sotonye.substack.com
SS: I make a case for drastically cutting back on education. I argue that education doesn’t achieve its desired goals. The material is irrelevant and students forget much of the material. Most information taught in schools is quickly accessible with a smartphone. Education might be warranted if it boosted cognitive ability but it appears to be increasing IQ scores rather than actual ability to think.
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Notes -
... Say you're in a car accident. A dozen bones broken, you're driven to the nearest hospital unconscious. After eighteen hours of tireless work by surgeons and two weeks of medical support, you wake up - you've lost all sensation in your left arm, and can barely walk. A year of physical therapy later, you can walk well enough to get by, but not much else has improved. Does this suggests that surgery and physical therapy were "massive wastes of time, failing their supposed goals"?
No, because without surgery, you'd be dead, and without PT you wouldn't be walking. "Functionally illiterate" means you can't pass literacy tests, but probably still understand written language well enough to read instructions at your job and math well enough to count money. School helped with that! These matter for dumb poor people who want to earn money or survive. This doesn't make school great, maybe it should be entirely replaced with something better, but it isn't a waste of time compared to 'staying home, playing video games, job at mcdonalds at 14'.
“Functionally illiterate” means the exact opposite: that you CAN pass literacy tests (they kind they give up to grade 6, anyway) but can’t read well enough to read and understand something in day-to-day life.
It looks like functional illiteracy is a badly defined term anyway.
From wiki.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_illiteracy
“ A reading level that might be sufficient to make a farmer functionally literate in a rural area of a developing country might qualify as functional illiteracy in an urban area of a technologically advanced country.”
Because they can’t understand how to RTFM? I think there’s a weird standard here, not everyone needs to understand anything above a 6th grade level to do many jobs, in my mind these people are literate enough for what they need.
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Bleh my bad for mixing ideas without paying attention. I don't think that impacts the point though - I'm pretty sure even level 1 and below adults (22%) can read significantly more than they could if school was simply abolished, and L2 + L3 (32% + 33%) "can perform simple tasks based on the information they read".
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But are we dealing with resolving damage or creating improvement? Healing is hard. Fixing a broken building is hard, there could be various complications that you discover. But building a new structure is fairly easy. Furthermore, we're being sold on a certain level of performance, not an open-ended improvement. Schools are saying they're trying to create creative, dynamic students for the 21st century, yet many can't even read?
Creating improvement should be easy, especially when you're given huge amounts of time and money. Say you promise a nice bridge with pedestrian access and two lanes for vehicles up to and including large trucks - I pay you a lot of money to achieve this result. Then after 12 years I get a rope bridge or something pathetic. I'd rightly be very angry with your performance. A rope bridge is better than nothing but it doesn't meet agreed upon standards. A sixth grade standard of reading should be achieved by the end of the sixth grade, certainly by the seventh. If they can't do it, send them back until they can, or send them away without graduating! Instead we have blatant fraud: https://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/unearned-diplomas-10849.html
Primary school alone should be enough to read instructions at your job and count money. What good is high school for these people then?
The hospital thing was just an example, and that it was 'healing' vs 'building new' isn't important for the analogy - a bucket with a small leak is a significant improvement over no bucket.
Improvement is created! Most people pre-schooling were illiterate, whereas only 22% of adults are 'level one and below'. I agree it's quite bad as it stands, but if doing better is so easy, got any concrete suggestions?
Direct Instruction, restoring discipline via creating credible expectations of punishment for rowdy students and raising standards in teachers. Many teaching students are already quite unintelligent and there's high attrition due to a bad work environment. We should be hiring smarter people to be teachers, it's an important job. Improving the working environment would reduce churn and allow standards to be raised.
I'd also start hacking away at the educationalists who've done a terrible job in the last 50 years or so. Too much leftist ideology, not enough performance. Training of teachers needs to be thoroughly reformed along evidence-based lines, not trendy buzzwords. There's probably more low-hanging fruit like direct instruction that could be adopted.
These suggestions are, of course, on everyone's wishlist. They are not, however, concrete.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. If you mean seven hours of lectures every day, no dice. If you mean "teachers are expected to teach phonics and arithmetic explicitly, yes, they are already required to do this in most places.
