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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   26657 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 22, 2024

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Education is like a religion for Democrats sometimes. Even though almost everyone in the West now has a machine capable of streaming much of the world's knowledge to them in an instant, they act as if it is the 19th century and public schooling is necessary to save masses of illiterate farm kids who live tens of miles away from the nearest library from ignorance.

Probably the biggest actual effect that public education has on society these days is not that it educates. It is that it emancipates the work force from child raising, keeps kids off the street when they are at a rambunctious age, and teaches kids how to sit still and take orders from boring authority figures. It also occasionally helps some kids to escape abusive relatives. Public education also helps Democrats because it gives them a way to funnel kids through a system where they have disproportionate influence.

However, I think that for the most part Democrats' attitude to education does not primarily have to do with any of these factors. They seem to, for the most part, actually believe in the rosy views of public education and its didactic benefits that they espouse.

Of course. Education as a public good is…like, part of our national mythos. Didn’t you watch Schoolhouse Rock as a kid?

Some of this is a legacy of our early years, which were unusually literate, usually for Puritan reasons. That was propagated through the Laura Ingalls Wilder tradition and on to modern children’s literature. There’s also the influence of Prussian and British schooling. And all this is before the modern Civil Rights movement, which was defined by educational policy.

What I’m getting at is that it ain’t just Democrats. No Child Left Behind was passed in 2002. Before that, students were the first line in the War on Drugs. The GI bill has shaped American families since WWII. Prior to 2020, antivaxxers were best known for bringing back measles in the public school system. A significant fraction of the middle class will choose their home to get a better-rated school district.

Education is one of the legs of the stereotypical American Dream. Is it any surprise that the major political parties act accordingly?

It's the same in most of the west though. In fact, if anything the US is more laissez-faire than many other western countries in respect to education - homeschooling is literally illegal in mine, for example.

Public education also helps Democrats because it gives them a way to funnel kids through a system where they have disproportionate influence.

I don’t think this is the main benefit to democrats from the public school system. Notably democrats don’t seem to think they’re very good at indoctrinating the youths through it even if they were trying.

Instead I think it’s that it’s a form of employment- and typically one of the bigger employers in any given area- which influences its employees to vote democrat. The other option for most teachers is probably ‘be a housewife’ after all, and housewives vote pretty Republican. Likewise I have a hard time believing that school janitors, bus drivers, cafeteria workers, etc don’t vote much more democrat than their private sector counterparts. I think it also goes beyond just voting; teachers unions and small dollar campaign contributions from teachers are key sources of contributions for democrats.

Instead I think it’s that it’s a form of employment- and typically one of the bigger employers in any given area- which influences its employees to vote democrat.

There's another form of employment that has basically no accountability for results. It's called "welfare".

People on welfare tend to vote for parties that promise more welfare (expanding the education system and increasing administrative burden on companies being the two most common ways), and their interests follow naturally downstream from there (even though a good chunk of people- welfare recipients or not- don't realize that).

I don't think there's anything more complex than that going on, but it's also why you can't meaningfully reform these systems- if you went back to 1950s standards in these areas, you'd both cut welfare benefits off from a massive number of women and incinerate the 4-8 years of their lives they spent getting a useless degree certified to receive that welfare. The sociopolitical ramifications of this would be interesting, to say the least; the last time the economy contracted that hard it forced the New Deal.

Notably democrats don’t seem to think they’re very good at indoctrinating the youths through it even if they were trying.

D+30 for young women, and an even split for young men? It's only the men the teachers need to worry about indoctrinating into the "you're trash and deserve this" philosophy (and they're clearly doing that quite well, aided by parents who grew up in a milieu of "the sexes are co-operating" and try to enforce it blindly)- for the women, cashing the checks is good enough.

What are you on about?

If you’re determined to be a cynic, welfare is the bread and circuses required to stave off revolt. How does that describe education?

A more sympathetic description might be that welfare adds slack to the economy, allowing employees to take more risks without getting relegated to the debtors’ gaol (or revolting). It’s a hedge. This is also not a good description of public education.

