The case for mutual educational disarmament
economist.com
economist.com
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
https://www.biglawinvestor.com/bimodal-salary-distribution-c...
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.
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.
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.
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.
(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.
Like really, not every educated black rose from ghetto.
These things take time to change and real progress didn't really get going until the 90's. Everyone wants instant change NOW but fails to realize things do take time.
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.
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.
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.
> 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....
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.
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.
From my experience of Germany and of the UK, I’d say that a mediocre job in Germany gives you a much better quality of life than it would in the UK. So you don’t have to get your child into the super-fancy Montessori nursery with the highest rate of alumni attending <German-Oxbridge>.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Shame this guy's never heard of the eleven plus:
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.
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.
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.