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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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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 The thing has been replaced by the symbolic representation of the thing.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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