Anti-schooling is probably a luxury belief used to signal intelligence and wealth. Having the belief implies that you’re so intelligent you are unable to intuitively grasp the importance of schooling for the average human being. Full (read: barely acceptable) literacy and numeracy require years to learn if you’re not gifted. A prole actually not encouraging his children to engage with the school system likely ensures a lower quality of life for them, while the consequences are much less dire for a knowledge worker, whose children can skate through with minimal effort.
As a compromise for the bored intelligent children suffering through the school system, I propose a new technocratic system that redistributes resources away from the least effective programs (special ed) to the most intelligent students, who can be segregated in gifted schools starting from elementary school and be pitted against each other in games, tests, and projects designed to demonstrate their creativity, intelligence, and willpower. They are shifted among different schools at the end of every school year based on their performance. This will be enormously demanding, with instructors encouraged to push students to the breaking point and beyond. R programming will be taught in the 5th grade, on average, and Javascript never. This continues until college, when they are allowed to unwind and engage in hedonism for a few years before companies pick through the merits and demerits of each student to determine their ability. The lowest-performing are assigned to menial tasks best suited for them, like data entry for the illiterate and medical fields for those unable to do algebra.
Yeah, it’s basically the Chinese educational system, only with more pressure, and instead of the top students trying to hit 100% on every test, they are instead given increasingly harder curriculums until they hit their limit. Also science fairs that don’t disqualify anything “too good” because the judges consider anything more complex than a chemical volcano to be proof of parental help.
Totally agree with the first paragraph. Totally not sure about the rest.
I think, I can imagine the superior culture, where all parents can teach (or arrange teaching) their children all the necessary things without compulsory education system. Perhaps, dath ilan works that way. We are not there. May be, some part of intellectual elites live in the subculture that resemble dath ilan enough and this is why they think that schools are bad on net.
AFAIK, in our (Earth) culture, schools definitely should be reformed. I’m really doubt that they should be reformed the way you describe, though.
Full literacy and numeracy are not what the school system is designed to teach, and certainly can be learned for most people without going to college. The vast majority of anti-schooling arguments you’ll see from anti-schoolers have nothing to do with expecting people to learn things on their own. We simply question the value in coercing children to learn most of the things schools teach, and think that putting children in halfway houses and forcing them to do meaningless busywork is mean. We also don’t want hundreds of billions of tax dollars funding what is empirically and definitively an actual signaling contest.
I’m not sure I trust The Case Against Education. I had once heard a review of it mention how the book debunked the notion that education teaches thinking skills. This interested me as I was trying to understand some things about how psychometrics works, so I skipped to that part of the book and looked at his references.
However, it turned out that the references were unconvincing. For instance, one of the main arguments was based on a small, old study that used an ad-hoc test of critical thinking skills. It was unclear to me how good that test was, and the study did not give any of the usual measures of goodness like internal reliability.
(I’m Russian, and my experience with schools may be very different.)
Then why are they called “anti-schooling arguments” and not “arguments for big school reforms”? I think this is misleading.
Schools are not perfect? Yes, sure. Schools have trouble adapting to computer age? Yes, sure. Schools need to be reformed? Yes, sure! Schools are literally worse than no schools, all else equal? I think, no, they aren’t.
Then why are they called “anti-schooling arguments” and not “arguments for big school reforms”?...Schools are literally worse than no schools, all else equal? I think, no, they aren’t.
In the case of higher education, yes, they are literally worse than no schools, all else equal. If you burned all higher educational institutions to the ground, my prediction is that after a small transition period where people figured out how to get the 5% of actually economically productive information somewhere else, global GDP would significantly increase. A world where adults skip paying a hundred thousand dollars for 4-6 years of college, and learn how to perform their trade, for free, via a 1-2 year unpaid internship at an actual company, or at the equivalent of a bootcamp, is much better than the extraordinarily expensive and wasteful credentialing race we have now. I cannot understand why this is so controversial, and why people resist the vast empirical evidence supporting this take with such absurd intensity.
