There’s an inplicit assumption, both in the post and in many of the comments, that the ‘value’ of school for teenagers lies in knowledge acquisition. And therefore, if school is busywork a.k.a. does not lead to acquisition of useful knowledge, homeschooling or ‘alternative’ schooling must be better. I think this is wrong.
For society, the principal lasting value of schooling teenagers relates to the acquisition of skills like:
dynamic balancing of self-assertiveness vs. deference to authority (both on an interpersonal level, and also on a societal level)
productively handling highly heterogeneous interpersonal environments e.g. where people have a broad mix of skill levels, temperaments, abilities, interests, etc.
learning to handle common but undesirable traits in others e.g. aggressiveness/bullying, jealousy, etc.
balancing behavioural risk/reward factors (e.g. via ‘playing up’ and assessing the reactions of others)
These things are all important in the real world to ensure effective function of society. They emerge as a result of contact time, and whatever other things also happen during that time (e.g. learning synthesis paths for ammonia, busywork etc.) don’t really matter that much. ‘Alternative’ schools where there’s more homogeneity (everyone is super bright, ‘finds school boring’ etc.) deprive teenagers of time spent in ‘normal’ (heterogenous) society—at a time when such exposure has the most impact—and thus compromises acquisition of the skills that help thrive in the real world.
Knowledge acquisition, on the other hand, can be done via Wikipedia etc. and does not need to occupy school time. People who want to acquire knowledge can do this easily in their bedroom at night. Soft skills cannot be learned this way.
There’s a lot of comments here from people saying things like “I dropped out of school / did not attend regular school, became a software engineer and that was a great decision”. Great for who? I’ve worked with many software engineers and I can say that “software engineer” as a profession is at least somewhat correlated with a lack of the soft skills that others do gain from teenage schooling. So it isn’t surprising, then, that “software engineer” is also correlated with “didn’t get much out of school”. But the direction of the arrow of causality isn’t clear. And having more teenagers spending more time on software engineering (and hence less time on acquiring soft society skills via extended time in heterogenous interpersonal environments i.e. ‘normal schools’) may be great for the teenagers if they’re not interested in society, or for GDP, but I don’t see any indication it’s a net positive for the world as a whole.
I was the one of the most conscientious people in school (had high grades and my teachers praised me for being a hard worker [and really, they don’t care about you...]) and school burned me out so much that I developed a long period of ADHD/burnout after (avoiding all the things that made me unhappy) . The thing that happened to Qiaochu Yuan also happened to me.
dynamic balancing of self-assertiveness vs. deference to authority
The proportion of “deference to authority” is too high, in my opinion.
Knowledge acquisition, on the other hand, can be done via Wikipedia etc. and does not need to occupy school time. People who want to acquire knowledge can do this easily in their bedroom at night.
This isn’t application-based knowledge. I mentioned that students can learn concepts on their own, but what society currently lacks is a path to do something useful with it from a younger age.
Also, I agree that learning social behavior is one of the primary purposes of school, and I’d like to stress that I’m not advocating for the removal of the school system.
The proportion of “deference to authority” is too high, in my opinion.
In school, or in the real world? And if the latter, what context in particular? In a career context, for example, lower deference to authority (when carefully executed) tends to lead to more rapid promotion, where at the terminus (CEO) everyone in an organisation defers to you. It doesn’t seem there’s a huge supply/demand imbalance for senior roles, which suggests to me that the self-assertiveness vs. deference balance in working-age society is more or less optimal.
what society currently lacks is a path to do something useful with it from a younger age.
Agreed, but why should teenagers being ‘useful’ be a goal? A century ago, most teenagers did actually do useful things (work in factories etc.) but we’ve moved away from that these days. Being a teenager is fun, with low responsibility, a lot of free time for self-discovery, etc. We have a lifetime after that to be ‘useful’. Why should we cut our young years short?
I meant that school generally tries to embed deference to authority. It fades in the real world for certain jobs though.
Why should we cut our young years short?
Brain myelination and information processing speed are highest then. Time is ticking if you want it to be easy to do creative, innovative work quickly. It is, of course, very possible to be successful as an adult with lower levels of neuroplasticity and processing and more “crystallized” intelligence, however adolescents have that particular advantage, differentiating them and making them valuable in a unique way.
This is turning into more subjective philosophy territory, but is relaxing and having “fun” necessarily better than intellectual stimulation and learning from challenges? And won’t experiences like that speed up self-discovery?
but is relaxing and having “fun” necessarily better than intellectual stimulation and learning from challenges? And won’t experiences like that speed up self-discovery?
I think it speeds up self-discovery, at the expense of narrowing the domain within which that self-discovery takes place. So if you spend a lot of time as a teenager developing software, you certainly learn more about yourself in terms of your aptitude for developing software. But there’s an opportunity cost. I favour unguided self-discovery (a.k.a. “having fun”) for longer, because I view self-discovery during teenage years as a global optimization, for which algorithms like simulated annealing tend to find better optima with a higher temperature, albeit taking longer to do so. As a result, I do not favour cutting short ‘childhood’ so people can be ‘useful’ sooner.
Also, it may be well be that the LessWrong demographic favours intellectual stimulation as “better” than many other things, but for the general population, I don’t see evidence this is the case. I know plenty of highly satisfied people, not driven by intellectual stimulation but nonetheless doing things most would regard as valuable to society. But yes, this comes down to subjective philosophy on what is “better” in terms of one’s own utility function, and what we should be optimising for.
