Average spending k-13 is higher. More like $16/$17k. Wildly distributed, most of the high COL states in in the $20k+ range. My own district spends $22k.
"Daycare" is the wrong metric. Infants and toddlers need low student/teacher ratios. I'd look a the cost of private schools that operate outside the elite space. They average $5k for K-8 and $12k for high school. The private school in our area costs a little under half what our school district spends, this seems to be a common pattern.
In Florida they gave people $8k vouchers and it appears to be wildly popular.
I think it likely that a school voucher system would cost about half what we currently spend, saving at least $8k per kid and more in the high COL areas.
"you might as well try to do something useful with that time"
Why? I would prefer my kids spent half the day in recess playing rather then sitting in boring and useless classes were they learn little.
"At a societal level, If the requirement that all students take biology in high school increased the odds by 5% that we would have an mRNA vaccine for COVID-19"
What are the odds some kid with a below average or even average IQ is going to discover an mRNA vaccine. It ain't 5%. You track these kids and give appropriate material to them based on their ability level and interests.
"Without free public schools, I’d expect we would return to a world where many more families would only have one working parent."
If that made sense. They might use the voucher for a private school or they might use it to homeschool.
"I’d guess it would also decrease birth-rates."
Why? Seems to me homeschool parents have way higher TFR. Making one parent work to pay the taxes to send their kids to schools that don't even provide a service the parents like seems fertility reducing.
"but it would certainly reduce the tax base"
That's true, but maximizing taxes doesn't maximize society.
Author here - you made a lot of points, let me try to address them individually.
> More like $16/$17k.
Turns out you are correct! Sorry my information was out of date - as you say, it's closer to $16k.
For private school, I'm seeing roughly the same costs ($12-16k) - https://educationdata.org/average-cost-of-private-school. One factor that's important to consider with private schools is that they are not universal and so can exclude students whose education costs would exceed tuition, whereas public schools cannot.
Also, to zoom out a bit: the book's argument is that we should get rid of the K-12 education system ("separation of school and state") because of the low evidence of *educational* value. My counterpoint is "wait a minute, there's also a huge value that schools provide society in terms of childcare." Some states are in fact exploring vouchers, charters, promoting homeschooling, and other ways of giving families more choice in what school their child goes to. There are arguments for and against these programs, but my broader point was that I think government-funded childcare for children under 18 is highly beneficial, and so we should pause before making dramatic cuts to government-funded schooling.
> I would prefer my kids spent half the day in recess playing
I am totally in favor of having a discussion of what school should look like and how to transform the school day to better meet the needs of students and families! That's why I'm a reformer. Based on this comment, it sounds like you might enjoy Peter Gray's book Free to Learn. But in my opinion, you still need schools to house this sort of structure, even unstructured structure :).
> What are the odds some kid with a below average or even average IQ is going to discover an mRNA vaccine. It ain't 5%. You track these kids and give appropriate material to them based on their ability level and interests.
I think you and I probably have differing perspectives on the value and consequences of testing children at a young age, valuing intelligence on a single dimension, and then limiting their career options as a result. I certainly would not want this for my child, it sounds dystopian. Also, as I mentioned in my writeup, when tracking has been done in the past it often ends up being distorted and abused by bigotry.
And zooming out to the broader point, this is a total guess but I would expect about half of "amazing, profound world-impacting discoveries/inventions" that we would be sad to be without came from people who, if we were in this counterfactual world with tracking, would have been discouraged from their chosen field. I have no idea what Norman Borlaug's IQ was, but he seems like exactly the sort of person who might slip through the cracks of a test-and-track system, and estimates about how many lives he's saved hover around 1 billion.
> "If that made sense." + "That's true, but maximizing taxes doesn't maximize society."
Totally agree! But in the book one of the arguments against school from a societal level is that it's a low/negative ROI investment, so these points are trying to argue that schools generate tax revenue in other ways (e.g. by enabling greater workforce participation).
The private school market is basically divided into two segments.
1) Usually but not always religious schools that try to operate at tuition levels closer to basic costs.
