It's difficult to feel optimistic about a society that thinks this way, much less has a cultural and economic elite that is seemingly emboldened to think this way. "Average" people are the norm, the reality that "not average" people will have to deal with for the rest of their lives.
Learning how to co-exist with people who aren't like you is a universally valuable experience, especially for people who would fashion themselves as "not average."
Why? Being in tech doesn't make you a hacker. Most people, even very talented engineers, are still happy to follow boss, do a 9 to 5, and don't really bend or break the rules... they don't go against the elite. They see themselves as the elite.
Agreed. "Tech" includes a lot of people who are not hackers.
It's worth pointing out though that the "hacker" types who go with the flow are in many cases doing so motivated by pragmatism and cynicism. They don't really believe in management or in the company or the product, but they gotta stick around until their shares vest or whatever.
Speaking for a friend.
This is exactly what I’m referring to when I tell people that the tech industry changed and is no longer fulfilling.
These are not the only two options. Deciding some people are "the elite" and defining people as being either part of that group or in opposition to it is your choice, but it is not the only choice.
The issue is that some liberal schools of thought are pushing towards detracking in hopes of reducing inequality in a Harrison Bergeron sort of way. So public schools are not offering those advanced courses. E.g. California was going to remove 8th grade Algebra as an option, but thankfully there was enough backlash to stop this.
"I thought you guys usually have a bunch of olympiad medalists though; don't students care about academics at your school?"
"No, there's only really 10–15 of us who try, and hold up the rest of the school's reputation."
"Whims of the state" -- I'd recommend you make sure to advocate for a strong department of education, which for its many activities is a facilitator of credentialing. It's fundamentally societal and operated politically and bureaucratically.
'"modern" moral standard" -- I agree, we should target humanist ideals only as they are sourced from naturalism, otherwise we have neomodern or otherwise misaligned religious tenets creep in as "values" when they're really misplaced. Some folks advocating pro-religious values in schooling are quite insidious -- using religious freedom (where people have a right to practice in their homes and even the public square) as an injection to favor their religion as the majority in an area, to the exclusion of people who do not believe as they do. It's quite sad to see the Constitution, written fundamentally by Deists who were motivated more by motives closer to religious existentialism than current triumphalism, be run so roughshod over!
If you meant something else by modern moral standard, my apologies, I simply see this common thought-terminating cliche in a lot of places and it falls apart with 2 seconds of introspection.
150 years ago, the average person was illiterate, poorer (in all senses of the word) and less connected to the world around them. Over a 100 year old grind, schooling fixed all that. Why can't it keep going? So the outlier, super special "phenom" today is the median of tomorrow.
Not true in the case of the US, which famously adopted a culture of universal literacy earlier than the rest of the world. By the mid-19th century, literacy rates among whites were not much different than they are today. It is one of the bright spots of American history; they took literacy very seriously for complicated historical reasons. Their book consumption per capita was also the highest in the world by a very large margin back in those days, which lends evidence.
It may or may not be relevant to your point, but at least in the US the idea that the average person was illiterate is ahistorical. They were the best read population in the world 150 years ago, and took some pride in that.
> By 1875, the U.S. literacy rate was approximately 80 percent.
> By 1900, the situation had improved somewhat, but 44% of black people remained illiterate.
> The gap in illiteracy between white and black adults continued to narrow through the 20th century, and in 1979, the rates were approximately equal.But the states does have among the lowest literacy rate in the west. Less than 80% was considered literate in 2024, compared to almost 99% in the EU (with a range from 94% to almost 100%).
Sounds like Americans were literate back then. I also suspect that most were _more_ connected to the world around them. Not the broader world, but the immediate world around them.
> literacy rates among whites were not much different than they are today. It is one of the bright spots of American history;
The rates only looked okay if you cut out at least 20% of thr population?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_racial_and_ethnic...
Yeah, it was okay in New England but many states had laws preventing slave education.
Schooling didn’t fix all that. There have been major advances throughout society in every area: medicine, nutrition, sanitation, manufacturing, electricity, refrigeration, printing, computing, telecommunications… the list goes on and on and on. Some of these things contributed major improvements to the average person.
Advances in medicine and nutrition, for example, contributed to sharp declines in early childhood mortality and morbidity. Advances in reproductive health care (along with everything else) led to huge declines in birth rates. Smaller families have more resources and attention available for each child.
