I thought this was somewhat obvious. Kids are really smart in their limited context. It’s communication they need to learn.
This is similar with people. Many people are quite intelligent, just not in a way we value or understand.
This is similar with people. Many people are quite intelligent, just not in a way we value or understand.
Public schools are not companies with a monopoly, nor do they have consumers, these are very loaded terms. Do you speak of all infrastructure in this way? Do you say the police have consumers? Or the firefighters a monopoly on putting out fires? Roads a monopoly on letting cars drive over them?
This world view that everything relates to money first and foremost, lives on markets, only improves by competition, should justify its existence in some measurable wealth producing way is very dangerous in my opinion, because not everything can work this way.
Public service has to be unprofitable in many cases, its first mission is to bring a service to the population, not to compete with the private sector. I once visited Maripasoula, a <10k pop town in the middle of the Amazon only accessible by river or small (10-20 passenger) propeller plane. I was fascinated to see it has: a post office (that doubles as a bank), a modern high school with dorms, firefighters and a police station. No private sector actor is going to provide any such service to this population in these conditions. These services do not improve by competition, because there can be none, yet they exist and work well. Crazy, that.
Where there is a mix of private and public, the private sector only services where (be it location or target population wise) it is most profitable and leaves the rest to the public sector to fend with. That does not in itself indicate it functions better, only that it only goes for the lowest hanging fruit by essence of why it exists: to maximize profit. The private sector is not in the business of making its life complicated, the end goal of any company is to provide the least possible for the highest price possible.
In the case of schooling, private schools' only merit is being inaccessible to the poorer populations, hence giving kids a network that sits higher on the social ladder. Generalize this and you find that it no longer brings anything worthwhile to the table, except for those with arbitrary educational constraints such as religious ones. Not that this "benefit" is particularly defensible to begin with.
I am not a conservative. The monopoly and consumer term is applied correctly whether you find it loaded or not. The police have a monopoly on legal initiated violence yes, although for instance many towns have had private fire trash etc that fulfilled needs well. I did not call them companies, I think this is a straw man attack. On roads, miles around me the roads are publicly accessible private easements, you cannot even get to my town on a tax funded road.
You also presuppose competing schools must be for profit which is absolutely false. In many cases they are non profit.
>This world view that everything relates to money first and foremost, lives on markets, only improves by competition, should justify its existence in some measurable wealth producing way is very dangerous in my opinion, because not everything can work this way.
No need, I'm only claiming the voucher system, which isn't even my ideal system (again I am not a conservative), lets parents make a choice without first and foremost having to chase the almighty dollar as the conventional public system forces them to do before sending their kid to another school. It's not just competition but diversity of options giving the poor options where before only the rich had them .
Terms such as "monopoly" = exclusivity or "consumers" = users come with certain associations similar to "parasite" = dependent. I didn't say sentences using those terms are not understandable, I said they are loaded, and I stand by that.
- There are some students with disabilities that are extremely expensive to serve. Private schools don’t want them. Small public schools don’t want them.
If you take the pool of education dollars, divide by the number of students, and issue vouchers for that amount, you’ll get private schools siphoning off the highest margin kids, and public schools in a death spiral. That may feel more “fair” to you as a parent of a low-needs kid, but we live in a society, not a Mad Max-style dystopia.
I have two low-needs/high-performing kids. Vouchers would definitely benefit my family. Public school frustrates me to no end. But I want to make it better, not retreat to an enclave and let the plebeians eat each other.
- Schools in many ways look like a “natural monopoly”. Duplicating facilities (playgrounds, cafeterias, gyms, etc.) is economically inefficient. Ditto for specialty instructors (art/music/PE). You don’t want 10 schools competing for 300 kids, just like you don’t want 10 electric companies competing for 3000 homes. The goal is to craft policies that avoid as many of the downsides of monopolies as possible. I wish I saw the opposition to public schools digging in on the reasons they’re performing poorly. I do think there are viable reforms if the political will materializes.
Just like paying programmers for each bug they fix, which will drive the production of bugs to fix, paying schools for grading children will earn you a lot of highly graded children.
What we need is a respect for the profession. Treat good teachers with a lot of social respect, pay them well so they don't need to think about anything else, and give them a lot of opportunity to educate children as best they see fit. Just like we do with the best doctors.
Conservatives do want to privatize them tho, mostly so that selected few can get richer.
There’s a lot of good in modern schooling. It’s not perfect, but throwing out the baby with the bathwater as is so frequently proposed is not the solution here.
American public schooling is and has been broken for awhile.
Blaming the parents and kids is just a scapegoat.
But yes, the kids that succeed are the ones that the parents are involved, because the teachers are useless.
The quality of teachers has gone way down, especially since federal student loans.
Anyone can become a teacher, it's a default path, and it shows.
I've seen good schools crumble due to terrible policies and teachers.
