Most Education Is Wasteful and Immoral (opens in new tab)

I get the feeling this guy isn't an educator or a parent.

"Shorter school day: School days should be cut drastically. If parents need babysitting, let students play games together or hang out and pursue their interests under adult supervision."

Big clue that he isn't a parent at least - like it or not, we depend on school to allow both parents to work. Allowing children to "play games together" under adult supervision. Which adults? Perhaps working professionals that have devoted themselves to the well-being of children, despite shit pay and being subject to ever changing priorities and non sense ideas like this article.

Another, less written about, issue with education is: overschooling.

All of these artificial thoughts and ideas are drilled into students heads; they spend something around 18-22 (in some cases 30+) years of their life living in a bubble unrepresentative of the real world; told to believe (and made to believe) things that are utterly irreconcilable with the "real world"; after which they are thrown out into the "real world" and told to "figure it out."

Overschooled, unprepared, unfulfilled. Instead of being given the tools and access to resources that would allow each "student" to make use of them only as necessary to achieve their goals -- they're all forced into mastering a set of tools that are almost always ill-suited for the individual pupil.

And after all this... living in a relatively sheltered, structured, naive existence: they've built up beliefs and mindsets that are quickly proven to be irreconcilable with the world -- and this identity and world view quickly beaten out of them by the "real world." Instead of being raised in the "real world," and been allowed to stumble about and learn to grow into it, and find their place in their formative, and most adaptive years: they're stuck in a false world for over 2 decades -- and unceremoniously dumped into the "real world" without the tools needed to navigate it. Sort of like living a privileged life since birth, and then by chance having it all whisked away and turned destitute.

Is it any surprise seldom few are satisfied with life? Utter barbarism.

I have a ton of critical things to say about the state of American education, evidentiary standards in teaching things like reading, and compulsory schooling but the arguments in this article are so muddled I don't know where to start.

But to begin:

>The need for memorization of historical facts, spelling rules, multiplication tables, arithmetic operations such as long division, basic scientific facts, and a whole host of other pieces of information is seriously undermined by the widespread ownership of smartphones among young adults.

This is an unbelievably stupid argument. First it misses that vocabulary, cultural context, and a sort of mental schema are all essential for reading comprehension. Moreover how the fuck are you supposed to know what to google for if you don't possess some baseline of facts and general knowledge?

> "Unschooling: Allow more freedom for students to pursue their academic interests with less guidance."

This, big point here. I started programming by firing up Visual Basic Express 2010 on a laptop running Windows XP with 1GB of RAM and a single-core Pentium M. I was 9 years old, and it was so interesting. I was blessed to be homeschooled - I would never have branched out the way I have if I had spent my days overloaded with homework. (I also entered college at 16 straight into Calculus I, so... my education was certainly not neglected either). Call it a sample size of 1.

The writer assumes that we the audience would find it ridiculous to make adult learning compulsory, but much to their disappointment, I err more towards that than getting rid of childhood education and … giving kids the… right to work?

You wouldn’t even need to make adult learning compulsory. Use all of the nobel prize winning knowledge we have on nudging to normalize the idea that it wouldn’t be all that bad to go and take a class at community college every so often. It could be a remedial class, it could be something totally new. Its affordable, if you dont qualify for a pell loan (right, this is in the United States), and classes are available until 8 or 9 pm and on weekend on most campuses.

Maybe from there people would find the will to go to the library every so often to fulfill their own curious itch whether with books on a subject or by using the online material available.

As far as my own curious itches, my 3 year old gas range went out recently, and of course GE makes as minimal of information available on how to repair it. The display and all electronic function (the spark mechanism, most importantly) went out, so I started watching a number of videos related to electronics repair on YouTube. I did pretty badly in physics in high school, and while I can build a pc, electrical wiring and circuits have been a sort of voodoo to me, and I promised myself that eventually I’d sit down and learn it. I’ve watched multiple videos on what voltages are, how transistors, relays, resistors and capacitors work, and how to solder, reflow bgas and at least diagnose gpus and motherboards. The last couple of weeks.