2) Elite educational institutions (sometimes affiliated with elite religious denominations like Episcopal) that charge insane amounts of tuition.
In my experience #1 schools tend to be able to operate for about 50% of the tuition of whatever the local school district spends, which varies throughout the country.
#2 schools often charge at least as much and often far more then the local school districts.
So the average is those two put together, but you can separate them out in the data.
Right now it's very hard to run a #1 school, because the competition, even if its inefficient and does things the parents don't like, is offering something for free. I suspect that if #1 schools could be put on equal footing they would steal a lot of people from public schools.
"book's argument is that we should get rid of the K-12 education system"
It is. I suspect Bryan would prefer a big child tax credit over a school voucher, and parents could decide if they want to spend it specifically on paid education (as an example of an alternative, they could pay themselves to homeschool, they could save it away to be a downpayment on their kids future house, etc).
I think parents should get more money they are in control of whether it be child tax credits or Education Savings Accounts.
On tracking, I just disagree. I don't know if a blog comment is the realm to debate this, but to me the statistical evidence is overwhelming and the counter arguments mostly seem to be emotional. Tracking makes basically everyone at every level happier and more productive.
At a personal level tracking has been an immense positive for me and lack of it I've observed to be an immense negative (have you ever seen hyper asian tiger parents try to turn their basically retard son into a Harvard grad, very sad).
Also, regarding tracking - I'm a fan (and it sounds like you are as well) of helping students find the things that best match their skills and interest and then spend more time on those versus other things that aren't a good fit. I just think tracking is a strictly worse structure than exposing students to many different things and allowing them to choose what fits best. "Free market" vs. "Top-down", if you will.
And regarding parental desires vs. their child's desires, I agree it's messy 😬
In general, I'm aligned with giving parents more control about their child's educational setting. I work at a charter school!
One thing though that I try to keep in mind that (to me) temper some of the more extreme forms of this: there should be an acknowledgement that the parents have rights, the child has rights, and the situations where the child and parents want different things get very messy indeed.
An example: a child is gay, their parents don't accept their child's homosexuality and so pull them out of public school and use a voucher to put them into a very strict religious institution that tries to convert them. Possible today without vouchers, but easier with vouchers.
Another example: a girl wants to go to middle school, a parent says "nah girls don't school after 5th grade, I'm going to pocket the money and spend it on myself. I deserve it." Again, it's possible for people to be terrible parents today, but it's easier if you give them more control.
These are extreme examples! And likely rare. But there are situations where the desires of the child conflict with the desires of the parent, and "require everyone to go to a middle-of-the-road public option" has some upsides in these situations.
This is bad argumentation. You're using hypothetical extremes to justify outcomes that you acknowledge would be bad for most people, because you presuppose the alternative would be worse at the extremes.
I’m not trying to argue in poor faith! I’m trying to surface some of the extremes that temper my personal perspective on the degree to which parents should have full choice over their child’s education. You may have a different cost/benefit calculus than me or may have ideas on how to address these concerns when designing an alternative education system.
It sounded like you're saying that parents can't be trusted to make decisions for their children. As though their default would be to make bad decisions, so we should make it more difficult for them to make a bad, self-interested choice.
This is just not a reasonable way to approach the education system, even if there are parents who would sell their kids' lunch to buy more drugs.
Bottom of society situations would benefit from any structured requirement. We don't need to cater to their whims in order to design a system that maximizes societal benefits.
>valuing intelligence on a single dimension, and then limiting their career options as a result. I certainly would not want this for my child, it sounds dystopian.
Whether you would want it, or not, it's the reality for your child, and everyone else. IQ (and other dimension reduction tools for cognition, intelligence, and skill) is indeed a limiting factor for viable careers.
As with some other "dystopias," the disaster is more in the observation of the reality, than the reality itself, even when the observation partially mitigates that reality.
[E.g. Bryan describes opposition to largely free immigration on the grounds that it would be dystopic for the global poor to form a poverty stricken underclass in the US. Of course, the alternative under the status quo, is for those people to stay in their home countries, where they are far poorer than they'd be in the counterfactual, but it isn't "dystopic," since we don't have to look at them.]