You're enabling the problem by apologizing for these poor performing teachers.
Literally all of 8th grade was learning how to count to 10 in other languages and some stupid cross-stitching art. In Math!!!
Luckily I learned through programming on my own time, but once you're behind from one shitty math teacher, it's hard to catch up.
And the notion that private schooling (in general) is better is hard to believe. When we looked at private schools for our son, test scores and college admittance were only marginally higher and much of the gap was simple selection bias (private schools are not legally required to take all students, so don't deal with disabled, disadvantaged, or otherwise non-exceptional students). The only time private was substantially better was hyper-elite, hyper-expensive schools (Sidwell Friends, DC vs Paul VI, Fairfax vs the publics in FCPS).
Also, America do tend to be country of extremes, so it has some very good public schools and some bad ones. Bad ones being in poor place. And it just so happen that the countries doing better tend to have less poverty and less issues related to it.
I have no idea if the less restrained model works long term, I suspect not when society is so intermixed and rigid. I joined the STEM Pipeline (introduced by the NSF in the 1970s and continues to this day) like so many others.
Let's look at a few counterpoints:
- Biologically secondary knowledge are the things that it's proposed that humans haven't evolved to naturally of. Math writing, ect. The upper middle class academics who had their mommy and daddy teach them literacy and numeracy felt stifled by the "drill and kill" explicit teaching, and provably think they'd have "flourished" if they could follow their own heart and figured it all out themselves, but only because they were privatised to have effectively a private tutor. That doesn't scale.
- Motivation. Schools do OK at teaching the things that are a priority, as long as they aren't too progressive (the preogressive education movement is older than the more modern traditional approach, but progressive educators claim they are the hot new thing for some reason). Just look at something dead easy that lots of people want to do - learning a second language. How many people can be bothered without school? (And sure, schools suck at language teaching, but only because it's not a real priority).
Like critics of capitalism, the most strident critics of modern education often have a solution they are trying to sell and it's a solution that doesn't work very well at scale in the real world.
Could schools compress the curriculum, getting kids ready for uni by year 10, then putting 2 years of uni into years 11-12 (or the trade school equivalent) so unis don't need to teach the drab basics? Yeah, probably. Middle school could probably be done in half the time if it wasn't treated as a total joke since it doesn't count for anything.
But you can't cherry pick extremely privileged or exceptional people and expect that everyone can replicated their results
Aristocratic tutoring works. The whole issue with it is that it's not affordable except for some kind of extreme super elite, hence why the rest of us have to make do with mass education, supplemented with some very limited individual tutoring and "tiger parenting".
I have a relative who does well at poker, despite not finishing school. A drainage guy I know has a good understanding of the business and where the opportunities are. In general a bunch of people in the trades seem to "get it". I've run into a bunch of these people who you don't think of as being intelligent, but if you frame something as a game, they know how to play.
None of these people could be taught high school calculus, for instance, but they are still intelligent in a way that's useful to them.
If we're talking about kids, from about the age of four they learn to trick you. "Dad, you have to give me ice cream. Mom says so. Don't wake her up." And it gets more and more sophisticated as they get older.
I think this is a few things:
- The people in the trades who get to running their own business have (by nature of survival bias) developed two skills at a good level: doing that trade and running a business
- Trades, because they involve material output and safety, have relatively little tolerance for the kinds of bozos who can slip under the radar in the white-collar and service sector worlds.
Intelligence is largely related to STEM and memory in most instances. But there are a vast number of other ways to be intelligent. Perhaps you excel at emotionally connecting with people, maybe you're really good at cooking or tooling approaches. All of these are ignored in school.
School is nothing more then a checkbox along your path, you need to be able to read, write, do math, etc. But we ignore a large amount of our populace who may excel at grunt work, or maybe they are really good at leadership.
Just because you don't know y=mx+b or struggle at reasoning/logistical challenges does not mean you are not valuable to society. Maybe your 300lbs of rock solid muscle and in a past live would have been a top tier hunter. We do appreciate some amount of sports, but even that stops unless you're in the top 1-2% of the country.
This is myopic almost to the point of satire. You really can't think of a single other benefit of social intelligence?
But you get graded based on your ability to read, write, do math, memorize data points. Not on your ability to lie to your teacher in a believable manner.
You may excel later in life, but it's not like you can enter Yale because you can manipulate people.
You also need a certain level of other intelligence to properly manipulate people, or at least a certain level of self narcissism.
I mean you kind of proved my point, perhaps we should be teaching/discussing social skills.
I completely agree that social skills should be emphasized in school-not to reward the people who are already adept, but to impress on the others that they're the primary determinant of success.
It's incorrect to think that's limited to America. Humans are mostly powerless against the charm of narcissists and other sociopaths.
You see it over and over throughout human history all over the world.
People put it on applications all the time.
In things like the study in the article, and in young children in general, not really.