I opened up the back panel, found a relay on the mainboard was blown, and the quick disconnect on a wire connecting to that relay was black and covered with plastic. Because ge has seemingly discontinued the wiring harness, i have to order some new wire (18awg with a 600v and 150 degree rating) and splice that between the old wire that has no slack and a new circuit board using a wago junction (which I just learned about and ordered last night. Got a crimping tool, waiting on a auto wire stripper that hopefully won’t consistently pull strands of wires off when unsleeving said wires. I watched some videos about wiring houses last night and kinda wonder if I could service the outlets here at home.

Really, writing this makes me think of the part of Bowling for Columbine where the creators of southpark explain why kids would get so angry to shootup a school. We really should try and move away from the “you couldnt pass this one arbitrary test of rote memorization so that means you will be stupid and incapable forever” to something much more forgiving where you at least go to school to be exposed to an idea and if you don’t do great on a test you can come back and revisit it another time when a contextual switch flips.

I don't think getting rid of education is a good idea. The current American system is not working but that's mainly because it is a government run monopoly that is largely controlled by very powerful teachers unions that place the interests of their members above the interests of kids and because it is directly subject to political interference from activists on both left and right via school boards and state governments. Schools that primarily serve the urban poor tend to be especially problematic because they are notorious for failing to educate at all and for allowing some of the kids to create a dangerous environment for themselves and others. The failure of the current education system to educate the urban poor to even a minimally adequate level is likely the primary root cause of the sky high crime rates in American cities and of racial inequality in America. And you can't just ignore the root causes of crime and throw all the criminals in jail. We tried the "ignore the root causes of crime and just lock them all up" approach in the 90s and 00s and it didn't work. Abolishing education would just spread our pandemic of urban crime to the suburbs and rural America.

There's an additional problem in that schooling inherently doesn't work very well for kids who are higher on the IQ scale who benefit more from being self-directed or from having a tutor who can bring out their full potential. But the schooling model works fairly well for educating kids within +/- 2 standard deviations or so of average IQ. Those who are on the low extreme of the IQ scale have a different set of special needs that revolves more around vocational training and life skills and my understanding is that the system generally handles this much better than it used to.

Hence the best way to fix education is through a universal vouchers program that doesn't discriminate against any type of schooling (i.e. including homeschooling and religious private schools). By depoliticizing curriculum, this eliminates the ability of left wing parents to take God out of schools (where religion is wanted by parents) and the ability of right wing parents to take what they call CRT out of schools (where it is wanted by parents).

I do think that memorizing facts "that you can just look up on Google" is a critical skill even though it is increasingly out of style these days. This is critically important because somebody who knows nothing is incapable of engaging in independent thought and will simply adopt somebody else's thoughts as if they were facts. When adults don't understand our constitutional system, they are unable to objectively evaluate the statements of politicians or competently serve on a jury.

The thing that legitimately needs to be nuked from the educational system is the "group project" where 1 student does all the work and the rest take credit. This is dysfunctional, everybody knows it is dysfunctional and it is likely only present in the education system because corporations that are too big to be functional want it there to train future workers in how to work in that dysfunctional manner. In general, I don't think the education system should care about what the needs of corporations are as it is the job of corporations to train their own employees.

For gifted education, I believe that the best approach is the traditional one of heavy immersion in the Classics including study of Latin, Ancient Greek and maybe Hebrew. This is the way the founders and our greatest presidents were generally educated and the modern style of education has produced the disastrously bad presidents we've had in recent years. I think that alone is enough to make a strong case for classical education.

I think what I believe is best in education would be competitive in the market if there was a genuine choice because alumni of such schools would be so clearly better educated than alumni of blue tribe schools or red tribe schools that such politicized schools would quickly be outcompeted if they couldn't be imposed upon all via the political system. I don't want politicians deciding what is taught in schools, how schools are run or even whether schools can have books in them.