In the case of K12, I still call my position “anti-schooling”, because the vast majority of the stuff we coerce and threaten children into “studying” is useless. It happens that a couple of those things are really important, like literacy and numeracy, but since the important lessons represent less than 10% of what K12 does, and it’s accomplished in such a harmful way, I still call my position “anti-school”.
That doesn’t match reality at all. China had a massive program to send students for college education in the US. US college grads have very obviously wider knowledge and skill bases than their Chinese peers (probably because they were studying instead of drinking). Don’t get me wrong, there are absolutely firms that don’t pay a premium for “returners”, but they very much fall behind.
I’m sure that if keeping the same person around at the company doing the same job but with a bit more mentoring was more efficient than asking them to take a few years off to get a Master’s/PhD, more companies around here would do so.
China had a massive program to send students for college education in the US.
Governments make mostly incorrect decisions, both for reasons of misalignment and incompetence. They’re not hedge funds. Xi and Biden don’t get paid more if they hit good Gross Domestic Product targets.
I’m sure that if keeping the same person around at the company doing the same job but with a bit more mentoring was more efficient than asking them to take a few years off to get a Master’s/PhD, more companies around here would do so.
I’m unfamiliar with the business practice of letting employees “take a few years off” to get a Master’s/PhD; that might be a Chinese thing. Here employers will pay for employee’s higher education, but that’s generally pitched as part of the compensation package for working there and done for tax reasons, not upskilling. Employees go for higher education because of the signaling value of having more education, not because the knowledge will make them more valuable employees. No one would ever go to anything like a University if the University was unable to award degrees certifying that the person had done so. This is obvious.
There is no signaling reason if it’s your own employee. You already know the guy. You know him far more intimately than any degree.
I understand. My point is that if a person is going to get a Master’s degree anyways, it’s cheaper for the employer to compensate them by paying for their education than by actually paying them extra money, because the government will give them tax breaks for doing so. This is the real reason employers pay for employees’ education (besides a misguided sense of charity), not the other thing.
And people audit college courses all the time for upskilling. I’m considering doing so for grad courses right now.
Yet the vast majority don’t audit courses, even when it’s free. In the United States, you can walk into very respectable universities like UC Berkeley and sit in on any class you like. Even people who live next to the campus almost never do. Anomalous if you believe most of the value of education comes from imparting skills, obvious if you believe most of the value of UC Berkeley education is transacted via the degree that says “UC Berkeley grad” and not the information students study while attending.
A lot of what students learn in school is sheer willpower, and a coercive environment is needed to maintain it.
Let me put it this way: Chinese elementary school students frequently study for 8+ hours a day. No busy work. They’re doing crazy advanced trig that most US college grads don’t even know how to approach. This escalates into even longer study sessions in HS (12+). For various cultural reasons, everyone goofs off in college.
Chinese people maintain this work ethic into their adult life to their benefit. As far as I can tell, it really doesn’t have any negative effects on their personality, and most still look upon their school days fondly. However, the lack of focus on creativity in schools results in lower productivity in their careers. I think it is possible to combine creativity and peer-competition to create an even more capable person, one who combines willpower, creativity, and curiosity. I think it is LS custom to refer to Jews here, who do exhibit all these traits, but my only close Jewish friend was my ex (heartbroken, in a thousand pieces. The wind blows. But the sun rises again), so I don’t think I have an objective view on this.
The lack of coercion in Western schools hurts the gifted students the most, I think. A lot of them just skate by without really trying, which can really hurt them in college or in their career.
A lot of what students learn in school is sheer willpower...
Citation needed. This willpower certainly does not seem to manifest itself empirically in terms of increased wages or career prospects, EXCEPT in terms of how the subsequent degree and certification signals preexisting conformity+intelligence+conscientiousness, which are traits valued by employers.