Are you trying to argue that welfare recipients are drawing money from “ expanding the education system and increasing administrative burden on companies”? What does that mean?

welfare is the bread and circuses required to stave off revolt

My assertion is that "bread and circuses" comes in the form of government creating [the need for] bullshit jobs for people who won't tolerate not having a job. We could make education vastly more efficient, and we could take away the degree pipeline for people whose jobs won't require them, and we could demolish most of the regulations that mean companies have to retain certain kinds of employees, and we could dismantle a good chunk of the administrative state.

But we won't do that. And the reason we won't do that is because the people in these positions are a significant (and politically powerful) fraction of the population who won't accept having "no place" in the economy, and they won't accept being consigned to a basic income that pays the underclass the same as them (or dependent on homemaking for an [indirect] income)- they're capable of doing more damage in a revolt, so governments obviously have to pay them more to make them not do that (which, come to think of it, is a major problem with UBI that I've never heard anyone discuss before).

Are you trying to argue that welfare recipients are drawing money from “ expanding the education system and increasing administrative burden on companies”?

I'm arguing that the people who work in those fields are, to a significant degree, themselves welfare recipients, and thus "the people who work in the education-managerial complex and support increasing the size of the education system and mandating companies increase the number of management jobs" is equivalent to "welfare recipient voting for more welfare", even though said welfare recipient might not fully recognize it as such (because the system is laundered through the guise of employment).

Even though almost everyone in the West now has a machine capable of streaming much of the world's knowledge to them in an instant, they act as if it is the 19th century and public schooling is necessary to save masses of illiterate farm kids who live tens of miles away from the nearest library from ignorance.

How many kids do you think would teach themselves math via the internet? Or how to read?

If you want to argue that there's a more efficient and/or effective method of delivering universal education than the status quo, I'm quite willing to believe that. I do not find it plausible that internet-based autodidacticism is one of them.

IIRC the usual result of "unschooling" (where no curriculum is imposed) is being about two years behind through most of primary/secondary school; kids actually are pretty curious. Not 100% sure about how reading fits in, though.

Unless my memory fails me, unschooling is, despite the name, a form of homeschooling; the children have more control over subject matter, but it still assumes there's someone taking responsibility for teaching them (including necessarily ancillary skills).

Unless my memory fails me, unschooling is, despite the name, a form of homeschooling; the children have more control over subject matter, but it still assumes there's someone taking responsibility for teaching them (including necessarily ancillary skills).

It's variable per household, naturally. I've met 'unschoolers' who range from what looks to me like pretty normal homeschooling (though very sensitive to ROI on time spent) to parents who literally just let their kids do whatever they want and don't pressure them into anything they're not 'ready' for. I've met kids who are reading at college level by age 10 and I've met kids who aren't functionally literate at age 15.

Arguments for and against homeschooling resolve, I think, into fully general arguments about to what degree parents should be able to raise their own children as they see fit.

Arguments for and against homeschooling resolve, I think, into fully general arguments about to what degree parents should be able to raise their own children as they see fit.

I don't really think that's true except in the vaguest sense. An argument about the effectiveness of homeschooling could theoretically be deflected by saying "it's my prerogative to not educated my children*", but very few homeschooling advocates are making that argument as opposed to arguing that homeschooling leads to superior outcomes. Arguments about outcomes in turn focus on the validity and interpretation of data.

*FWIW, existing laws on homeschooling suggest the existing consensus is "no, it isn't". Arguments about parental rights vs child's interests tend to turn on conclusions about outcomes rather than vice versa.

(I will also note that my point about unschooling was not whether or not it was good or bad relative to public schooling but that it was certainly not equivalent to handing a child a tablet with internet access and telling them to figure it out themselves; homeschooled children are usually more closely instructed than their traditional classroom peers)

Arguments for and against homeschooling resolve, I think, into fully general arguments about to what degree parents should be able to raise their own children as they see fit.

