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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   31876 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 10, 2023

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I wouldn't call them all amazing scholars. As I mention in the post, Harvard hasn't selected primarily on intelligence for a long while. I would call the ones I met noticeably capable, well-adjusted, balanced people when compared to the median individual: smart, knowledgeable, conscientious, well-connected, well-off, and ambitious, the sort of people who stand out in any group they're in as being the ones who get things done. Not better than anyone else in the world, but noticeably highly selected in those domains.

This is a generalization, of course, not a rule, and reality is always less shiny than generalizations of this sort allow for, but I've been sincerely impressed by the Harvard (and Yale, and similar-school) graduates in my life.

The quality of graduates from the top schools has fallen precipitously over the last 30 years. This shows in two ways. Firstly, while in college, students are less interested in the material, ask less questions, interact with their TAs and professors less, and generally are more like consumers than people engaged in discovery. The quality of exam answers increased up until about 2010, but the quality of in-person engagement decreased notably. Students who are selected for doing well on exams do well on exams, but somehow, they are less interested, and significantly less interesting. Cheating has gone from being almost unheard of, save for very marginal students who were desperate to pass, to commonplace, and now to almost universal. I have seen students speak at graduation who did not do a single problem set of their own.

Once these kids hit the workplace, they are strikingly lost. They understand how to do a set task, so long as it is phrased like a problem they would be posed in school, but beyond this, they find independent work very challenging. They tend not to be comfortable having opinions of their own. When asked to do analytical work, they tend to write in a polemical style. They will present all the information that supports a thesis, but do not understand the importance of covering the facts and evidence that points the other way.

A lot of this may be due to the practices of college admissions. Kids who get into top schools tend to have gotten straight As, perfect recs from their high school teachers, and have learned to lie about (or at the very least, wildly exaggerate) their extracurriculars. This requires diligence, always agreeing with authority, never displaying independent thought - as high school teachers hate that. Developing a passion for a subject requires time to think and space to explore. How housed kids do not get this, and thus arrive in college with no opinions that they have developed for themselves. They sit through classes where they don't interact with the professors, as they have learned that channeling their teachers is a bad idea. They write banal essays so as not to offend.

Much of modern high school is about learning to deny the obvious. English is perhaps the most obvious example of this, where literary classics, that are obviously great, and intermixed with books that any smart high schooler can see are pulp trash. Getting good grades requires pretending that Beloved, which does not have literary merit, is just as good as Shakespeare. This lying about the obvious teaches very bad analytical skills, where students learn to support pre-given conclusions, rather than follow where the evidence leads.

History is just as as bad, as AP History explicitly has themes that give the answer to each question. The historical facts are secondary to large-scale themes that the curriculum has identified. As an example, one of the themes is the West colonizing the rest of the world in a search for raw resources. The correct answer to why Cook traveled to the Pacific is thus that he was looking for resources for England, not scientific exploration, despite the transit of Venus being the stated reason for the trip.

I would call the ones I met noticeably capable, well-adjusted, balanced people when compared to the median individual: smart, knowledgeable, conscientious, well-connected, well-off, and ambitious, the sort of people who stand out in any group they're in as being the ones who get things done.

They are smarter than they average person, but they are a lot worse than they used to be.

I, and probably most other upvoters, would love to see more details or mini-stories about the things you've described here, or other things you've noticed from the inside.

And questions like - Has student quality decline been pronounced in some subgroups (race or not) while not in others, or is it universal? I've also noticed the growth of cheating, any ideas on the causes?

This would explain my high school GPA.

Good to know I'm not the only one.

Honestly I’ve often been in favor of a more classical approach to education where students are expected to learn logically and to read whole books and write essays about topics. Modern education doesn’t do that. Every question or problem has a set answer and requires nothing outside of the lesson in question to solve.

I think just as an example, in history, I’d ask students to write about counter factual versions of the events in question. How does history look different if Rome had adopted Mithraism instead of Christianity? How does history look different if the French or American Revolutions fail? Or in mathematics you can have students try to use Fermi’s method to come to a guess about how many people in Ireland have green eyes or something silly. The point would be to teach people to think and reason to a conclusion that they then must justify logically.

I'm undecided about this. It would be difficult to know how this would play out long-term in a large, complex and technologically advanced modern society.

I don't 'necessarily' have a problem with aspects of the Prussian educational system. In 2023, you 'have' established canons of knowledge across disciplines which need to be inculcated in people. The last thing you want to do to a child, is take simple concepts like 2+2=4 and confuse the hell out of them by asking them to get philosophically creative and ask if 2+2 'really' equals 4; and get tripped up on basic terminology, like two friends high on peyote around a campfire, staring at the stars. In fact that 'creative' aspect is essentially why I struggled so much in school. I'm 'very' much an individual that reasons backwards, from the answer/conclusion to the logic that got you there. The 'creative', 'explore around' method of education left me confused as hell and at odds with my intuitive and focused tendency to think about things. I understood things easiest in chronological sequence, from A to B to C to D.

If you look at Singapore for instance, it's lack of natural resources and geography lend it's very survival to making itself economically relevant to the outside world. They don't have room for a classical education. The consequences are much more severe for departing from the State driven mandate and focus on STEM. They have to make themselves technically and technologically relevant to the rest of the world, simply to survive. A classical education won't work there IMO. And it has increasingly diminished returns in modern society. I say this as a huge lover of the humanities, unfortunately.

The problem I have with the Prussian model is that it’s pretty much a failure at teaching people how to approach problems and solve them without having to be hand held. If anything, I think it actually teaches people not to think.

In a typical Prussian school, the students sit at desks while the teacher lectures on some subject. They’re then given worksheets on the specific material to drill the exact thing the lecture covered. These worksheets have no problems that reference anything outside the lesson given, and only very rarely ask for application of the material or anything going above and beyond, or requiring the students to reason from facts given to a logical conclusion.