In the case of education, as well, given the reality that career options are largely limited by intelligence, using measures of intelligence to make informed education and career decisions can partially mitigate the painful reality that half of children are beow average and 99% of people are outside of the 1% that will include the vast majority of those who will make revolutionary contributions, by finding viable options in which individuals *can* succeed and contribute, rather than stringing them along with the false hopes and dreams of blank-slatism, that "you can achieve anything, if you just put your mind to it," or the more agnostic, but still false, suggestion that we can't know who has what it takes to succeed, and "you may already be a winner!!!"
Of course, that doesn't mean that any particular testing regimen or its implementation is optimal, but those issues are distinct from the conceptual argument of "dystopia."
For an anecdote of the painful reality of the effects of a low IQ, and the exacerbating effect of ignoring it, you can see this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09-UbD-96Gw from someone with a measured IQ of 70, whose parents forced him to go to college (!), and who subsequently struggled mightily to work at McDonalds. If I recall, he explicitly denounces the approach of ignoring tests and their implications, noting that this places a cruel burden on intellectually challenged students.
This reality is most self-evident for the most challenged students, but it's hardly limited to them.
I've mentioned this on a few other comments, but I am not disagreeing with the fact that different people have different abilities and interests. I'm surprised though just how much people then interpret that to mean we must have *tests* that dictate to young children what they can and can't do with their life in a freedom-limiting, top-down fashion. There are so many better ways!
For instance, I'm in favor of designing a system where young people are exposed to many possible career options, given a chance to try them out in realistic and meaningful ways, and then allowing people to self-select into the career that best matches their interests and abilities.
I doubt the viability: Just checked the "professions" in Germany - and the were 171 entries for the letter "A" alone. In real life there are again many more different jobs/tasks than formal "professions" (think "influencer"/ dog-walker ...). And the same "profession" can be a radically different experience in real life (customers, colleagues, boss, function, company, ... ) In school, I did a gig in a traditional book-shop (out of business today. no surprise). In a Barnes & Noble it would have been different. Each book-shop in town would have been different. It was not worse than dreary school, but far from what I'd really wanted to do: secretary of defence ;) and 20 stints more would most likely not gotten me nearer to this or to what I ended up doing: teaching German at MAGU/UGTU in Russia and KSU in KSA.
You persist in being an idiot about this. First, no it's not. More importantly, that's per student spending, which includes immigrants and special ed kids, so you will still be on the hook paying for those kids.
Public school spending was $15,633 in back 2022 nationally.
Most school districts have seen very large increases the last few years to keep pace with inflation. My district just got a 9.4% increase despite lower overall enrollment. Non-School administrative positions are up 47.8% in the last seven years despite actual school positions only being up 14.8% and enrollment flatlining after COVID.
So $16/$17k seems like a reasonable estimate, probably low.
The big spender states are all well above $20k (even back in 2022). New York spends $29k per student! New York City spend $38k per student. It is expected to reach $44k by 2026.
Those numbers are fudged (they make some very generous assumptions about returns amongst other rosy projections), but they are still huge. They don't take it into the spending numbers above.
The thing that gets my goat is how many useful things could be taught but are not. For example, nowhere is the structure of a company or its typical functions taught. I was 25 before I knew what the difference was between sales and marketing. Or projects that simulate what working in different functions would be like. If the goal of school is to help people figure out what they want to do with their life, then the current approach seems pessimal for that -- keeping them away from employment, ignorant of what industries there are and how they work, studying old english literature and european history instead of biographies of successful entrepreneurs.
And the above is just about "what you want to be when you grow up". If you expand the scope to "skills that will be useful in your life", e.g. changing a car tire before you're stuck on the side of the road, the universe of things goes way up. And how much more interested would kids be in that sort of learning! And instead they sit in classrooms with a required Masters of Ed lecturing to them.
With just a little imagination and self-reflection, I find it wild that more people aren't outraged about the status quo.