I’d argue that working earlier and having fun are not necessarily mutually exclusive—for example, look at university life. There are a lot of students doing research and other work, while participating in probably the strongest self-discovery of their lives. I also don’t think specialization has a significant impact on what forms of self-discovery someone can engage in—software engineering covers a broad variety of things, from working with people to problem solving to time management to creativity and pitching your work
There’s an inplicit assumption, both in the post and in many of the comments, that the ‘value’ of school for teenagers lies in knowledge acquisition. And therefore, if school is busywork a.k.a. does not lead to acquisition of useful knowledge, homeschooling or ‘alternative’ schooling must be better. I think this is wrong.
For society, the principal lasting value of schooling teenagers relates to the acquisition of skills like:
dynamic balancing of self-assertiveness vs. deference to authority (both on an interpersonal level, and also on a societal level)
productively handling highly heterogeneous interpersonal environments e.g. where people have a broad mix of skill levels, temperaments, abilities, interests, etc.
learning to handle common but undesirable traits in others e.g. aggressiveness/bullying, jealousy, etc.
balancing behavioural risk/reward factors (e.g. via ‘playing up’ and assessing the reactions of others)
These things are all important in the real world to ensure effective function of society. They emerge as a result of contact time, and whatever other things also happen during that time (e.g. learning synthesis paths for ammonia, busywork etc.) don’t really matter that much. ‘Alternative’ schools where there’s more homogeneity (everyone is super bright, ‘finds school boring’ etc.) deprive teenagers of time spent in ‘normal’ (heterogenous) society—at a time when such exposure has the most impact—and thus compromises acquisition of the skills that help thrive in the real world.
Knowledge acquisition, on the other hand, can be done via Wikipedia etc. and does not need to occupy school time. People who want to acquire knowledge can do this easily in their bedroom at night. Soft skills cannot be learned this way.
There’s a lot of comments here from people saying things like “I dropped out of school / did not attend regular school, became a software engineer and that was a great decision”. Great for who? I’ve worked with many software engineers and I can say that “software engineer” as a profession is at least somewhat correlated with a lack of the soft skills that others do gain from teenage schooling. So it isn’t surprising, then, that “software engineer” is also correlated with “didn’t get much out of school”. But the direction of the arrow of causality isn’t clear. And having more teenagers spending more time on software engineering (and hence less time on acquiring soft society skills via extended time in heterogenous interpersonal environments i.e. ‘normal schools’) may be great for the teenagers if they’re not interested in society, or for GDP, but I don’t see any indication it’s a net positive for the world as a whole.
I was the one of the most conscientious people in school (had high grades and my teachers praised me for being a hard worker [and really, they don’t care about you...]) and school burned me out so much that I developed a long period of ADHD/burnout after (avoiding all the things that made me unhappy) . The thing that happened to Qiaochu Yuan also happened to me.
The proportion of “deference to authority” is too high, in my opinion.
This isn’t application-based knowledge. I mentioned that students can learn concepts on their own, but what society currently lacks is a path to do something useful with it from a younger age.
Also, I agree that learning social behavior is one of the primary purposes of school, and I’d like to stress that I’m not advocating for the removal of the school system.
In school, or in the real world? And if the latter, what context in particular? In a career context, for example, lower deference to authority (when carefully executed) tends to lead to more rapid promotion, where at the terminus (CEO) everyone in an organisation defers to you. It doesn’t seem there’s a huge supply/demand imbalance for senior roles, which suggests to me that the self-assertiveness vs. deference balance in working-age society is more or less optimal.
Agreed, but why should teenagers being ‘useful’ be a goal? A century ago, most teenagers did actually do useful things (work in factories etc.) but we’ve moved away from that these days. Being a teenager is fun, with low responsibility, a lot of free time for self-discovery, etc. We have a lifetime after that to be ‘useful’. Why should we cut our young years short?
I meant that school generally tries to embed deference to authority. It fades in the real world for certain jobs though.
Brain myelination and information processing speed are highest then. Time is ticking if you want it to be easy to do creative, innovative work quickly. It is, of course, very possible to be successful as an adult with lower levels of neuroplasticity and processing and more “crystallized” intelligence, however adolescents have that particular advantage, differentiating them and making them valuable in a unique way.
This is turning into more subjective philosophy territory, but is relaxing and having “fun” necessarily better than intellectual stimulation and learning from challenges? And won’t experiences like that speed up self-discovery?
I think it speeds up self-discovery, at the expense of narrowing the domain within which that self-discovery takes place. So if you spend a lot of time as a teenager developing software, you certainly learn more about yourself in terms of your aptitude for developing software. But there’s an opportunity cost. I favour unguided self-discovery (a.k.a. “having fun”) for longer, because I view self-discovery during teenage years as a global optimization, for which algorithms like simulated annealing tend to find better optima with a higher temperature, albeit taking longer to do so. As a result, I do not favour cutting short ‘childhood’ so people can be ‘useful’ sooner.
Also, it may be well be that the LessWrong demographic favours intellectual stimulation as “better” than many other things, but for the general population, I don’t see evidence this is the case. I know plenty of highly satisfied people, not driven by intellectual stimulation but nonetheless doing things most would regard as valuable to society. But yes, this comes down to subjective philosophy on what is “better” in terms of one’s own utility function, and what we should be optimising for.
I’d argue that working earlier and having fun are not necessarily mutually exclusive—for example, look at university life. There are a lot of students doing research and other work, while participating in probably the strongest self-discovery of their lives. I also don’t think specialization has a significant impact on what forms of self-discovery someone can engage in—software engineering covers a broad variety of things, from working with people to problem solving to time management to creativity and pitching your work