Once the delusional or factually incorrect claims about the practice are excluded from conversation they do, but plenty of arguments against homeschooling are based on ‘it delivers worse results’ or ‘it somehow takes money from public schools’.

Robin Hanson on healthcare:

"What we want is health, i.e., a long healthy life, but when we sit down and draw up a contract, what we buy is health care, i.e., a certain degree of attention from health care specialists."

Education is the same way. The more human time and attention is dedicated to education (i.e. how much it costs), the more you signal that you care about educating children. The thing has been replaced by the symbolic representation of the thing. We would be in much less of a student debt crisis if middle-class women didn't have to get (subsidized) 4-year degrees in order to get childcare jobs at the government-run daycare.

Many don't stop at 4 years. They'll go back to get a masters or something terminal.

This is a policy choice. There is no law of the universe that says you have to pay childcare technicians teachers more if they have a master's degree.

It's their culture. They're indoctrinated early.

We would be in much less of a student debt crisis if middle-class women didn't have to get (subsidized) 4-year degrees in order to get childcare jobs at the government-run daycare.

First off, I am in no way arguing that being a kindergarten teacher requires a masters degree. I can think of a half dozen 16 year olds off the top of my head who could shadow an elementary school teacher for a week and do fine taking over.

But expanding that system to the general population would be a disaster because of lots of reasons(mostly that there is no bureaucracy-legible way to find those people), and I somehow doubt women who want to become teachers would stop going to college to save money if that was an option.

In the first place, teachers are mostly teachers- or should I say they become teachers- because they believe in the education system and the benefits of formal education. But furthermore, the option to get a four year teaching degree for significantly cheaper than a traditional four year degree already exists. Everyone who wants to can go to community college and save like $20k a year for at least two years; in my state it’s three years in practice because community college credits universally transfer to state schools. Actually, speaking of Texas, there’s a program to do remote learning from a low-performing state school while enrolled in community college and get your teaching certificate entirely through community college for much cheaper. You know who uses it? Women that want to be housewives but need to kill time until their boyfriends get more established. Career teachers choose to go straight to university in the presence of cheaper alternatives that don’t hurt your career because government hiring isn’t allowed to care about the institution granting a diploma.

And realistically, what’s the alternative to a degree requirement for teachers specifically? It’s a good proxy for ‘values education enough to plausibly care about the job’ ‘smart and functional enough to do the job’ and ‘cooperative with the giant all-consuming bureaucracy that governs every aspect of the job’. No other proxy seems legible enough to the bureaucracies that run the public school system.

And realistically, what’s the alternative to a degree requirement for teachers specifically?

What if they did an apprenticeship, like a blacksmith in the old days? Watch a good teacher teaching, talk with them about how they do things (maybe do this with a few people to even things out), hands on learning, then be supervised for teaching easy classes, then go and teach with supervision... then you're a teacher! Add some basic maths, logic, English and science tests to make sure they're not stupid and you're good to go.

I say this because education degrees don't necessarily teach people how to teach. In Australia education degrees often get below-average students and they don't teach classroom management as opposed to progressive ideology.

The bureaucracies aren't doing a good job, they're part of the problem. All this useless admin that eats up time and money. It's a problem in healthcare and a problem in education, spending and admin multiplies while results are stagnant. Privatize, charterize, get rid of the bureaucracy.

See figure 3 and figure 4: https://www.cato.org/publications/k-12-education

They do this, it's called student teaching.

Some states do let people start teaching before earning their degree, and some do allow the degree to be from a much cheaper community college. My daughter's pre-K teacher just sent a letter home about this, asking to include activities with the kids in her (regional college) coursework. I am unworried, it is pre-K, I can teach her to read and count myself if it comes to that.

Anyway, it's true, but not any more true than for at least half of jobs currently requiring a college degree. An admin assistant doesn't really need to study... whatever it is that the median low level administrator studied in college, yet here we are.

Anyway, it's true, but not any more true than for at least half of jobs currently requiring a college degree.

yeschad.png A system of apprenticeships is a great way to cut down on degree inflation and to ensure that the skills people learn are actually applicable.

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