The original purpose of education was solely to prepare students for college, which in those days was very academic. We don't change it because no one would agree on it.
Teachers don't have to have a masters of Education. At the high school level, they are being lectured to by people who degreed in something other than education and passed a pretty substantial knowledge test.
Vocational ed is wildly expensive and oh, by the way, no, kids aren't more interested in learning how to change tires.
> We don't change it because no one would agree on it.
I think this is a point worth emphasizing: we as a society don't have broad agreement about why we education kids in the first place (good citizens? human capital investment? enabling good jobs?), plus a huge number of highly vested people who would come out with pitchforks if you tried to cut any part of the current curriculum, leading to the current world where it's *incredibly* difficult to change the curriculum. California just re-mandated the teaching of cursive in elementary school! Bonkers.
When I taught physics to average-ish students at an average-ish school, the primary goal was to get them thinking quantitatively at all, think "how do we (a civilization) know what we know about the physical world," and have some exposure/practice solving problems, extrapolating data, and the basics of the world. In general I was not super concerned with a bunch of stuff they'd forget immediately, whatever the state standards said.
"while child abuse unfortunately does happen in school settings, schools have created structural advantages that make it easier for them to prevent and catch this versus in the workplace".
This is flat wrong. It's rare that a modern workplace have employees treat eachother anywhere close to as badly as students treat eachother, employers usually aren't able to give hours of mandatory unpaid homework every day like schools do, and so on. If a manager does want to abuse children but students were allowed to leave then they would, unlike school.
I'm not sure what you're referring to when you say "which is false" - the evidence I've seen is that while you _could_ have a system for tracking that is race-blind, historically when these systems have been put into practice there end up being lots of high-leverage places where bigoted people can skew them towards racist ends.
Plus as I mention, if you think that different students should spend their time focused on things that better match their skills and interest, I think tracking is a strictly worse structure than exposing students to many different things and allowing them to choose what fits best. "Free market" vs. "Top-down", if you will.
Re fat tails, we have to ask whether your uncle or Steve Jobs would've been as likely to encounter a similarly-transformative experience had they been doing something else instead of school (like working). I'm inclined to say yes.
Maybe! It’s hard to run the counter factuals. Here’s what makes me inclined to think school is worth it:
1) it doesn’t take a big percentage difference for it to be worth it. As I wrote above, I think if requiring biology increased the odds of getting an mRNA vaccine for COVID by 5%, that’s probably worth it.
2) when left to their own devices, teenagers certainly don’t *seem* to spend their time learning. This is particularly true as the options for leisure (TikTok, video games) have become more compelling.
3) While young people would certainly learn some skills in the workplace, they’d likely be exposed to a much narrower set of skills than in school.
Again, I’m a reformer; I think schools can and should be redesigned to help young people find their path to a fulfilled life. But I do think that schools offer value over not offering school, and (in my opinion, for k12), enough value to justify the cost.
Regarding 1: Are you not comparing to a world with no education as opposed to one with education which looks quite different? It seems that encouraging wealthy/high status families to engage in a more aristocratic type of education would produce considerably more entrepreneurial/cognitive elites? Also apparently Sweden has a lively debate/salon culture in education that you may enjoy reading about: https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/popular-education-in-sweden-much. Basically, I like to focus on the counterfactual where "public" schooling is not compulsory to attend or fund. This would both leave more money in people's pockets to spend on other things —including education for their kids — as well as free up time for the pursuit of other opportunities.
This dovetails into 2: Yes teenagers seem to not get up to much these days, but these are government schooled kids who are divorced from their communities and pacified with technology which I anticipate parents reigning in for future generations as people realize the harm it causes (cf. Haidt's "The Anxious Generation"). Seeing as the proportion of kids exiting high school who are agentic, intelligent, creative, and curious is fairly low, what kind of world would we live in if there was 1.5x or 2x of that population? Seeing as these are the types of people who bring dynamism to societies/economies, this could be a massive effect derived from just removing the requirement that most all kids make it through this stultifying institution.
