That depends on what would replace them. One could imagine a scenario in which schools were eliminated, no other form of learning filled the gap, and mankind ended up worse off as a result. However, schooling in its present form seems net-negative relative to most realistic alternatives. Much of this will focus on the US, as that is the school system I’m most familiar with, but many of the lessons should transfer.
Much of the material covered has no conceivable use except as a wasteful signal. “The mitochondrion is the powerhouse of the cell”: everyone in the US gets taught that, but almost no one knows what it means in any real sense, nor does anyone benefit from knowing it unless they’re either going into biology or interested in biology. And the people who are becoming biologists still need to know what that actually means! And that’s even before we get to material like the fates of King Henry’s wives: divorced beheaded died, divorced beheaded survived. In what world is that the most pressing thing to learn?
Even the plausibly-useful material tends to be covered slowly and with heavy emphasis on following steps by rote instead of understanding what’s actually going on. Not only does that make that curriculum much less helpful for actual learning than one might expect from the topics, but it can actively drive students away from curiosity and critical thinking.
On top of this, we must consider the price of schooling, both financial and opportunity costs. In fiscal 2022, the Department of Education consumed over 600 billion dollars. That’s not trivial, and one wonders what other uses that amount of money could be put to. And children losing a large portion of their childhoods is a staggering human cost. And what do we get in return for such sacrifices? One in five high school graduates can’t read. Over a decade of their lives taken from them in the name of learning, and they never even learned how to read.
If we hadn’t grown up with school as a normal, accepted thing, if we weren’t used to going along with it because it would be awkward not to, what would we see? What would you think about a society that locks children up to perform forced labor that isn’t even economically productive, tries to justify it in the name of learning, then barely even teaches anything?
Much of the material covered has no conceivable use except as a wasteful signal.
What would you think of the argument that getting taught a bundle of random things practices learning, so that those who have been taught in school are better able to learn other things afterwards?
Why would you suspect this is true? This sounds like one of those feel-good ideas that is morally satisfying but could just as easily be false.
How big of an effect are we talking? The price is 12 high-quality years, so even a 10% improvement in ability to learn wouldn’t nearly justify the cost. Also, your neuroplasticity will probably drop by more than that over the course of the 12 years, so the net effect will be to take 12 years and leave you with a reduced ability to learn.
If “getting taught a bundle of random things” is valuable, is it more valuable than doing whatever you would do by default? Even the most wasteful activities you would realistically do—watching TV, playing videogames, surfing the net, talking to friends—all have some benefits. All of them would improve literacy, numeracy, and your knowledge of the world, and all of them would require you to learn a bundle of random things, which (following your suggestion) may be valuable in itself.
Why would you suspect this is true? This sounds like one of those feel-good ideas that is morally satisfying but could just as easily be false.
When people do something, they tend to become better at that thing by picking up tricks relevant to it. If the thing they are doing is learning lots of random things, presumably some of the tricks they pick up would be tricks for learning lots of random things.
How big of an effect are we talking?
I don’t know. I’ve talked with some people who are interested in intelligence research about how to measure learning ability. It would essentially require measuring people’s ability to do lots of things, then teaching them those things, then measuring their ability on those things again, and looking at something like the difference in ability. The trouble is that it is simultaneously really expensive to perform such measurements (as having to teach people things makes it orders of magnitude more expensive than ordinary psychometrics), and yet still too noisy when performed at reasonable scales to be useful.
So measuring learning ability would be difficult. And even if we found out how to do that, we would still need some sort of randomized trial or natural experiment to test school’s effect on learning ability.
The price is 12 high-quality years, so even a 10% improvement in ability to learn wouldn’t nearly justify the cost. Also, your neuroplasticity will probably drop by more than that over the course of the 12 years, so the net effect will be to take 12 years and leave you with a reduced ability to learn.
Maybe. This assumes ability to learn when younger is as valueable as ability to learn when older, which might not be true because you have much more information about what you need to learn when you are older. For instance at my job I had to learn KQL, but KQL did not exist when I was a child, so in order to teach it to me as a child, we would have to be able to accurately forecast the invention of KQL, which seems impossible.
If “getting taught a bundle of random things” is valuable, is it more valuable than doing whatever you would do by default? Even the most wasteful activities you would realistically do—watching TV, playing videogames, surfing the net, talking to friends—all have some benefits. All of them would improve literacy, numeracy, and your knowledge of the world, and all of them would require you to learn a bundle of random things, which (following your suggestion) may be valuable in itself.
I suspect it depends on the person.
The sort of person who watches science documentaries on TV, who builds redstone computers in Minecraft, who reads LessWrong and scientific papers when surfing the web, and who talks with friends about topics like the theoretical arguments for and against school would probably have a much more intellectually stimulating environment outside of school than within it.
But such people are extremely rare, so we can to good approximation say they don’t exist. I’m less sure about how it would work out for the median person, who spends their time on other stuff. I think they might tend to learn things that are less intellectually varied, specializing deeply into keeping track of social relations, doing exciting things, or similar? Idk, I don’t know very much about the median person.
I would think that it’s valid, but a smaller effect than getting taught a bundle of random things in a gratuitously unpleasant way resulting in those who have been taught in school having a deep-seated fear of learning, not to mention other forms of damage. Prior to going to school, I had an excellent attention span, even by adult standards. After graduating high school, it took two years before I could concentrate on anything, and I still suffer from brain fog.
I don’t know how common loss of attention span is, but certainly reduced interest in learning occurs extremely often.