Other advances had less of an impact but still add up when combined. Widespread access to refrigeration improved nutrition and reduced spoilage, allowing increased consumption of meat. More meat means taller, stronger, healthier children.
On the other hand, schooling hasn’t improved all that much in 150 years. You can find lots of writing samples and old exams for schools from back then. The bigger difference is that children stay in school much longer and have less need to rapidly enter the workforce in order to support the family. This last factor is a product of many of the advances listed above.
You might say that's also a success of the schooling (and higher education) system - unless the people who produced these advances were all home schooled, which I somehow doubt...
Children are required to be there. The school has to provide them with all manner of opportunities.
On the flip side, the school can't expect anything from the kids other than attendance. They don't really get to expect a certain level of behavior or performance. They can't relegate the bad actors (behavior or performance) away from those who wish to participate fully. Everyone has to be mixed together.
So you give a certain vocal minority that don't care about the education a heckler's veto. They are regularly disruptive and can't be removed.
Nobody has a solution for actually improving that group of student, but there are enough people involved in public education that demand these students be included in the process that they are trying to wreck.
> schooling fixed all that
Not globalization, industrialization, and urbanization?
Illiterate, yes, but likely better at other skills like milking cows and knowing which plants in the forest were edible. Less connected to the global world and culture, yes, but more connected to the hyper local environment around them. I don't know if the schooling "fixed" anything, it just created a new, national or global template for what a human being should be like.
In what way do you mean this?
Schooling has fixed all that, and still works just fine. Just not in America, because that country is rapidly self-destructing. Schooling is still working fine in the rest of the world.
Because an educated populace is harder for the ultrarich to control and abuse, because an educated populace with free time can revolt against those in power, and because as a consequence of those two things ultrarich conservatives have consolidated ownership of media and used it to defund education and convince the population that funding education is bad.
This is the bottom line; this right here.
We're being led to a second dark age ON PURPOSE.
Plus, an "educated" populace is as easy or maybe even easier to control, it's willpower against all odds that characterizes the truly ungovernable.
However I'm curious as to why you attribute or limit this to 'conservatives' only. Is this really something exclusive or characteristic of the conservative side? At least where I am from it's the left that's more interventionist in regards to education rather than the right, that interventionism being used to make education more rigid and controlled by a biased government.
And the media is definitely not consolidated, you've got clearly two sides competing at a pretty equal level.
A billion times this. School is not to train you on Math, English or Science. It's also to teach you how to cooperate, how to reach consensus, how to make decisions as a group, and so on.
These soft skills are absolutely critical to maintain a properly functioning society.
Now, such organizations are banned. The closest analogue is a "student" council, run by an adult, that might get to choose the color of the wallpaper at prom.
Cooperation requires shared goals. I can't cooperate with someone when we're not sharing goals. Young students don't have shared goals other than "survive in this classroom for 11 months out of a calendar year". So there's no lessons in cooperation.
>how to reach consensus,
Of what use is consensus, without shared goals? Sounds more like indoctrination.
>how to make decisions as a group,
Same as above.
>These soft skills are absolutely critical to maintain a properly functioning society.
These skills are actually being used to murder civilization/society, even as we speak. The current fertility rate is sub-replacement, but the children being indoctrinated in public schools are being indoctrinated to be even less fertile than that. Many will grow up to be and remain childless as adults, and as that happens, society will not replace those people who are dying of old age. Society then dies itself just decades later. Your society, such as it is, is absurdly dysfunctional. I suppose if one were to define "properly functioning" as "polite to a fault" or "as peaceful as cattle trudging down the slaughterhouse chute"...
They risk being able to function better in highly controlled environments with other kids that share the same background as them. Not optimal.
Sure, there is selection bias among those who get that far in math, and those who would seek out tutoring. But I had 9th graders coming to me already behaving well as adults. More often than not they were in charge of working things out with me, not their parents.
Every time one of these threads comes up I cringe, because virtually nobody here has worked with a large number of these kids. They just remember the one weird kid who stood out. If homeschoolers were to put forth the same arguments based on the one weird kid from public school, homeschooling would win by a landslide.