As for 3: It seems that the younger the child, the more they benefit from a "massive input" model of education. As they mature, they should hone their skills on particular pursuits which they have a proclivity for. Once they reach a certain level of mastery, they can move onto another domain since maintenance of a high level of competence is much less laborious than establishing this competence in the first place. As for becoming well-rounded, I don't see why the social sphere can't handle this. You'd have family, friends, and community members — really anyone you have thick connections with — to converse with and share things you've learned with.
Different Perspectives I'd Offer to Brett van Zuiden:
1. I'm not sure I understand your "in a world with more entrepreneurship" comment, as in I'm not sure what point it makes. Should we ever expect to live in a world with more entrepreneurs than we have now? Does the fact that some industries have more potential for enterprising entrepreneurs to overcome their lack of credentials mean that 90-99% of people are not going to be dependent on their credentials for the first 5-10 years of their career?
2. Your fears about "test and track", I think, are hopeless and unresolvable. The reality is that different groups have different occupations preferences, and if given the freedom to choose, you would still see a major disparity is which occupations different groups choose for themselves. The disparities could even be larger under a free-to-choose approach like we've seen with Nordic women choosing STEM professions less now when they have more choices than historically. This is an argument for or against "test and track". I just want to disagree that we can assume less disparities in occupation with one approach versus the other.
3. 12-18yos should be working or developing their human capital in some. As Bryan illustrates, our current education system has no productive working element and barely increases human capital. Dismissing the option of having teenagers learn something useful while making money and being productive because there wouldn't be robust oversight is short-sighted and wrong.
First off, the greatest protection kids and teenagers alike have against abuse is their parents/supporters and the potential they have to act on their behalf. Parents are the primary acting force that protects kids, not schools. A school is only a safe place for kids insofar as the parents are monitoring the school's action and have the power to act against the school. I think the Canadian schools for indigenous kids are a good example of how unsafe schools can be when parents do not have the power to remove their kids from a schools or act against a school.
In short, parents will monitor the businesses their kids work at and will have the legal power to eviscerate these businesses if there is abuse. So how likely is there will be a substantial increase in abuse when parents will have that kind of power? I even be willing to argue it could be safer for kids because I'd bet that businesses are a lot easier successfully sue than government-protected schools. That would be an empirical question, though.
4. It doesn't make economic sense to spend trillions to force millions of people to suffer unproductively in the prime of their life for happy accidents. Further, just because your uncle found love through French class or Steve Jobs learned calligraphy does not show school helped your uncle find love or Steve Jobs make Apple successful. Your uncle is probably a good dude that was attractive to good women, and Steve Jobs could realized that nice looking text would be nice and borrowed a book on calligraphy from a library and learned then.
One idea that come in tow with signaling is that people don't need special training to succeed because our education system generally doesn't provide that anyway. Career success, successful romance, or brilliant entrepreneurship are not developed through school. Getting an education is just the goal our society has directed young people to succeed at to prove themselves. Because it is mostly a signal and not a determining factor, school and "getting an education" ought to be replaceable with a system that develops human capital better and/or lets young people have happier childhoods.
5. Your minor squabbles section is correct over Bryan in all accounts, in my opinion. I didn't consider either point when I read the book, so I felt enlightened from your perspectives there.
Thank you for the thoughtful response! I'll address your points individually, but I appreciate you taking the time.
1) I certainly think the world could be much more entrepreneurial! I hadn't realized it until it was pointed out to me (by the book Moral Mazes), but in the United States pre-1930 a much, much higher percentage of the U.S. labor force was doing work that was judged by the market rather than a corporate superior. Farmers, cobblers, carpenters, bricklayers, plumbers, etc. - in a field where your work is much more exposed to the market, what you know is much more important than a certificate demonstrating what you know. In a highly bureaucratic/corporate workforce, that's less true as Bryan points out in his book.
2) I don't have any problem with different individuals choosing different career paths, even if that shows up in discrepancies in aggregate statistics! I find the arguments that you refer to about Nordic women in STEM very compelling. My issue with test and track is that individuals aren't given the choice to decide for themselves and are instead told what they can and cannot pursue.
