I don’t necessarily expect there to be a black-and-white answer to my question, it’s mainly that I was reading Ben Hoffman and was thinking about how schools are a pretty central crux to his writings, yet after having unupdated my beliefs about schools, I wasn’t sure what to think of this crux, so I wanted some opinions from smart informed people that I could dig into or reflect upon.
Well, I don’t know who Ben Hoffman is, but the obvious answer is “good schools are good and bad schools are bad, and everything in between.”
Personally, I had a variety of experiences from quite bad to very good throughout my school years. It all depended on the mix of teachers, students, admins and my personal emotional place in the system. My own children were schooled, unschooled, private-schooled, public-schooled, depending on what was necessary and available at the moment.
The questions you are asking appear uncorrelated with what you want to learn though. Evaluate job candidates on merits, of which credentials are a part, but not a huge part. Ignore all considerations based on the conflict theory approach, like “class war.” Pick an educational framework that works best for a specific kid, unencumbered by ideological considerations. In general, keep your ideological identity small and such.
That ignores systematic problems with schooling, which even good schools will tend to suffer from:
Teaching by class risks both losing the kids at the bottom and boring the kids at the top, whereas individual study doesn’t have this problem.
Teaching by lecture is much slower than learning by reading. Yes, some students benefit from audio learning or need to do a thing themselves to grasp it, but those capable of learning from reading have massive amounts of time wasted, as potentially do the kinesthetic types who should really be taking a hands-on approach.
Teaching a broad curriculum forces vast amounts of time and effort to go towards subjects a student will never use. Specialization avoids this. Broad curricula are sometimes justified on the grounds that they’ll give a student more options later if they don’t know what they want to do, or on the grounds that they make the student “well-rounded”. However, the first justification seems extremely hollow in the face of opportunity costs and the tendency of aversive learning to make the victim averse to all learning in the future. The second, meanwhile, seems hard to take seriously upon actually experiencing “well-rounded” education or seeing its effects on others: it turns out people just don’t tend to use ideas they’re not interested in that were painfully forced into their minds.
Also relevant, though you could fairly note that the best schools will not suffer from these as much:
Public schools do not tend to benefit much from good performance nor suffer from bad. They are not incentivized to do a good job and thus tend not to.
Political and educational fads can result in large amounts of schooling going towards pushing pet ideas of the administrators, rather than anything that is plausibly worthwhile. This can even be worse than a simple waste of time: I’ve seen multiple classmates develop unhealthy guilt due to forced exposure to political propaganda.
You are correct that some schools are much better than others. But there are serious systematic problems here, and some schools being somewhat less bad doesn’t change that fact.
This black-and-white thinking doesn’t sound like you.
I don’t necessarily expect there to be a black-and-white answer to my question, it’s mainly that I was reading Ben Hoffman and was thinking about how schools are a pretty central crux to his writings, yet after having unupdated my beliefs about schools, I wasn’t sure what to think of this crux, so I wanted some opinions from smart informed people that I could dig into or reflect upon.
Well, I don’t know who Ben Hoffman is, but the obvious answer is “good schools are good and bad schools are bad, and everything in between.”
Personally, I had a variety of experiences from quite bad to very good throughout my school years. It all depended on the mix of teachers, students, admins and my personal emotional place in the system. My own children were schooled, unschooled, private-schooled, public-schooled, depending on what was necessary and available at the moment.
The questions you are asking appear uncorrelated with what you want to learn though. Evaluate job candidates on merits, of which credentials are a part, but not a huge part. Ignore all considerations based on the conflict theory approach, like “class war.” Pick an educational framework that works best for a specific kid, unencumbered by ideological considerations. In general, keep your ideological identity small and such.
He’s a rationalist(-adjacent?) blogger who writes about power, economics, culture, and EA: Compass Rose. His post Oppression and production are competing explanations for wealth inequality might be a good place to start.
Sorry, tried reading it a few times, the meaning escapes me...
That ignores systematic problems with schooling, which even good schools will tend to suffer from:
Teaching by class risks both losing the kids at the bottom and boring the kids at the top, whereas individual study doesn’t have this problem.
Teaching by lecture is much slower than learning by reading. Yes, some students benefit from audio learning or need to do a thing themselves to grasp it, but those capable of learning from reading have massive amounts of time wasted, as potentially do the kinesthetic types who should really be taking a hands-on approach.
Teaching a broad curriculum forces vast amounts of time and effort to go towards subjects a student will never use. Specialization avoids this. Broad curricula are sometimes justified on the grounds that they’ll give a student more options later if they don’t know what they want to do, or on the grounds that they make the student “well-rounded”. However, the first justification seems extremely hollow in the face of opportunity costs and the tendency of aversive learning to make the victim averse to all learning in the future. The second, meanwhile, seems hard to take seriously upon actually experiencing “well-rounded” education or seeing its effects on others: it turns out people just don’t tend to use ideas they’re not interested in that were painfully forced into their minds.
Also relevant, though you could fairly note that the best schools will not suffer from these as much:
Public schools do not tend to benefit much from good performance nor suffer from bad. They are not incentivized to do a good job and thus tend not to.
Political and educational fads can result in large amounts of schooling going towards pushing pet ideas of the administrators, rather than anything that is plausibly worthwhile. This can even be worse than a simple waste of time: I’ve seen multiple classmates develop unhealthy guilt due to forced exposure to political propaganda.
You are correct that some schools are much better than others. But there are serious systematic problems here, and some schools being somewhat less bad doesn’t change that fact.