At best (in any country) I’ll grant that children are heavily coerced to follow arduous orders, and the ones that have the least pride and are most enthusiastic to do that get promoted into top government and official positions, who then set policy so that the next batch of students are rewarded based on their willingness to do pointless work at the behest of their bosses, etc. etc. However “ability to do lots of useless work when an authority figure tells you to” is a very different psychological skill than the kind needed to do actually productive work, proactively, for your or the world’s benefit.
I will do a statistical deep dive on all this later. But this anti-schooling idea is very counter-intuitive, requires extremely coordinated incompetence to work, and runs extremely counter to my personal experience. With the recent Replication Crisis trashing counterintuitive studies that are used to push political agendas, I suspect anti-schooling is simply untrue.
Let me give a personal example: I currently exercise regularly. It is good for me in many ways. When I first started, however, it was akin to torture, and only self-coercion allowed me to continue. I dreaded my visits to the gym, and feared the pain and nausea that would greet me at every visit. But I pushed myself, most out of vanity and partly out of disdain for my physical weakness. After several months, however, the pain began to fade, and soon I started to enjoy it. Without the self-coercion, I would still be out of shape today.
The same applies to my job. When I first started working, focusing on my job instead of browsing the internet was very painful. And doing it for 8 hours a day made my daily utility became negative—I would have paid money to not experience those days. But through self-coercion, I was able to continue until it first became endurable and then enjoyable. For the first time in my life, I feel free—my sarkic desires and my ambitions are no longer in constant conflict.
This is very under-valued skill. It isn’t sexy. It sucks. And self-coercion can only be taught through external coercion, which sucks even more. I absolutely wish I had more of it as a child.
Requires extremely coordinated incompetence to work.
It’s indeed an incredible waste that higher education is almost entirely a credentialing race; doesn’t mean it requires that much coordination or even incompetence. The root causes are simple (intense government subsidies + a natural race to the bottom to be Most Credentialed among the working class), and could only be fixed by people and institutions which aren’t fired if they govern incorrectly. Biden and Xi are simply optimizing for different things than the general welfare of their constituents. You should read this if you have the time.
For what it’s worth, however counterintuitive you find this, I am fairly certain I find the idea that schooling does anything worth paying for more counterintuitive.
Epistemology: intentional sophistry hits bong
Anti-schooling is probably a luxury belief used to signal intelligence and wealth. Having the belief implies that you’re so intelligent you are unable to intuitively grasp the importance of schooling for the average human being. Full (read: barely acceptable) literacy and numeracy require years to learn if you’re not gifted. A prole actually not encouraging his children to engage with the school system likely ensures a lower quality of life for them, while the consequences are much less dire for a knowledge worker, whose children can skate through with minimal effort.
As a compromise for the bored intelligent children suffering through the school system, I propose a new technocratic system that redistributes resources away from the least effective programs (special ed) to the most intelligent students, who can be segregated in gifted schools starting from elementary school and be pitted against each other in games, tests, and projects designed to demonstrate their creativity, intelligence, and willpower. They are shifted among different schools at the end of every school year based on their performance. This will be enormously demanding, with instructors encouraged to push students to the breaking point and beyond. R programming will be taught in the 5th grade, on average, and Javascript never. This continues until college, when they are allowed to unwind and engage in hedonism for a few years before companies pick through the merits and demerits of each student to determine their ability. The lowest-performing are assigned to menial tasks best suited for them, like data entry for the illiterate and medical fields for those unable to do algebra.
Yeah, it’s basically the Chinese educational system, only with more pressure, and instead of the top students trying to hit 100% on every test, they are instead given increasingly harder curriculums until they hit their limit. Also science fairs that don’t disqualify anything “too good” because the judges consider anything more complex than a chemical volcano to be proof of parental help.
Totally agree with the first paragraph. Totally not sure about the rest.
I think, I can imagine the superior culture, where all parents can teach (or arrange teaching) their children all the necessary things without compulsory education system. Perhaps, dath ilan works that way. We are not there. May be, some part of intellectual elites live in the subculture that resemble dath ilan enough and this is why they think that schools are bad on net.