3) I agree that we should reform schools to be better at developing human capital. I disagree with Bryan that we should get rid of schools in favor of having kids get jobs instead. While I wish that more parents were highly involved in their child's education, outside of a small number of affluent suburban districts the most common situation is that parents are totally uninvolved. I don't think that would change if schools were replaced with students in the workforce. And yes, abuse in school is non-zero and tragic when it occurs, but as I mention schools are *designed* to be places that are safe for kids and so have structural advantages around keeping these rates low that are not the case in the workplace.
4) > It doesn't make economic sense to spend trillions to force millions of people to suffer unproductively in the prime of their life for happy accidents.
Maybe! I actually think it would be worth running the numbers here. The COVID vaccines saved a lot of people's lives! I agree that it's hard to know the counterfactuals here; I personally find the "Fat Tails" reasoning compelling and I felt like it was not acknowledged in Bryan's book so I raised it. If someone ran the numbers I could be convinced otherwise, and if someone has different priors and so disagrees I respect that.
" it’s easy to say that I should have taken that course and the other students shouldn’t have, but I don’t think you could have predicted who would have their life changed by a course a priori. "
right, so maybe Shakespeare isn't such a "waste" after all; certainly there's plenty there to last a lifetime - no matter what the woke kooks - who are doing more to ruin schools than anyone - say
Shakespeare specifically is just neither that good a writer nor writing in consistent language, and what was "eternal" about him was long taken into other, better works.
Mr Caplan concedes that the largest benefit of schools is that they act as day jails for unruly youth. Not sure how Mr. Zuiden didn't see this in the book.
It's not a coincidence that public schooling came into prominence when the western world was industrializing and people moved into the cities in large numbers. Having a bunch of kids running around all day while their parents were in the factories was a recipe for disaster.
Just read Lindbergh (Charles Lindbergh). He essentially flunked out of college. He just wasn’t interested. Once he found a topic that moved him, he threw himself at it with amazing enthusiasm.
Society has got to be better off waiting for each individual to reach out. A bit of general education is fine. We push too much.
We should keep in mind the degree to which deeply rooted learning comes from trial-and-error as opposed to a regimented curriculum. Yes there's a small but significant proportion of the population who learn quite by following the logic and integrating new information into a mental scaffolding which leads to a certain consilience very useful for cognitively demanding work, but this is *roughly* indicated by IQ anyway, so we could just test most people like we do with standardized tests to get an idea of a kid's capacity for that kind of work
For everyone else, they just need to learn by doing, taking mentors' advice, and making mistakes in the process of trying to solve a new problem or fix something that went awry. This is related to the notion of "massive input" which seems to represent how children learn. You just need to toss a whole bunch of things at them, and their proclivities will endear them towards things which come more easily. Part of maturation is putting in the extra effort to go past the surface level of those subjects you're endeared to and actually becoming competent at it. Right now we basically force kids to go straight to the mature "mode" of learning towards subjects which they are not particularly privy towards, so it's no surprise that people are turned off from putting in the work to go past the bare minimum of what's required of them.
Even I, who self-taught myself most of the math that I know (up through some graduate level stuff), was leaning more and more with time towards just doing the minimum because not only was the extra work to gain a fuller understanding not rewarding, but often it was costly because it diverted time from the other things I was supposed to be doing for that class or another class. That said, I do want to contribute that learning about applications of previous concepts allowed me to return to previous topics with a newfound appreciation as well as cognitive priming which made uptake both quicker and more long lasting. The example I'll give here was how algebraic topology encodes topological information within the algebraic structure of a group, and the ubiquitous long exact sequences we utilized to compute homology groups gave me an appreciation for the utility of the isomorphism theorems in group theory. And aside from the utility, there's a certain "this is too good to be true, but yet it's true" that you experience when you realize just how broadly applicable those isomorphism theorems are. You're seriously telling me that what elements get mapped to zero by a homomorphism force degeneracies (many-to-one mappings) upon the rest of the domain? That's radical man.