Science and math classes are taught much the same way. The students have “lab” classes, but even up to senior in high school (or possibly non-majors science courses in college) nothing done could be called an experiment— they’re at best demonstrations of something already covered in class and of course you have to get the right results. So students graduate with really weird ideas of how science works — mistakenly believing that science is a set of knowledge something like psychics belief in Akashic Records. The science exists and people in lab coats know The Science and so on. Except that science is a process of trying to figure things out, it’s discovered by seeing something and trying to prove yourself wrong on that front. Mathematics is a system for describing the universe and a tool for figuring things out. Most people don’t understand that because the Prussian system isn’t interested in having kids do experiments.

What classical education does, is teach, in every subject is how to think. How to take apart a text and understand it, how to think and argue logically, how to ask questions and find answers to them. They learn how to seek truth rather than simply waiting for the authorities to hand it to them. And I think, especially with AGI teed up within the next 20 years, the future belongs to people who can think, invent, and lead, and those who only learn to repeat the same things their teacher told them are correct answers will be lost in a world where the only jobs humans are doing are original creative thinking jobs. They haven’t been taught to do that, and learning later is very difficult.

I think the exact subject matter should be brought up to date for the twenty first century, but the method works and has produced the greatest thinkers of the last several centuries.

In related news, Florida is now accepting an alternative to the SAT designed to favor students with a classical education background, I believe.

See also: most of the AP curricula.

Probably not technically true for the harder sciences, since there’s not many ways to set up a free-body problem. But the history essay rubrics look like more formal versions of what you’re describing.

Overall, the problem is that school is serving as a daycare and indoctrination. So the mandatory parts can’t be too comprehensive. It’s fulfilling far too many purposes.

I think just as an example, in history, I’d ask students to write about counter factual versions of the events in question. How does history look different if Rome had adopted Mithraism instead of Christianity? How does history look different if the French or American Revolutions fail?

This isn't a history exercise, it's a creative fiction exercise and treating it like a history exercise does nothing but instill false confidence in students about their ability to reason about situations with far too many unknowns

Of course it’s a history exercise; building a credible case for a counterfactual relies on deep knowledge of pre-existing context and trends. You cannot explain how Rome would differ without understanding how Rome was and how Rome did change.

A counterfactual without utilizing the factual would be shoddy work.

There is no such thing as a credible case for the questions you posed. There are cases that superficially sound credible but actually make too many assumptions. In my opinion such a case is actually worse than just saying "I don't know".

The best political analysts of our time struggle to predict the economic impacts of a single peice of legislation a few years out with any decent accuracy. So when you ask a mere student to predict something orders of magnitude more difficult like the impacts of a grand change on a distant civilization that spanned centuries, you are only testing their ability to tell a story, not to get at the truth.

The only thing an avowed rationalist would say to such a question is "I don't know and neither do you"

This is exactly the goal of the exercise. And it wouldn’t be an everyday thing either. Most of the subjects would be taught in order to get those deeper understandings, studying the culture and history and personalities, learning the dates and geography and so on.

Although, it’s always been my contention that having the facts, theories, and procedures memorized is a big part of proper reasoning. If you know the names of great figures, their peers and rivals, what they did, and what the issues of the day were, understanding why things ended up as they did and how else things could have gone.

The quality of graduates from the top schools has fallen precipitously over the last 30 years. This shows in two ways. Firstly, while in college, students are less interested in the material, ask less questions, interact with their TAs and professors less, and generally are more like consumers than people engaged in discovery. The quality of exam answers increased up until about 2010, but the quality of in-person engagement decreased notably. Students who are selected for doing well on exams do well on exams, but somehow, they are less interested, and significantly less interesting. Cheating has gone from being almost unheard of, save for very marginal students who were desperate to pass, to commonplace, and now to almost universal. I have seen students speak at graduation who did not do a single problem set of their own.

I think this coincides with the neoliberal push in education, but the cracks in the foundation were already there much earlier. I think captivating a child's attention in grade school was always going to be an issue. They're much more interested in exploring and imagining than being forced into a chair ala the Prussia model of education. As a person who paid his way through college, cheating looks like an attractive option if you're falling behind; considering the financial investment you put into your classes. Someone's 'always' had to pay for it at the end of the day, but I think the financialization of the university system continues to contribute a crucial piece of the problem.

Once these kids hit the workplace, they are strikingly lost.

This was me, also. Maybe I took for granted so much the fact that I could coherently speak English, that I could turn around after graduation and say it felt like I didn't learn anything. But I didn't feel like I was prepared for life in any way. When I asked myself "what next?," I had no idea how to answer it or where to go. I think a 'practical' education solves this problem where an 'academic' education barely makes any attempt to address it. Maybe that's part of the reason for higher education's insistence on extracurriculars and their interest in your time spent outside of the classroom. I did do pretty well (though not exceptional) in the former but not the latter. It's still difficult for me to tell if I'm a successful product of the contemporary American educational system or not. I'm not exactly where I would like to be in life, but I'm not really complaining either. I think the lack of social and economic mobility in the job market and other socioeconomic ladders are to blame, from a policy standpoint more than my education was.

As someone attuned to the system, what’s the solution, then?

Once these kids hit the workplace, they are strikingly lost. They understand how to do a set task, so long as it is phrased like a problem they would be posed in school, but beyond this, they find independent work very challenging. They tend not to be comfortable having opinions of their own. When asked to do analytical work, they tend to write in a polemical style. They will present all the information that supports a thesis, but do not understand the importance of covering the facts and evidence that points the other way.

William Deresiewicz does some pretty good observations on this in Excellent Sheep.

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