AFAIK, in our (Earth) culture, schools definitely should be reformed. I’m really doubt that they should be reformed the way you describe, though.
Full literacy and numeracy are not what the school system is designed to teach, and certainly can be learned for most people without going to college. The vast majority of anti-schooling arguments you’ll see from anti-schoolers have nothing to do with expecting people to learn things on their own. We simply question the value in coercing children to learn most of the things schools teach, and think that putting children in halfway houses and forcing them to do meaningless busywork is mean. We also don’t want hundreds of billions of tax dollars funding what is empirically and definitively an actual signaling contest.
I’m not sure I trust The Case Against Education. I had once heard a review of it mention how the book debunked the notion that education teaches thinking skills. This interested me as I was trying to understand some things about how psychometrics works, so I skipped to that part of the book and looked at his references.
However, it turned out that the references were unconvincing. For instance, one of the main arguments was based on a small, old study that used an ad-hoc test of critical thinking skills. It was unclear to me how good that test was, and the study did not give any of the usual measures of goodness like internal reliability.
(I’m Russian, and my experience with schools may be very different.)
Then why are they called “anti-schooling arguments” and not “arguments for big school reforms”? I think this is misleading.
Schools are not perfect? Yes, sure. Schools have trouble adapting to computer age? Yes, sure. Schools need to be reformed? Yes, sure! Schools are literally worse than no schools, all else equal? I think, no, they aren’t.
In the case of higher education, yes, they are literally worse than no schools, all else equal. If you burned all higher educational institutions to the ground, my prediction is that after a small transition period where people figured out how to get the 5% of actually economically productive information somewhere else, global GDP would significantly increase. A world where adults skip paying a hundred thousand dollars for 4-6 years of college, and learn how to perform their trade, for free, via a 1-2 year unpaid internship at an actual company, or at the equivalent of a bootcamp, is much better than the extraordinarily expensive and wasteful credentialing race we have now. I cannot understand why this is so controversial, and why people resist the vast empirical evidence supporting this take with such absurd intensity.
In the case of K12, I still call my position “anti-schooling”, because the vast majority of the stuff we coerce and threaten children into “studying” is useless. It happens that a couple of those things are really important, like literacy and numeracy, but since the important lessons represent less than 10% of what K12 does, and it’s accomplished in such a harmful way, I still call my position “anti-school”.
That doesn’t match reality at all. China had a massive program to send students for college education in the US. US college grads have very obviously wider knowledge and skill bases than their Chinese peers (probably because they were studying instead of drinking). Don’t get me wrong, there are absolutely firms that don’t pay a premium for “returners”, but they very much fall behind.
I’m sure that if keeping the same person around at the company doing the same job but with a bit more mentoring was more efficient than asking them to take a few years off to get a Master’s/PhD, more companies around here would do so.
Governments make mostly incorrect decisions, both for reasons of misalignment and incompetence. They’re not hedge funds. Xi and Biden don’t get paid more if they hit good Gross Domestic Product targets.
I’m unfamiliar with the business practice of letting employees “take a few years off” to get a Master’s/PhD; that might be a Chinese thing. Here employers will pay for employee’s higher education, but that’s generally pitched as part of the compensation package for working there and done for tax reasons, not upskilling. Employees go for higher education because of the signaling value of having more education, not because the knowledge will make them more valuable employees. No one would ever go to anything like a University if the University was unable to award degrees certifying that the person had done so. This is obvious.
There is no signaling reason if it’s your own employee. You already know the guy. You know him far more intimately than any degree.
And people audit college courses all the time for upskilling. I’m considering doing so for grad courses right now.
I understand. My point is that if a person is going to get a Master’s degree anyways, it’s cheaper for the employer to compensate them by paying for their education than by actually paying them extra money, because the government will give them tax breaks for doing so. This is the real reason employers pay for employees’ education (besides a misguided sense of charity), not the other thing.
