Educationism: A Hidden Bias We Often Ignore
bbc.com
bbc.com
"It wasn’t so much overt stigma, but the hidden injuries of social class that kept emerging – people kept having to explain themselves"
You're going to meet people from different backgrounds. You're going to have to explain yourself to them. You're going to have to listen to them. I don't know how many times I've had to explain that having your parents buy a $30,000 car isn't poor, just because peers got a $60,000 car. There are people whose parents can't buy new cars. But that's the environment they grew up in, of course they can't understand. I had a hard time imagining that an adult would think buying a 16 year old a sports car is a good idea, given their higher accident rates and poor decision making skills.
Are we really lowering the standard this much? You can't be expected to have to meet people from different backgrounds? Which brings me to:
"If you have low expectations of the kids they'll sink to the level of expectations"
Exactly. Maybe setting the expectations that they never feel uncomfortable, never have their ideas challenged is a bad idea?? In the articles defense, they did mention telling all kids to set their goals high.
"Bourdieu pointed to the fact that the education system was invented by the ruling classes", "Here in Switzerland they abolished grades in one place but there was an uprising mainly due to parents who all of a sudden couldn’t figure out how their kids were doing"
Maybe I am reading too much into these quotes, but really? The article mentions that education is linked to success, but also seems to try to paint the picture that the ruling class invented education to keep the lower classes down? And those evil parents, caring how their kids did in school? Can someone tell me if I am misinterpreting these quotes?
In a word, yes. It's not the first time I've seen such an argument made; Gatto (1) does so at considerably greater length and rather more forcefully, motivated by his own experience as a teacher and finding considerable substantiation in the published writings of many of those who worked to design and implement education in the modern style.
The tl:dr; version might be that, in purpose, this modern reinvention of a strictly regimented child-gardening scheme was of a piece with the Progressive Era's many other enthusiastic attempts at methods of engineering a more perfect society, and has proven to be no better advised or more humane than any - that, having been given an ample period to prove its value and having, at least in Gatto's judgment, signally failed to do so, the practice merits a place alongside eugenics in the intellectual and moral junkyard.
I tend to agree, and to find myself reminded somewhat of that marvelous satire of Progressive Era utopianism, Brave New World, besides. But it would be remiss of me not to note that my own experiences may have predisposed me to do so, and to exert less effort than I otherwise might in seeking contradictory evidence. From the sound of it, you are unlikely to harbor similar confounding motivations, and I'd be most interested to hear your evaluation of Gatto's rather sensationally named, but nonetheless substantial, work.
(1) https://archive.org/details/JohnTaylorGattoTheUndergroundHis...
"But it would be remiss of me not to note that my own experiences may have predisposed me to do so, and to exert less effort than I otherwise might in seeking contradictory evidence"
Refreshing to hear this :) Seems all to often people confuse their opinions with facts. Looking forward to the discussion :) Some thoughts so far(page 10):
"an assistant principal screamed at her in front of an assembly, "BIANCA, YOU ANIMAL, SHUT UP!"" ... "Do I make too much of this simple act of putting a little girl in her place?" ... "I picture this animal Bianca grown large and mean"
I think he does make too much of this. To put it simply, kids do not act in their best interest. IIRC, they do not start really taking long term consequences into account until 25 or so.
I remember hearing teachers tell kids they needed to try harder, and hearing the kids say, "but Einstein didn't pay attention in school". Unfortunate as it may be, and having known these kids since kindergarten, they are unlikely to be Einsteins. There is a difference between being bored because of a lack of challenge, and because they just want to play outside.
Now depending on what your view of a more perfect society is, this might be irrelevant. But it would seem to me that without an education, our society would be much more like animals. Between growing up in a rural area, and nature documentaries, I have witnessed many animals disciplining their kids. Why? Because they care more about play than finding food. So I am not seeing the alternative here.
"understand the personality of your particular child or anything significant about your family, culture, religion, plans, hopes, dreams"
A good teacher should try to learn about your kid. Easier said than done, especially in larger schools. As for culture, while I agree that multiculturalism is good, I see it like a Venn diagram. The differences are important, as there might be better ways of doing something, inspiration from one domain applied to another can yield breakthroughs. But there needs to be something in common, so that we can understand one another. Otherwise it breaks down into tribalism, which I believe to be much less perfect. That's what the school system provides, a shared culture/experience.
"The cost in New York State for building a well-schooled child in the year 2000 is $200,000 per body when lost interest is calculated. That capital sum invested in the child's name over the past twelve years would have delivered a million dollars to each kid as a nest egg to compensate for having no school"
I believe it is well documented that a large portion of lottery winners end up broke. Not understanding things like compound interest, inflation, or even basic math would make it hard to use that $1mm effectively. While I would not blame the 2008 financial crisis on lack of education entirely, I do think more education could have averted that, or at least mitigated it. I'm not sure what his point is here.