“I think a better approach that we use in my school network is to focus on broad exposure to different career paths early (internships/apprenticeships, job shadows, student entrepreneurship, etc.) and then let young people naturally sort out what they like and are good at vs. deciding it for them via a test
Define early? I was tested and tracked in 4th grade, after crying about how easy and boring the homework was. That seems too early to do what you’re suggesting, but I don’t want elementary schoolers to needlessly suffer in the wrong classes either.
> Define early? I was tested and tracked in 4th grade, after crying about how easy and boring the homework was.
An alternative: after crying about how easy and boring the homework was, the school said "would you like to try a more advanced/accelerated set of work?" and you (or realistically at this age your parents) said "sure!"
His computer course and his uncle's French course were serendipitous. How do we keep the serendipity and ditch the drudgery?
Is there a way to increase serendipity? This seems a bit paradoxical. If we know how to predict it, it isn’t serendipity. Other parts of life can also spark serendipity.
Maybe instead of thinking of it as serendipity, we should think of it as uncovering someone's true calling or potential. That sounds less paradoxical, but actually may be no less difficult.
> Maybe instead of thinking of it as serendipity, we should think of it as uncovering someone's true calling or potential. That sounds less paradoxical, but actually may be no less difficult.
To me, this is one of the most important purposes of education. I am inspired to do work to reform the system towards this end. A good example of this in practice: at Summit Public Schools (the charter network where I work) we run a program called Expeditions, where four times a year we pause all "normal" courses for a 2-week period. Students are given a menu of possible Expeditions experiences early in the year and are matched based on which ones they rank that they are most interested in. Expeditions courses are everything from Wilderness Science to Auto Mechanics to Pre-law to Robotics to Personal Finance. It's a huge effort to pull off, and I wish we could do it more than 8 weeks a year, but it is worth it; students are exposed to a much broader set of potential post-high-school life pathways and they consistently rate it as one of the best parts of their high school experience, both in high school and as alumni.
His assertion that schools gain little when students are classified with IEPs is false (see Thomas Sowell’s book on Charter Schools). His point is flawed if only for the fact that public schools are not managed like private schools (tuitions must cover all expenses at private schools while government schools are funded by taxpayer dollars so additional funding due to special education adds up quickly when 100 or more kids are reclassified)
Author here - I haven’t read Sowell, but I do work at a charter school and I can confidently state that the cost of providing mandated individualized services to students with IEPs exceeds the additional funding we receive for them, and that this is the case at every school I’ve talked to.
hahaha. Thomas Sowell might be an expert in his subject, but he's an idiot on education.
The *average* sped kid costs twice as much as a non-sped kid. Sped for LDs is a waste. Sped for severely disabled kids who can't be educated who need special buses and two paras and diaper changes twice a day, plus a wildly expensive wheel chair is just institutional care. They cost about $100K/year.
For higher education, I fear the advocates aren't willing to give the real best defense -- it's more about the social benefits and pleasure than any kind of education.
Having a period of time to form friendships with other young people of around the same age and a time to learn how to live away from home and mix with people from around the country is incredibly valuable. People fucking love their time in college and make lifelong friendships.
Of course, taking this seriously would mean cutting a bunch of excess programs and slimming things down.
Author here: I agree that is a benefit of today’s system, but the university system is actually not well optimized for this either! If you wanted to design an institution towards this goal I think you could do significantly better (and cheaper) than the college setting.
Probably could if you were a dictator. But I think if you tried in our society it's quite likely that what you would get is similarly large wasteful spending on some kind of status signalling competition without the positive externalities that universities create.
First, I think it would be really hard to convince many people it was worth the money if you spelled this out directly. Moreover, in terms of the space of possibilities it's pretty amazing that instead of this role being filled by something like the military or tech company intern programs -- with the resulting goodwill that now goes to alumni donations going to support for defense contractors or brand loyalty -- we instead get something where that's channeled into a system with relatively valuable research externalities.