People say it's about socialization, but homeschoolers are out there doing it in a normal way all the time. Parent needs to go to the post office -- there is a class on that, and why. Everything can turn into a lesson and not just something taken care of by parents. They come out of this experience with far more adult level socialization and civic knowledge than the average kid, by a wide margin.
Who are kids in high school getting their social queues from? The drug dealers? The bully? The good kids in high school are typically well adjusted because of things taught to them not by their peers, but by their family and community outside of school.
Yes, homeschooling can be done poorly. But it is not inherently a poor education, and in my experience is far superior to the average experience at a public school. Some exceptions apply for those things which a large school may be able to have by aggregating sufficient students and resources toward (marching band, science classes, AP level courses).
If those people have worse habits, are less motivated, less educated, less cultured, what is there to gain from it?
Seems like there's only something to lose from adjusting to their shittiness. Like Harrison Bergeron
And seeing the state of California trying to push math classes later because of "equity", seeing public schools dissolving gifted programs, it makes me think that privatization is the only way forward instead of trying to make amends with the current progressive stupidity
This is prejudice in the most basic sense: you literally don't know any of these things about the people you're surrounded by in a society. The person who rides the bus next to you could be a couch potato, or a talented artist, or something entirely different that simply isn't legible to you.
I don't know anything about California's math classes. I'm saying that, on a basic level, anybody who thinks this way about people they don't know is demonstrating the exact traits they're smugly claiming to be above.
Reading your comment, it seems to focus on the individual. “The person” you know nothing about.
The parent comment seems to be Bayesian, the probability of “the person” being something.
I do think it’s possible to simultaneously believe that:
* every single person you meet in every possible circumstance might be an exceptional human
* your are more likely to encounter exceptional humans in specific circumstances and you can optimize for that
I believe this holds true regardless of your definition of exceptional.
A (maybe) obvious example: if you believe exceptional humans want to grow their own food and live on communes, you probably don’t want to live in the financial district of Manhattan. That would be a bad way to optimize for finding people who share your values.
Similarly you’re unlikely to find a thriving software developer community in Springfield Illinois. If you go to Springfield and assume everyone you meet can’t program, you’re going to be wrong - there are good programmers there. But if you want to live around people who know how to code, you don’t move to Springfield Illinois.
learning how to be patient and tolerant regarding situations / people / things i do not like or think of as “beneath me”.
tends to lead to better decision making as one can respond, rather than knee jerk react to everything.
edit — also, i tend to find i can learn a lot more useful lessons from beginners.
in the beginners mind there are a lot of possibilities. in the expert’s mind (especially self proclaimed ones) there are few possibilities.
children are a great example of this.
It's not all about you.
The appearance of humility^[0]? I don't really see what there is to gain either.
[0]: Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Section II, Paragraph 9
The average kid at the average school is at the 50th percentile. Moreover, the speed of the class isn't even the speed of the average kid because then the 40th and 20th percentile kids would get left behind. To get out of this you'd need a school with a gifted program and enough 90th percentile kids to fill it, and many of them don't have one.
Humility.
Becoming humble in front of people who suck is learning the wrong life lesson
> Learning how to co-exist with people who aren't like you is a universally valuable experience, especially for people who would fashion themselves as "not average."
Context is /everything/.
Dealing with "average" people as an adult means dealing with them under the boundaries, strictures, customs, and etiquette of adults in your society enforced, in some sense at least, by laws, and with people are are, at least in theory, bound to serve and protect who will come to your aid when those boundaries are broken.
Dealing with "average" people (really just the lowest quintile cause all the problems) for me in school resulted in multiple fractures, trips for stitches, and ultimately /my expulsion/ from one school district because I had the gall to hit back rather than just let some kid beat me to death while a teacher watched and did nothing.
I've been accused of all manner of things in other comment threads for my ardent desire to protect my children from what you think of as "average", and I'll happily take your words and savor them because it means my children will never be beaten, robbed, see a dead body at a bus stop on their way home for school, or any of the other horrible shit that happened to me because I had to be surrounded by the "average".
The entire point of my own economic mobility and gaining wealth was to create a better future for my children, and that /very much/ includes their education. You can take your exposure to the "average" a.k.a. unnecessary torture and shove it.
Your kids don't need to be exposed to the often violent whims of society's bottom quartile for 8 hours a day for more than a decade. It doesn't need to happen. It would be better if it did not. It is a net negative experience, whose main lesson is: avoid these people. That can be taught pretty quickly by a parent.
