Fredrik deBoer on the taboo of admitting some kids just aren't good at school | Hacker News Reader

Fredrik deBoer on the taboo of admitting some kids just aren't good at school

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I wonder if we are seeing a blow-back against this cult. In high school, I remember that it wasn't "cool" to really excel academically -- but part of that was just a reaction to the fact that academic excellence involves a bunch of bullshit, like being good at test-taking, memorizing irrelevant facts that adults decided were important, etc.

Yes, I was a goody-two-shoes who enjoyed getting gold stars from adults. But, my parents also motivated me with sermons threatening the hell of flipping burgers all my life if I didn't knock it out of the park. It's fucked up to put that much pressure on kids. Some people just don't have the ability, so we can't pretend that STEM degrees are a panacea. I happened to like science & be good at it, but I've taught/tutored enough to know that it's not for everyone.

Much of the value of a degree is simply as a marker, not as value-added by the process of getting the degree. We're seeing an expansion in the number of roles that require degrees, but this may be just as much a consequence of the declining selectivity of a degree, not that the average job is increasingly requiring workers with higher skill levels. At some point, this becomes detrimental to the overall productivity of society, and for individuals.

It's unfortunate that talking about equality of outcome vs equality of opportunity has become a third rail in (neo)liberal circles.

>we have a talent deficit in our teaching core. The only way to fix that problem is to make the profession more attractive.

Another no-brainer that we should really work on!

Not sure if it's because I might be a bit younger than you, or because I went to school in NZ, but i think it's come full circle, certainly where I went to highschool, the high achievers (people who got university scholarships and got the best grades) were the cool kids, the low achievers were the losers.

At least in the US, I think it varies massively depending on the culture of a given city and school (the way the parents in the district make their living definitely impacts the values of the kids), and maybe less so generationally.

Yeah, I was in rural southeastern US. I have no idea what it's like there anymore.

16% of people have cognitive capabilities that are one standard deviation below the average. 2% are two standard deviations below the average.

It's not clearly obvious at first. Complex sentence structures are harder to understand and after some level of abstraction thinking becomes very hard, but they still have success in life if there are no artificial barriers.

It's helps when you realize that so many people have low IQ and there used to be lot more of them (Flynn effect). It's not that bad. I have relative that scored below 85 and she is assistant nurse. She worked really hard at getting that level of education and that's probably of the limit for her. She excels in her job. Her common sense is better than what many doctors and nurses have.

The taboo is pretending school is for "useful" things.

Many things we do has a hobby, end up being way more useful in our lives than what we do at school.

I've always maintained that school rewards a certain style of learner quite well. Being the right kind is more important than being smart.

People are totally unequal. Humans are an unequal animal. How this reality can have passed anyone by I do not know.

A critique of deBoer's book by another socialist, Current Affairs' Nathan J Robinson, which I enjoyed:

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2020/09/we-dont-know-our-pote...

Thank you very much for sharing this! It was a really, very well thought out piece. If I had a particular criticism though, I would wonder whether the section on shared environments wasn’t missing the point — as a society we need to have a single shared environment; that there exists one which would lessen the impact of all perceived heritable factors equally is not obvious to me. If that is indeed the case, are we not back at square one?

That rebuttal mostly offers stereotypes and emotional appeals.

It wouldn't surprise me if the evidence for a genetic component to intelligence is weak. It's hard to imagine there's NOT a genetic component (genetics effects all the rest of the body, so why not the brain?), but given the sorry state of statistics in social sciences,the evidence may well be poor.

Also, Robinson is right to point out that this entire question is irrelevant to the question of equality vs equity. The latter is simple a matter of values, after all.

But holy smokes, look at the contortions Robinson makes to claim that we can't possibly know whether academic performance is limited by genetics! It's laughable.

I do like his story about Sara Slow -- I was that kid in grad school stat mech. The prof was a terrible lecturer. I got stuck on the assumption of equal a priori probabilities in phase space, and I had a hard time with the rest of the class. In fact, grad school largely destroyed my curiosity b/c I didn't have time to stop and chew on things like this, I just had to soldier on to the end of the course.

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