Also, potential evidence that more damage occurs than is commonly recognized: in the modern world, we generally accept that one needs to be in one’s late teens or even early twenties to handle adult life. Yet for most of human history, people took on adult responsibilities around puberty. Part of the difference may be the world becoming more complex. But how much of it is the result of locking people up in environments with very little social or intellectual stimulation until they’re 18?
The world looks exactly like one would expect it to if school stunted intellectual and emotional maturity.
Should society eliminate schools?
That depends on what would replace them. One could imagine a scenario in which schools were eliminated, no other form of learning filled the gap, and mankind ended up worse off as a result. However, schooling in its present form seems net-negative relative to most realistic alternatives. Much of this will focus on the US, as that is the school system I’m most familiar with, but many of the lessons should transfer.
Much of the material covered has no conceivable use except as a wasteful signal. “The mitochondrion is the powerhouse of the cell”: everyone in the US gets taught that, but almost no one knows what it means in any real sense, nor does anyone benefit from knowing it unless they’re either going into biology or interested in biology. And the people who are becoming biologists still need to know what that actually means! And that’s even before we get to material like the fates of King Henry’s wives: divorced beheaded died, divorced beheaded survived. In what world is that the most pressing thing to learn?
Even the plausibly-useful material tends to be covered slowly and with heavy emphasis on following steps by rote instead of understanding what’s actually going on. Not only does that make that curriculum much less helpful for actual learning than one might expect from the topics, but it can actively drive students away from curiosity and critical thinking.
How many people have been traumatized into a fear of math?
On top of this, we must consider the price of schooling, both financial and opportunity costs. In fiscal 2022, the Department of Education consumed over 600 billion dollars. That’s not trivial, and one wonders what other uses that amount of money could be put to. And children losing a large portion of their childhoods is a staggering human cost. And what do we get in return for such sacrifices? One in five high school graduates can’t read. Over a decade of their lives taken from them in the name of learning, and they never even learned how to read.
If we hadn’t grown up with school as a normal, accepted thing, if we weren’t used to going along with it because it would be awkward not to, what would we see? What would you think about a society that locks children up to perform forced labor that isn’t even economically productive, tries to justify it in the name of learning, then barely even teaches anything?
This is a crime against humanity.
How does society decide what subjects get taught in school?
What would you think of the argument that getting taught a bundle of random things practices learning, so that those who have been taught in school are better able to learn other things afterwards?
Why would you suspect this is true? This sounds like one of those feel-good ideas that is morally satisfying but could just as easily be false.
How big of an effect are we talking? The price is 12 high-quality years, so even a 10% improvement in ability to learn wouldn’t nearly justify the cost. Also, your neuroplasticity will probably drop by more than that over the course of the 12 years, so the net effect will be to take 12 years and leave you with a reduced ability to learn.
If “getting taught a bundle of random things” is valuable, is it more valuable than doing whatever you would do by default? Even the most wasteful activities you would realistically do—watching TV, playing videogames, surfing the net, talking to friends—all have some benefits. All of them would improve literacy, numeracy, and your knowledge of the world, and all of them would require you to learn a bundle of random things, which (following your suggestion) may be valuable in itself.
When people do something, they tend to become better at that thing by picking up tricks relevant to it. If the thing they are doing is learning lots of random things, presumably some of the tricks they pick up would be tricks for learning lots of random things.
I don’t know. I’ve talked with some people who are interested in intelligence research about how to measure learning ability. It would essentially require measuring people’s ability to do lots of things, then teaching them those things, then measuring their ability on those things again, and looking at something like the difference in ability. The trouble is that it is simultaneously really expensive to perform such measurements (as having to teach people things makes it orders of magnitude more expensive than ordinary psychometrics), and yet still too noisy when performed at reasonable scales to be useful.
So measuring learning ability would be difficult. And even if we found out how to do that, we would still need some sort of randomized trial or natural experiment to test school’s effect on learning ability.
Maybe. This assumes ability to learn when younger is as valueable as ability to learn when older, which might not be true because you have much more information about what you need to learn when you are older. For instance at my job I had to learn KQL, but KQL did not exist when I was a child, so in order to teach it to me as a child, we would have to be able to accurately forecast the invention of KQL, which seems impossible.
I suspect it depends on the person.
The sort of person who watches science documentaries on TV, who builds redstone computers in Minecraft, who reads LessWrong and scientific papers when surfing the web, and who talks with friends about topics like the theoretical arguments for and against school would probably have a much more intellectually stimulating environment outside of school than within it.
But such people are extremely rare, so we can to good approximation say they don’t exist. I’m less sure about how it would work out for the median person, who spends their time on other stuff. I think they might tend to learn things that are less intellectually varied, specializing deeply into keeping track of social relations, doing exciting things, or similar? Idk, I don’t know very much about the median person.
I would think that it’s valid, but a smaller effect than getting taught a bundle of random things in a gratuitously unpleasant way resulting in those who have been taught in school having a deep-seated fear of learning, not to mention other forms of damage. Prior to going to school, I had an excellent attention span, even by adult standards. After graduating high school, it took two years before I could concentrate on anything, and I still suffer from brain fog.
Hm not sure such damage commonly happens.
I don’t know how common loss of attention span is, but certainly reduced interest in learning occurs extremely often.
Also, potential evidence that more damage occurs than is commonly recognized: in the modern world, we generally accept that one needs to be in one’s late teens or even early twenties to handle adult life. Yet for most of human history, people took on adult responsibilities around puberty. Part of the difference may be the world becoming more complex. But how much of it is the result of locking people up in environments with very little social or intellectual stimulation until they’re 18?
The world looks exactly like one would expect it to if school stunted intellectual and emotional maturity.