If a system is specifically set up against you, runs poorly, and in a real sense hates you, you have the option to let it fail without you. It is the polite, and least conflict path to leave it to its failure, and to forge your own way.
On the other hand, listening to people who tell you that you are unethical, guilty of an *ism of some kind, or bad, does not have a good track record of success. The path to hell is paved with good intentions. What you suggest is specifically not going to happen on my part.
It's an interesting perspective, but I'm afraid it fundamentally misunderstands the nature of real-world human societies and how they hold together over time -- advancing that perspective will inevitably result in society fragmenting into factions that are increasingly at odds with each other, and ultimately collapsing.
Societies are not monolithic entities unto themselves that people somehow owe loyalty to. They're emergent patterns of people -- often with disparate interests and values -- cooperating with each other in pursuit of mutual benefit. Forcing people to be locked into monopolistic social relations that no longer offer those benefits to them is a sure-fire way to destroy society.
We'll be much better off when education in our society is offered by a wide range of approaches that adapt in a bottom-up way to the full diversity of that society, an not dominated by a politicized monopoly that tries to shoehorn everyone into a conformist model that is optimal for no one in particular.
Maybe that's not how society thinks? That's one person's opinion.
Yet it's not worth the cost of a slowed curriculum.
Also, I don’t have to deal with average people, I have apps that do that for me.
Having said that, two things can be true, I can prefer not to be around average people and I can be concerned for their lack of flourishing as I do prefer to live in more egalitarian society, especially one that can have better averages.
no better place to see that than in tech and HN
if by “deal with” you mean serving them fries on their way to a ski trip, perhaps :)
That's so last century. Now about as real as Santa. Now you can only get wealthy by inheritance or gambling. Even if it means gambling with you health you still need to win for it to amount to anything. There's absolutely no way to earn wealth now. I'm not sure if there ever was.
Optimism is the default state of non-broken children.
Sober realism is what's needed and required from adults.
Time to graduate - we have enough optimistic children running around with scissors already :)
While true, it is true as like a side quest. Just because something is valuable doesn’t mean you should revolve your life around it.
What are you talking about?!
I'm a highly educated, "high class" (professional career) person, and I've been socially segregated from "average" people since high school (so, since I was 15). Literally primary school was the last time I ever interacted with "average" people in a meaningful way (beyond "hi, thanks" to the supermarket cashier/bank teller).
Society truly does segregate you by social class, and unless you truly seek different classes (which I don't really, I'm a geek so my interests are quite niche) you don't "normally" interact.
No wonder that "elitist" politicians are so removed from the "average" people (hint: Brexit, Trunmp). Thank god for Twitter, allowing to break social bubbles at least a little bit!
Nope. For some people it may be valuable. For me it was miserable, almost to the point of being deadly. It does not prepare you for adulthood or life or what have you in any meaningful sense (think about what would happen in your everyday life if someone e.g. decided you had insulted them somehow, and punched you. Think about how different your experience of that probably is to the average person. And then think about what that experience is like for a schoolkid). It's just a whole load of unnecessary suffering.
The people you hear giving up today have tried to fix the system. It's a little insulting to insinuate otherwise. When I was in high school, I tried to start a CS club, but no one was interested. I helped run MATHCOUNTS at the local middle school, and we had five people show up on a good day (<1% of the student body). Most students don't care anymore, and why should they when you have to fight the school to take AP Biology as a freshman? Gifted programs are being eliminated in the name of equity, and common core standards are lower than they ever have been. A friend who immigrated in seventh grade said America's seventh grade math classes are years behind China's (and she went to a better school than me). How do you get years behind in seven years?!
I don't think it is possible to fix the education system. The student body has adopted an anti-learning culture, administrators are lowering standards to raise their metrics, and most teachers would be wholly unfit for an ideal classroom, let alone the ones they're supposed to oversee nowadays. I am all for "burning the house down". I think the best solution would be to fire everyone, raise salaries by 10x, and then hire back 10% as many people. After all, the professorship pyramid scheme has lots of PhDs who might be interested in teaching for $300K/year.
How bad would it have to get to change your mind about this? Suicide is already one of the biggest causes of death in young people, and the biggest known contributing factors are things that are determined by the school environment.
