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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29600 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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Genetics places hard limits on the extent of a specific child's educational attainment potential. Some children will never be neurosurgeons no matter how much they are taught, by whom and using which method.

This does not imply that all teaching methods are equal. You can't change children's relative educational attainment, but you can change their absolute educational attainment. The fact that some children will never be neurosurgeons doesn't mean they can never be taught to read. If you take a child who is near the bottom of an IQ distribution, you will never mould him into a neurosurgeon, but teaching him basic literacy will improve his quality of life. Some methods are demonstrably more effective for improving literacy than others, teachers should be choosing the best methods available for teaching children, and knowingly using a subpar method for teaching literacy just because you find it more enjoyable than a better available method is a massive dereliction of duty.

The worldview that I find objectionable is the blank-slate idea that everyone's educational attainment potential is identical, and that the only reason that working-class children attending public schools tend to have poorer educational outcomes than middle- and upper-class children attending private schools is because private schools have better teachers/better teaching methods/better teaching resources etc.. The former group tend to have poorer educational outcomes: they don't have no educational outcomes. I'm quite confident that almost every child who graduates public school knows a few things they didn't know when they started public school, as a direct result of their schooling. But if you were to take a single town which has Public School A and Private School B, track the educational attainment of a cohort of first-year children in each school from the year they enter to the year they leave, I predict that you would find:

  • Most of the highest-performing children are attending the private school

  • Most of the lowest-performing children are attending the public school

  • The relative positions of each child are mostly unchanged by the time they finish school: students who were high-performing at the outset will be high-performing when they leave

The deBoer article linked above contains a wealth of data backing up this highly intuitive assertion.

Genetics places hard limits on the extent of a specific child's educational attainment potential.

And that doesn't change my point. You seem to be engaged in a certain sort of strategic equivocation here, treating "potential" and "manifested ability" as equivalent when they are not. Similarly there's an obvious motte and bailey going on here. some qualities are inherited by children from their parents is the motte, where the motte is 100% bio-determinism where environment, discipline, are all meaningless distractions is the bailey.

You're complaint is essentially that I am refusing to grant you the bailey.

I'm not sure if I understand which position is the motte and which is the bailey in this framing. I don't believe in pure biodeterminism.

The Motte is that genetics exists, the Bailey is that everything is reducible to genetics, and that all other factors can be discarded as inconsequential.

Okay. I don't think all other factors outside of genetics can be discarded as inconsequential. Probably if you transferred some of the students from the public school to the private school you would, in some cases, see modest improvements in educational and socialization outcomes. Go back prior to they started school, and you'll probably find that the private school kids had better early childhood nutrition and lower incidence of e.g. fetal alcohol syndrome relative to the public school kids, which is bound to have a knock-on effect on their intelligence and educational outcomes.

But the girl I was dating at the time seemed to be denying that genetics plays any role in intelligence or educational outcomes, and that these are entirely attributable to the environment. I know this might seem like a bravery debate, but the blank-slate enviro-determinist worldview espoused by the girl I was dating seems far more widespread and influential than mine (it implicitly underpins virtually all modern education policy and every argument in favour of affirmative action in education, for instance), so I think it needs to be pushed back upon far more aggressively than the biodeterminist worldview.

Here you claim...

Okay. I don't think all other factors outside of genetics can be discarded as inconsequential.

but in the rest of this thread you've been posting things like...

I found her optimism touching, even heartbreaking, and immediately started reciting all of my best talking points from Freddie deBoer: it's all genetics, the children whose parents can afford to send them to private school tend to be smarter than the children whose parents can't; "school quality" and "teacher quality" have pretty much zero bearing on educational outcomes and are almost pure signalling; if you sent all of the private school kids to a public school and vice versa, you would see essentially zero change in educational outcomes in either cohort; and so on and so on.

You can't have it both ways. One of the above statements was a lie, which was it?

When I said "it's all genetics" I was exaggerating for rhetorical effect. I apologise for my imprecise wording.

I don't believe that your words were "imprecise". I think you knew exactly what you were saying.

You're entitled to your opinion. I know what I do and don't believe.

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