Yet the vast majority don’t audit courses, even when it’s free. In the United States, you can walk into very respectable universities like UC Berkeley and sit in on any class you like. Even people who live next to the campus almost never do. Anomalous if you believe most of the value of education comes from imparting skills, obvious if you believe most of the value of UC Berkeley education is transacted via the degree that says “UC Berkeley grad” and not the information students study while attending.
A lot of what students learn in school is sheer willpower, and a coercive environment is needed to maintain it.
Let me put it this way: Chinese elementary school students frequently study for 8+ hours a day. No busy work. They’re doing crazy advanced trig that most US college grads don’t even know how to approach. This escalates into even longer study sessions in HS (12+). For various cultural reasons, everyone goofs off in college.
Chinese people maintain this work ethic into their adult life to their benefit. As far as I can tell, it really doesn’t have any negative effects on their personality, and most still look upon their school days fondly. However, the lack of focus on creativity in schools results in lower productivity in their careers. I think it is possible to combine creativity and peer-competition to create an even more capable person, one who combines willpower, creativity, and curiosity. I think it is LS custom to refer to Jews here, who do exhibit all these traits, but my only close Jewish friend was my ex (heartbroken, in a thousand pieces. The wind blows. But the sun rises again), so I don’t think I have an objective view on this.
The lack of coercion in Western schools hurts the gifted students the most, I think. A lot of them just skate by without really trying, which can really hurt them in college or in their career.
Citation needed. This willpower certainly does not seem to manifest itself empirically in terms of increased wages or career prospects, EXCEPT in terms of how the subsequent degree and certification signals preexisting conformity+intelligence+conscientiousness, which are traits valued by employers.
At best (in any country) I’ll grant that children are heavily coerced to follow arduous orders, and the ones that have the least pride and are most enthusiastic to do that get promoted into top government and official positions, who then set policy so that the next batch of students are rewarded based on their willingness to do pointless work at the behest of their bosses, etc. etc. However “ability to do lots of useless work when an authority figure tells you to” is a very different psychological skill than the kind needed to do actually productive work, proactively, for your or the world’s benefit.
I will do a statistical deep dive on all this later. But this anti-schooling idea is very counter-intuitive, requires extremely coordinated incompetence to work, and runs extremely counter to my personal experience. With the recent Replication Crisis trashing counterintuitive studies that are used to push political agendas, I suspect anti-schooling is simply untrue.
Let me give a personal example: I currently exercise regularly. It is good for me in many ways. When I first started, however, it was akin to torture, and only self-coercion allowed me to continue. I dreaded my visits to the gym, and feared the pain and nausea that would greet me at every visit. But I pushed myself, most out of vanity and partly out of disdain for my physical weakness. After several months, however, the pain began to fade, and soon I started to enjoy it. Without the self-coercion, I would still be out of shape today.
The same applies to my job. When I first started working, focusing on my job instead of browsing the internet was very painful. And doing it for 8 hours a day made my daily utility became negative—I would have paid money to not experience those days. But through self-coercion, I was able to continue until it first became endurable and then enjoyable. For the first time in my life, I feel free—my sarkic desires and my ambitions are no longer in constant conflict.
This is very under-valued skill. It isn’t sexy. It sucks. And self-coercion can only be taught through external coercion, which sucks even more. I absolutely wish I had more of it as a child.
It’s indeed an incredible waste that higher education is almost entirely a credentialing race; doesn’t mean it requires that much coordination or even incompetence. The root causes are simple (intense government subsidies + a natural race to the bottom to be Most Credentialed among the working class), and could only be fixed by people and institutions which aren’t fired if they govern incorrectly. Biden and Xi are simply optimizing for different things than the general welfare of their constituents. You should read this if you have the time.
For what it’s worth, however counterintuitive you find this, I am fairly certain I find the idea that schooling does anything worth paying for more counterintuitive.