I'm all for paying taxes for the greater good. But I don't want anyone I care about to go through what I went through.
Trying to do that in an completely artificial institution that arbitrarily divides people into age cohorts in a way that resembles no organic social pattern and forces all social interaction to conform to bureaucratic rules is not just not a value experience, but in fact actively inhibits the above goal.
The kinds of social skills and expectations kids develop in a school environment often need to be unlearned entirely in order to function effectively in a complex and dynamic society.
Out here, in my schooling, the first stage of schooling was an elementary school, from ~7-15yo (8 years), and by default, you're enrolled into the nearest school to your home. Sometimes there are ways to choose other schools, but all the other pupils there, are there, because it's their nearest school.
What that means is, that you have, in a same class group (~25 people) a wide distribution of capabilities but also mental states, behaviours, etc. From geniuses that contribute to the whole schooling experience, to kids who somehow manage to stay basically illiterate even after 8 years of schooling, and just cause problems for everyone else. What that means is, that many of the lectures are based around trying to get the lower percentiles to learn at least enough for a minimum passing grade, and the top percentiles are either bored or lose interest. + all the behavioural issues.
After you finished elementary school, your grades of the last few years (2? i forgot) are calculated, you do some standardized testing, the numbers are calculated by some formula, and you get a numeric score, that is then used to enroll into high schools (and in most cases, the top X candidates by that score get accepted to a school, depending on how many apply, and how many open spots (X) there are.
There are many high school options, but most of the smarter kids enroll to 'general' high schools (gymansiums) for the next 4 years (and then college), and even those have reputations for some being better, and others worse, even though they technically teach by the same teaching programme (same courses, same subjects,...). Why are some better? Because smarter kids apply, and you get a high school where ALL of the students are from the "top 20%" of elementary schoolers. That means that teachers don't have to waste their time on "illiterate" kids, there are less behaviour problems, if everyone in class understands the lecture relatively quickly, the teacher can add some extra "college level" lectures, etc. This, for better students, is a much better learning experience, both from school lecture experience, to general interactions with classmates (where you're not the only smart one in the class and have noone to help).
Add to this that smarter kids usually have smarter, more involved parents, and that means that also the teachers have to bring out their A-game, and not just bare minimum to get the kids a passing grade, because the grades and (another) standardized testing is then used to apply to colleges.
So yeah... some separation is not a bad thing.
TLDR: "staying away from averages" might sound stupid, but "removing the 'worst' students lets others perform better" is IMHO true.
society has always been this way, from the hunter gatherer days, to middle ages - that's why people want to become part of the elite.
It's only recently that the average people have had the chance to become elites, rather than be born into it. But the desire to be elites, molded by evolutionary/darwinian pressure, is not gone, nor different, than in the past. Another word for it is "the human condition".
It still mostly depends on being born into it. In the US your odds of going from impoverished to wealthy are extremely slim and socioeconomic mobility is among the worst compared to other developed countries. The US falls behind South Korea, Lithuania, Estonia, Singapore, Malta, and Slovenia, while the Nordic countries top the list.
Depending on the study, socioeconomic mobility in the US has either stagnated since the 1970s or actually declined. Average people have little hope of substantially improving the situation they were born into while the percentage of people born into wealth (but not the 1%) who slide downward in socioeconomic status grows. Wealth inequality continues to accelerate at an insane pace. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:1962-_Net_personal_wealth...)
Just about everyone would like to be one of the "elites" but most people would be happy with a fair chance to meaningfully improve their lifestyle.
Social mobility is a measure of relative rank change. In countries with compressed wage ranges, such as those you mention, “social mobility” is an artifact of the mathematics, it doesn’t mean you are meaningfully wealthier than the average person. You can double your household income in the US to above average and still not be “socially mobile”. Social mobility is not a meaningful measure for continent-sized economically diverse countries.
A person can go from the trailer park to being upper middle class in a place like Mississippi and it doesn’t count as socially mobile because you are being ranked against the household income of someone in Seattle, 3,000 km away. As far as the person in Mississippi is concerned, they are living the dream.
The opportunity to improve your standard of living in e.g. Europe pales in comparison to the opportunity to do so in the US. It won’t be classified as “socially mobile” in the US as an artifact of how the math works, but no one in the US cares.