What would the punishments be? How would you enforce them in the face of the "black children more likely" crowd? Don't say "I would start a small private school with no low performing children of color." Those already exist, and are doing well enough. They are not where the illiteracy lies.
So you... give them a harder test? And then when you don't have enough teachers and there are smart people teaching 50 6 year olds at a time who quit after six months because that's impossible, you... what, exactly?
Everyone already wants this. This is not a concrete suggestion.
In what way?
Lol. This is, of course, what the educationalists say. This is how they keep their positions churning out new low quality "research" and "professional development" year after year. This is wearing out teachers, as they struggle to "collect and analize data" in 30 minute segments twice a week. How would you prevent this without being empowered to personally vet that "evidence."
You already mentioned that one. None of this is low hanging fruit. Everything you mentioned is pushed constantly, exhaustingly, unremittingly by the education establishment already. This is just a pie in the sky wishlist, which the world is already flooded with.
I don't have a good solution either, that fits within the very onerous constraints of existing within a huge bureaucracy that's determined to equalize unequal things.
There are educational theorists with actually concrete suggestions, but they struggle in the face of unwieldy bureaucracies with a thousand tiny, onerous rules and regulations, of exactly the sort you outline above, and uninterested demographics, which is the hard lift, and the fulcrum of change.
Direct Instruction is widely shunned. Teachers hate it, students like it. It works. It genuinely is low-hanging fruit. I'm referring to an actual technical term hence the capitalization, I don't need to define it. Just search it up!
Getting locked in a quiet room without a phone for several hours would be one option. Fines and a criminal record would be another option. Expelling those who are committed to being egregious. Certainly not suspension or getting sent to some 'behavioral specialist', those are limpwristed and scream weakness.
I'd ignore the 'black children most likely crowd' and send them to prison when they start rioting. It's a political choice to listen to these people.
If you make the job more attractive by preventing teachers from being harassed, then attrition will reduce and you can be more selective with applicants. That's what I mean by improving the working environment. Reducing the pointless bureaucracy would also help, there are too many administrators. That would save money.
The educationalists have been lying. As you say, they've been churning out low quality 'research' that doesn't help. Cost-efficiency has declined. But just because they're lying, it doesn't follow that it's impossible to improve the quality of education scientifically, it's only that we've had an outbreak like Lysenkoism. We could inspect what the best teachers do, film their classes and analyse them. Is it charisma? Incentivizing students to work harder via personal relationships? Intelligence? High quality students? Are they gaming our measurements of success?
Direct Instruction is a concrete suggestion and I want to pole-axe the bureaucracy anyway. You can't get real change if you're committed to leaving things the same, it's a contradiction.
Yes, it is what I thought it was. I think you're talking about this kind of thing.
So, yeah, there's some tension between the approaches that work best for children with dyslexia and children at risk for illiteracy (but who can read if instructed well), and what at least some teachers prefer.
There are things schools and the educational establishment can do to mitigate this. Letting teachers know up front what they're getting into, rather than BS about Rousseau or whatever. A few schools have teachers follow students as they progress through the elementary grades, rather than staying at one grade level for multiple years, so they don't become burnt out on phonics. Interventionists and tutoring for children who aren't getting enough out of their core courses, using curriculum designed specifically for dyslexia. Programs specifically for the children who already know how to read and are bored with repeated instructions. Aesthetically pleasing special schools for children at no risk of failing to learn to read. I personally do not much want my daughters to do year after year of direct instruction in phonics if they already understand how to read and spell by six or so, which is likely, based on family history. I could be wrong, maybe one of them will prove to be dyslexic or something. ButI would rather they do some kind of aesthetically pleasing Waldorf or Forest School or Montessori or some other kind of hipster program after learning the basics, though I'm unsure if we'll be able to make that happen financially. I would prefer more of a voucher program, probably with more money attaching to the "at-risk" children than to the children who will still learn to read if they spend three hours a day hiking and watercoloring or whatever. I was homeschooled probably four hours a day, which was plenty, and my social circles are very open to this kind of thing. We (myself and my social circle) are in some ways overly literate, and trying to correct for this. My default state is reading, so here I am reading this, rather than planting seeds, which I told myself I would do today. Compulsive reading and akrasia do not show up in the statistics, but much more like what I and the people close to me deal with.