Okay, since this already got long, I plan to email you further.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/06/18/the-sp-500-has-already-met-i...
When you do follow up by email, perhaps you'll substantiate the equivocation here of education and discipline, and of humiliating someone in front of essentially the entirety of her social group. I see nothing indispensable of the latter in the former, and it surprises me to see a defense of such behavior in those terms. I'd like to know your reasoning there, if that's a point you still care to espouse by then. In the same vein, I'm not sure I see where the experience of schooling is uniquely corrosive to tribalism, either.
As far as the million bucks goes - well, it'd make student loans obsolete, don't you think? Formal public schooling isn't the only way to gain an education - one of Gatto's major themes is that it never has been, and one of his minor themes is that, if you believe formal public schooling is the only way to gain an education, that may not be by coincidence. And a high SAT score, honestly earned, is a high SAT score, no matter how one happens to come by the knowledge that enables it. We might see a magnified version of the same effect that's driven up tuitions in response to the availability of easy college credit - or we might not, if the award isn't a flat million but rather scaled against local tax receipts or whatever basket of factors goes into pricing schooling per student as we do it now. But even if we did, I think a lot of people would agree that paying more up front, in exchange for not having to spend the first decade or more of their working lives servicing a gigantic load of debt, would be a trade worth making.
And for people like me, who don't pursue postsecondary education in the first place? Well, even a pro-rata fraction of a million bucks buys a lot of house, everywhere in the country that isn't the Bay Area, NYC, or a handful of other metropolitan outliers on the far right-hand side of the median home price chart. Not "puts a down payment on a mortgage for", though the option would still exist - buys, cash on the nail for a deed in fee simple. You want to talk about mitigating or preventing the 2008 financial crisis? What better way to do that than to have engineered the shady ARM market out of existence before it ever had a chance to get going?
In any case, thanks again! I'm really looking forward to your email.
I also wasnt trying to complain about others being wealthy, or talking about it. I didn't feel like I didn't belong, as the article seems to hint at. Perhaps I shouldn't have felt compelled to explain myself.
The points I was trying to make were other people assuming everyone is wealthy should be irrelevant to your academic success. People assuming anything about you shouldn't stop you. If that is what causes you to not pursue higher education, then I would say that is on you. Secondly, you aren't always going to be among people who are exactly like you. In fact, I think this is an important part of college. Partly, this was a rant against what I see as lowing the expectations for young adults. Life is hard sometimes, excuses won't help.
'“examiners” scored individuals lower on the same task when they were told that the pupil came from a less privileged background.'
'Those who were told they were “low status individuals” performed worse on both financial decisions and basic cognitive tasks.'
I'm not sure how well-backed-up the assertions actually were (I've not followed up on the references) but the well-regarded and sometimes recommended-on-this-very-site Influence by Cialdini has a chapter on the effects of appearance on others, and especially of wealth/class markers. In particular, it claims a study was conducted that found that pretty much no-one thinks they would defer more readily, when driving, to an expensive-looking car than a cheap-looking one, but in fact people do (in this case, IIRC, waiting longer for them to go after their light turns green before honking) and to a very large degree.
Apparently these kinds of results are pretty typical for research along those lines, i.e. self-reported versus actual deference to people who simply look rich/"classy"/powerful, even absent any directly-relevant hierarchy in the equation (i.e. just strangers on otherwise equal footing).
i figured that 1. i was obviously hot shit at chess and 2. there was no way this hayseed could possibly beat me.
when the inevitable humiliating defeat was meted out to me, i did not forget it.
On the other side of the coin, i’m still trusting MDs with my medical problems, not the guy down the street whose grandmother has strange ideas about the curative power of crystals, prayer, and raw garlic enemas.
Wrong - it's not always so subtle! For instance, there's widespread, blatant discrimination against people lacking medical degrees for performing complex surgical procedures. We should really work to correct this systemic bias for a more equal and inclusive society.
/sarcasm
Not letting someone without a medical degree practice medicine is discrimination based on relevant characteristics. Not letting a licensed surgeon practice because he uses non-standard English in a way that marks him as having an underprivileged background is discrimination based on irrelevant characteristics.
Nobody is arguing that we should allow blind people to drive cars. However, you'll face heavy resistance if you try to suggest that only people with a university degree should be allowed to drive cars.
For instance, say I am consciously biased against hiring black people because I believe them to be generally less qualified. This is the same type of discrimination as not hiring a credentialed doctor because I believe them to be less qualified; not only difference that one of these beliefs is factually inaccurate. When you say that activists are only talking about the "bad" discrimination, you implicitly sweep under the rug questions about the factual basis for discrimination; and end up treating questions of fact as if they were questions of morals.
