Mediocrity Is Now Mandatory

I think the second paragraph of this article is unintentionally revealing:

> One high school near me just dropped freshman advanced-standing (honors) English “to combat the effects of academic ‘tracking” because it “ultimately separates students of different socioeconomic and racial backgrounds.” It turns out that middle schools from lower-income areas aren’t adequately preparing their students for high school. So rather than fix that problem, they dumbed down high school.

So rather than write about that problem, the author takes the far less interesting path of complaining about lowering standards. Much easier to advocate a return to a recent status quo than to dig into the sticky, uncomfortable reasons that education is stratified by race and class.

This article is basically a case study in what it purports to call attention to. What could have been an interesting article is merely a mediocre fallacy-filled defense of conservative economic policies that, increasingly clearly, do not work.

I find a similar worrying trend in Software Engineering. Criticisms are often supressed [1], people are afraid of saying anything negative to "offend" someone, right-to-be-offended is rampant and often go unchecked and it's sending chilling effects in social media, Github, work places, forums, and slack channels. When we used to meet in person to discuss, there is a level of courtesy and acceptance of dissent as a matter of intellectual discourse, this is being eroded in front of our eyes. Online discussions in the past weren't so gamified as things are today.

On Github, saying something across the grain or against it can lead to public shaming - all beautifully souped up for public consumption in the form of 31 downvotes, emojified, recorded and attached to someone's name. Now, that person will perhaps think twice before saying something negative ever again, silenced and rejected by the public previously. Email mailing lists are far superior in arguing about a point than Github. Makes me furious just thinking about how shitty we have become. It's getting worse everyday. If you think that these people are just "assholes and always complain"; we have a mechanism for people who are truly assholes - be tolerant and ignore them.

Folks, it's time to ditch the 'Emoji Casino' for any sort of serious intellectual discourse. That includes Github and anything that's "social". One should be judged by the merit of their words and thoughts, not statistics and concensus.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25991563

This article assumes grading and categorizations leads to non-mediocre results. And yet, to use the article's own example, Steve Jobs took classes at Reed college without actually being enrolled, losing the opportunity to even get a "loosey-goosey grade-point average" but was considered "exceptional". Being graded doesn't "manifest merit".

These kind of articles tend to vacillate between two extremes. Either academia is killing creativity and producing unthinking drones who live for grades, or schools are too lax with their grading to produce exceptional students.

Mediocre is synonymous with average, which logically speaking, a school will be more likely to produce regardless of its grading policy (aptitude being a moving target). Simply put, exceptional people/circumstances that produce exceptional results are exceptional because they are not the average, so expecting a non-average result from an education system servicing large populations is unlikely in any scenario. Improvements in education require specific solutions to specific problems, arguing more grades/categories are necessary in order to produce some vague idea of merit isn’t a relevant assertion.

What a bunch of ideological cr*p. All you need to know about this is the author puts the word science in climate science in quotation marks. Or makes a "highly reasoned" point about redistribution: "Redistribution, by definition anti-merit,...". I presume fire/flood insurance is also anti-merit by this guy's standards.

Notwithstanding all that, I have issues with some college admission practices for example, but it has to be reasoned with facts and rational discussion, not with a political zeal.

My views on mediocrity have changed over the years. My old mantra was something like "Only excellence deserves celebration, not mediocrity". But this view diminishes peoples efforts who don't quite make it all the way...

Now I feel that excellence doesn't appear from a vacuum. A supportive community that helps grow individuals is what produces excellence. And to support individuals you need to recognise their successes along the way... no matter how mediocre...

Not surprising the writer completely omits the redistribution of wealth the pandemic has enabled. Arguing against increase in minimum wage, wealth taxes and pandemic stimulus checks, he ends his article with "when everyone gets a trophy, no one gets a trophy".

The oligarchy [1] has certainly gotten a lot of trophies this year and shall continue. Didn't register on his radar.

[1] The US is dominated by a rich and powerful elite. Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organised groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.

"Testing theories of American politics: Elites, interest groups, and average citizens" Gilens, Page,2014, over 2k citations.

College will become high school. It will be free, mandatory, and which one you went to won't matter at all. That's not important. But what is important, is that like high school, it won't matter what you studied, or if you stood out. In fact, it's already happening.

Archive link to complete article: https://archive.is/IB9Oz

This seems less like an argument and more like a loosely connected list of things that the author doesn’t like, everything from Diversity and Inclusion departments to Bernie Sanders’ appointment to the Senate budgetary committee—the main commonality is that they’re somehow left or left of center. If you already dislike these things, maybe the idea that they’re all related is convincing. But if not, it just seems like recycled complaints.

Maybe there is a deep connection to mediocrity in each of these examples, but he doesn’t really make that case, only that the status quo, which he asserts used to be about excellence, is changing.

"Why work when Uncle Sam provides table stakes for mob-trading GameStop and dogecoin?"

This made my day.

Interesting discussion in the comments. Here are some related thoughts:

I have come to understand that grading is just a tool to get students to actually engage with the material. And GPA or SAT scores have little to do with productivity or career success after school, based on my professional experience.

Tracking is wrong, but not because of equal rights. It’s wrong because it’s based on an archaic education and grading system and it is not in the best interest of a cohesive society.

Is there anyone who still thinks that schools look anything like the real world at this point? We aren’t educating obedient factory workers any more.

A strict pass-fail system would probably work just fine now, with mastery as the goal for a passing grade. Set the bar, and help everyone to achieve it in their own way.

If one doesn’t know enough to pass the college entrance exam, then they need to study some more to achieve mastery and then they will be ready for college. Make it pass/fail for college entrance.

College should probably be an extension of high school as some have suggested—-senior year of high school should probably be freshman year of college coursework since 12th grade in the US is a wasted year anyway—-and the goal should be to educate independent, life-long learners who can get along in society and survive, ie. make a living.

There is no magic to a 4-year degree. If one can master the material in 2 or 3 years, then great. Coursework should not be structured so that this can’t happen—-that’s a trick that universities like to play.

If one wants to call mastery “mediocrity” because most people are achieving it, then I’m okay with that.

This one really grinds my gears: College shouldn’t be like joining a country club—-and the days of “my college is better than yours” should come to an end already. The cost to society is too high. After 2 or 3 years out of school, people could care less where you went to school. And nobody cares whether you got an A or a C in your psychology class.

And another thing: It doesn’t cost $30-$50k a year to educate a student at the college level. That is an abstraction of the system, and a complete waste of money.

It’s important to consider that things are changing so rapidly, it is impossible to know what “jobs” will be in demand 5-10 years from now. Curricula and degree accreditation won’t keep up with the changes. Professional vocations are going to change even as the students are training for them. It’s happening now.

For example: Will Computer Science still be a necessary and valid degree program in 10 years? Maybe not. But logic, math, reading/writing, physics, problem solving, sociology, psychology, humanities, design, learning, research, statistics and probability, creativity, and other basic skills will surely still be useful.

I believe that of all the skills one could learn in school, agility and adaptation are probably the most important skills for the foreseeable future. We need to start teaching that.

In conclusion: Let the SAT score die, replace it with a pass/fail entrance exam, and let’s educate as many students as possible for the lowest cost possible and get to work building a better society.