Surprised by the karma not being higher, and by the negative reactions.
I generally enjoy your articles for providing me insights into a part of the planet I know little about, but I think this article was good even separately from that. The fact that education has been warped from “nurturing individuals” into “screening them,” is something that I also perceive as obviously true and very painful. Unlike the author, I have a university diploma, I worked as a teacher for a few years, and I have a life-long interest in improving education, so many ad-hominems used against the author wouldn’t work for me. And I agree about how the system is broken. Also, Bryan Caplan’s The Case Against Education makes the same point.
You can complain about a system regardless of whether you win or you lose; but of course, if you win, you have less of a motivation to do so (especially if the system is designed to pretend that the winners are superior beings, so by questioning the system you also question your own superiority), and if you lose, there is the convenient argument that your opinions are opinions of an inferior human, and therefore superior humans should avoid them without discussing them, lest they contaminate themselves with the inferiority.
Take one of the schools as an example: I remember a few years ago only four students entered the interview stage, but this year it increased to ten, yet the admission quota remained unchanged. As the number of people increases, participants must expend more effort than in previous years to secure a spot.
The logic of screening here, if viewed from the perspective of “education,” is deformed. We can compare it to a driver’s license exam to understand—if we screened driver’s license applicants annually, saying “only the top 5%” are eligible to get a license, the absurdity of university educational screening becomes apparent. An illiterate person indeed doesn’t meet the standard and cannot enter university, but if a person possesses basic high school knowledge, why can’t they enter university to learn? The logic of a “qualification exam” and a “selection exam” is fundamentally different: Selection means there are still losers above the standard, and it is relative (the top 5% of last year coming to take the exam again doesn’t mean they can still be in the top 5%). However, a fixed qualification standard line remains consistent every year. Unless there are adjustments to the standard of “basic university knowledge” based on learning sciences and cognitive sciences, this line should remain largely unchanged annually.
This is (from my perspective) the key part of the article—pinpointing a part of the difference between what the educational system does, versus what it pretends to be = what it derives its legitimacy from.
As a thought experiment, imagine that you are designing an educational system, and your great desire is that e.g. as many people learn calculus as possible. You do not want to sacrifice literally all resources towards this goal, but you are pretty serious about it. You would probably design a system where anyone who has a potential to learn calculus is invited and taught, and then examined.
You would filter out e.g. mentally retarded people, because trying to teach them calculus is hopeless. Also, suppose that only have control over universities, but not over elementary and middle schools. Then, you would also filter out people who fail at the prerequisites so hard that there is no way to teach them calculus in the available time.
But what you definitely wouldn’t do is establish a goal of only admitting a certain fraction of the population. Not if your goal is to teach the calculus to as many people as possible. If more people arrived from middle schools sufficiently prepared, you would be happy to admit all of them; not trying to figure out more ways to reject them. (And you definitely wouldn’t reject them based on e.g. extracurricular activities unrelated to math.)
From this we can conclude the difference between the idealistically stated goals of the educational system, which is providing knowledge (to those who are capable of receiving it, given limited time and resources), and its actual goals, which are more like selecting a fraction of population, based on criteria that are correlated with their ability to receive knowledge but also with lots of arbitrariness and sheer luck.
Another way to say the same thing is that if you have a specific goal, such as “teach everyone literacy”, it is a game that the majority of people can win. In theory, you would be happy if 100% managed to win. The educational system is designed to be the kind of game where many people can’t win, because separating the winners from the losers is its point; it would be considered a failure if somehow 100% managed to win.
A system that is advertised as trying to make 100% win (and pretends that it anyone loses, it is only their own fault), but it actually designed to make a predefined fraction fail, is a system based on lies.
Why it matters (besides the standard rationalist obsession with truth)? Among other reasons, system based on lies are surprisingly resistant against attempts to improve them—if your proposal would improve them according to their stated criteria, but not according to their actual criteria. From the perspective of a system whose purpose it to separate winners from losers, improving the number of winners would be a failure; therefore it will resist any attempt to improve the number of winners, in ways that will be infuriating for a person who genuinely desires to see more people succeed at getting knowledge.
Surprised by the karma not being higher, and by the negative reactions.
I generally enjoy your articles for providing me insights into a part of the planet I know little about, but I think this article was good even separately from that. The fact that education has been warped from “nurturing individuals” into “screening them,” is something that I also perceive as obviously true and very painful. Unlike the author, I have a university diploma, I worked as a teacher for a few years, and I have a life-long interest in improving education, so many ad-hominems used against the author wouldn’t work for me. And I agree about how the system is broken. Also, Bryan Caplan’s The Case Against Education makes the same point.
You can complain about a system regardless of whether you win or you lose; but of course, if you win, you have less of a motivation to do so (especially if the system is designed to pretend that the winners are superior beings, so by questioning the system you also question your own superiority), and if you lose, there is the convenient argument that your opinions are opinions of an inferior human, and therefore superior humans should avoid them without discussing them, lest they contaminate themselves with the inferiority.
This is (from my perspective) the key part of the article—pinpointing a part of the difference between what the educational system does, versus what it pretends to be = what it derives its legitimacy from.
As a thought experiment, imagine that you are designing an educational system, and your great desire is that e.g. as many people learn calculus as possible. You do not want to sacrifice literally all resources towards this goal, but you are pretty serious about it. You would probably design a system where anyone who has a potential to learn calculus is invited and taught, and then examined.
You would filter out e.g. mentally retarded people, because trying to teach them calculus is hopeless. Also, suppose that only have control over universities, but not over elementary and middle schools. Then, you would also filter out people who fail at the prerequisites so hard that there is no way to teach them calculus in the available time.
But what you definitely wouldn’t do is establish a goal of only admitting a certain fraction of the population. Not if your goal is to teach the calculus to as many people as possible. If more people arrived from middle schools sufficiently prepared, you would be happy to admit all of them; not trying to figure out more ways to reject them. (And you definitely wouldn’t reject them based on e.g. extracurricular activities unrelated to math.)
From this we can conclude the difference between the idealistically stated goals of the educational system, which is providing knowledge (to those who are capable of receiving it, given limited time and resources), and its actual goals, which are more like selecting a fraction of population, based on criteria that are correlated with their ability to receive knowledge but also with lots of arbitrariness and sheer luck.
Another way to say the same thing is that if you have a specific goal, such as “teach everyone literacy”, it is a game that the majority of people can win. In theory, you would be happy if 100% managed to win. The educational system is designed to be the kind of game where many people can’t win, because separating the winners from the losers is its point; it would be considered a failure if somehow 100% managed to win.
A system that is advertised as trying to make 100% win (and pretends that it anyone loses, it is only their own fault), but it actually designed to make a predefined fraction fail, is a system based on lies.
Why it matters (besides the standard rationalist obsession with truth)? Among other reasons, system based on lies are surprisingly resistant against attempts to improve them—if your proposal would improve them according to their stated criteria, but not according to their actual criteria. From the perspective of a system whose purpose it to separate winners from losers, improving the number of winners would be a failure; therefore it will resist any attempt to improve the number of winners, in ways that will be infuriating for a person who genuinely desires to see more people succeed at getting knowledge.