Unfortunately, determining relevant characteristics is incredibly hard (especially if people know what measures you use). Instead we use our intuition and gut feeling. It is important to be aware of inaccurate intuitions we have to improve our assesments. However, there is no easy way to tell a-priori what discrimination is based on an accurate signal, and what discrimination is not.
Kind of. I was highlighting the fact that the word "discrimination" is inherently ambivalent (you could also say equivocal I suppose) - it simply means to distinguish between. It’s no different to the words "categorisation" and "selection" in this sense.
As you recognised, there are forms of discrimination that are absolutely necessary and even desirable - such as discriminating against someone without a medical degree to practise medicine.
The point I was making is that it's not always so easy to distinguish between positive and negative forms of discrimination. Is it wrong to be biased against less-educated people? Well, it depends on the situation. Are you hiring for an important position that requires higher education? In this case, it would be unethical of you not to be biased against less-educated candidates.
The problem I have with this kind of article is it paints a one-sided picture where discrimination-as-such is bad. You can make a compelling case for this. When you discriminate against people without a law degree for performing legal work, you deprive those people of a well-paying, high-status position in society. You could say that's not fair, and there’s truth in that. But what's the alternative? If your view is that all forms of discrimination are wrong, the logical answer is to do away with all forms of discrimination, even the positive ones. You can see this in the article by its promotion of non-quantitative assessments in education:
> So, what could help overcome the education divide? One view is that different ways of scoring tests could help even the playing field. In several studies, Butera’s team showed that giving children graded tests or exam scores actually reduces motivation and performance in reasoning and decision making. If there are no graded scores it also reduces social comparison, which we know can often negatively affect performance, as Sheehy-Skeffington’s work revealed. If detailed feedback on how to improve is given instead of simple graded scores, it helps “focus on assessment as a tool for education” rather than assessment for selection, Butera argues.
Of course removing graded scores “evens the playing field" and reduce social comparison. It also makes selection based on competence impossible - it’s “throwing the baby out with the bathwater”. And don’t think for a minute that proponents of this think it should be strictly limited to primary education and not also apply to secondary or tertiary education, where grades and certifications supposedly have some value as selection criteria for employers.
> Nobody is arguing that we should allow blind people to drive cars.
Don’t be so sure. Arguing that we shouldn’t be allowed to discriminate by level of education is no different to this in principle - it’s only a matter of degree.
You're not doing better. They're referring to discrimination that they don't like. In general, they make no effort to establish that such discrimination is based on irrelevant characteristics, only to claim that it is.
Assuming that someone is stupid because they didn't go to Ivy League is a dumb form of discrimination.
End result was that said parties has taken a more rightward turn in their policies, and are only just starting to maybe realize their folly.
So biases are kind of the necessary. But in some instances the extra effort for unbiased decisions is worth it. Ignoring "Educationism" as a recruiter should be one of it. But to eradicate a bias is kind of Impossible. Its just possible to change or replace it with another one.
One of the most egregious example is that when scheduling for a job interview via Web form, when you graduated from a low-ranked university its always "schedule full". This is called "学歴フィルター(filter)."
http://www.dictionary.com/browse/bias?s=t
If you need evidence that bias is bad, there is a host of nonfiction literature by the likes of Nobel prize winning economists on the subject.
More shoddy activism handwaving as 'science' for media attention and social policy change.
Coin a term for an "effect" with shoddy research meant to advance your poltical ideology. See: Stereotype threat, implicit bias. Sounds suspiciously close to "scientism" as well.
> the education system is “motivated to maintain the status quo” – where the children of highly-educated parents go to university, while children with less exposure to education go into vocational training or apprenticeships
This whole article is thinly veiled political ideology mixed with pop psychology BS. It's a charade.
> “It wasn’t so much overt stigma, but the hidden injuries of social class that kept emerging"
Uh huh.
You're casually dismissing a reference to a pretty well known and important work in sociology: https://www.amazon.com/Hidden-Injuries-Class-Jonathan-Cobb/d...
I'm happy to buy a copy for you if you send me your address and promise to read it!
(eta: Also, have a look at the book linked from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16007116, which is probably more on point to the subject of this thread. The next person I talk to who's also read it will be the first, and as I describe there, I'm interested to hear what others with an interest in the subject at hand think of it, too.)
> It is an excellent example of social-science work in which the authors do not pretend impartiality
a.k.a. Exactly what I'm talking about: Political sctivism via masquerade using the veneer of 'science'
And you're suffering from selection bias by ignoring the actual scientific studies mentioned in the article and cherry picking some of the fluff. My other comment on here notes a couple of them.
Edit: it looks like you've been using HN primarily for ideological battle. We ban accounts that do that, regardless of ideology, so please stop doing that.