Direct instruction is already very common, but maybe not common enough. I assume you think that whatever the current amount of school time is being spent on direct instruction is not enough. Good news: the pendulum is already swinging. A quick search did not reveal what the current breakdown is. Chat GPT says, likely wrongly, 50% - 80%, and I suppose 50% would be low, if true. Colleges of education like focusing on things like think-pair-share, flipped classrooms, or AVID program kinds of discussion and enquiry, probably because it gives the professors something contentless to do. This is mostly a waste of time, to be sure, especially for lower elementary teachers, since most of the alternative methods assume a child can read, or that they can guess well enough to pretend to read. I was treated to a two hour lecture a while back about how The Neuroscience Shows that children should read about something, rather than than nothing, and that it probably matters what the something is, and it's more interesting to talk about the something than about the reading. The researchers must have been very stupid indeed that they needed neuroscience to figure that out.
It appears to be unclear what, exactly, the effect of higher quality teachers is, above a certain baseline. But, sure, everyone agrees that this would be great, and sometimes if enough teachers quit or strike, improvements are made. It would be better to not wait that long, for sure.
Anyway, I'm not certain that this is a useful level of abstraction. If a Mottizen were Education Czar, perhaps they could pole-axe the bureaucracy, sequester unruly children, improve the quality of social science research, and bring back the good old days. Or perhaps not.
Right now my state legislature is debating adding 100 hrs of instructional time to our elementary schools. I do not like it, but am not sure if my dislike is well grounded or not. My preference is for less default schooling, rather than more, especially for younger children, along with summer school for kids who aren't doing well, and less expensive play based childcare available to those who want it. I can't really write a letter to the state legislature or go into a meeting with administration and say "pole-axe the bureaucracy!" But there is some support for things like charter schools, vouchers, 4 day school weeks (this is apparently already common in rural districts with long drive times), and half day kindergartens used to be more of a thing. All of which are more like what I support than the alternatives. But I'm still trying to figure out exactly what my position is, and whether it's well grounded or not. It's probably just a case of kids at different ages and from different backgrounds needing different things, and it's a matter of what my own students and daughters happen to need more or less of.
I'd differentiate classes based on ability. The A-class would move ahead more quickly than the B and C classes, the F class would stay behind until they mastered the content. This does mean acknowledging that some people are smarter than others, yet it would be possible to move up if you did well in exams. Or down, if you did poorly. If the A-class finished early, they could pad out their part of the term with extensions. For your children who I assume would be very smart, they could spend more of their English time in the library doing free reading, or write their own stuff or something. I loved quiet reading time and still do, probably falling in your category of overly literate people.
This is how I was educated in high school and would've been nice to have back in primary school. Even in primary school we had special classes for the smart children, where we got to play around with robots most of the time since it was assumed we'd stay well ahead of the rest. There really is no limit to how far you can go in the humanities or the sciences. In my last year of high school I remember being shocked by these kids who could ad-lib a dialogue about the meaning of historiography, taking on the ideology of Zinn and various other people. It was a seriously impressive display when compared to us mere mortals who stuck to the scripts we had prepared earlier. I did go to a very good school, so my experience is very different from everyone else's.
The American 'everyone learns at the same pace so the stupid kids get left behind and the best kids are bored stiff and fantasizing about culling the stupid/teachers/stupid teachers' system seems like a gross failure. I just haven't really experienced it apart from people complaining about it online.
As for Orwell's experience, the system at least got results. I can sympathize with the struggle in learning classics, I had to do some of that at a much lower level of intensity. But Britain ruled the world back in those days, they had plenty of tough men who were ready to conquer and die for the empire. Despite an institutional contempt for science, Britain led the world in radar and jet engines. Orwell himself was no dimwit, his mastery of language is undisputed. What great minds has modern Britain turned out like Orwell? The social democratic education system is turning out people who get anxious answering the telephone, not warrior-poets.
Fair enough, it doesn't sound like we fundamentally disagree. I worked at a charter school for a while with the A-C class system, based on math skills. It seemed fine and reasonable enough as far as I could tell, though the teachers were all a bit frustrated with the behaviors, more than the ability, of the C class. Having a class like that all day every day in elementary school tends to drive teachers with other options out of the profession. It might work to pay the teachers with lower ability classes more to compensate, and this does to some extent happen, with public schools paying more than private ones.
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