I'm not so much arguing that our system is even close to optimal in a theoretical sense, merely that societies virtually never achieve that kind of efficiency in these sort of things and all things considered it's a much better equilibrium than most ones I think plausibly could have resulted so we should be careful about messing too much with it.
I know Bryan isn't going to buy this but my sense is that we actually have quite a bit of evidence people are extremely irrational in terms of choices they make prospectively about socialization (we don't like to think of friends as things one buys and we don't appreciate how hard it is to just get up and join a club or other alternative so we don't properly weigh these impacts on our happiness very well).
If and when we start doing our public discourse about costs and benefits in terms of studies about utility rather than primarily in terms of dollars maybe then it will make sense to radically reforem the system.
"$13k/child/year"
Average spending k-13 is higher. More like $16/$17k. Wildly distributed, most of the high COL states in in the $20k+ range. My own district spends $22k.
"Daycare" is the wrong metric. Infants and toddlers need low student/teacher ratios. I'd look a the cost of private schools that operate outside the elite space. They average $5k for K-8 and $12k for high school. The private school in our area costs a little under half what our school district spends, this seems to be a common pattern.
In Florida they gave people $8k vouchers and it appears to be wildly popular.
I think it likely that a school voucher system would cost about half what we currently spend, saving at least $8k per kid and more in the high COL areas.
"you might as well try to do something useful with that time"
Why? I would prefer my kids spent half the day in recess playing rather then sitting in boring and useless classes were they learn little.
"At a societal level, If the requirement that all students take biology in high school increased the odds by 5% that we would have an mRNA vaccine for COVID-19"
What are the odds some kid with a below average or even average IQ is going to discover an mRNA vaccine. It ain't 5%. You track these kids and give appropriate material to them based on their ability level and interests.
"Without free public schools, I’d expect we would return to a world where many more families would only have one working parent."
If that made sense. They might use the voucher for a private school or they might use it to homeschool.
"I’d guess it would also decrease birth-rates."
Why? Seems to me homeschool parents have way higher TFR. Making one parent work to pay the taxes to send their kids to schools that don't even provide a service the parents like seems fertility reducing.
"but it would certainly reduce the tax base"
That's true, but maximizing taxes doesn't maximize society.
Author here - you made a lot of points, let me try to address them individually.
> More like $16/$17k.
Turns out you are correct! Sorry my information was out of date - as you say, it's closer to $16k.
For private school, I'm seeing roughly the same costs ($12-16k) - https://educationdata.org/average-cost-of-private-school. One factor that's important to consider with private schools is that they are not universal and so can exclude students whose education costs would exceed tuition, whereas public schools cannot.
Also, to zoom out a bit: the book's argument is that we should get rid of the K-12 education system ("separation of school and state") because of the low evidence of *educational* value. My counterpoint is "wait a minute, there's also a huge value that schools provide society in terms of childcare." Some states are in fact exploring vouchers, charters, promoting homeschooling, and other ways of giving families more choice in what school their child goes to. There are arguments for and against these programs, but my broader point was that I think government-funded childcare for children under 18 is highly beneficial, and so we should pause before making dramatic cuts to government-funded schooling.
> I would prefer my kids spent half the day in recess playing
I am totally in favor of having a discussion of what school should look like and how to transform the school day to better meet the needs of students and families! That's why I'm a reformer. Based on this comment, it sounds like you might enjoy Peter Gray's book Free to Learn. But in my opinion, you still need schools to house this sort of structure, even unstructured structure :).
> What are the odds some kid with a below average or even average IQ is going to discover an mRNA vaccine. It ain't 5%. You track these kids and give appropriate material to them based on their ability level and interests.
I think you and I probably have differing perspectives on the value and consequences of testing children at a young age, valuing intelligence on a single dimension, and then limiting their career options as a result. I certainly would not want this for my child, it sounds dystopian. Also, as I mentioned in my writeup, when tracking has been done in the past it often ends up being distorted and abused by bigotry.
And zooming out to the broader point, this is a total guess but I would expect about half of "amazing, profound world-impacting discoveries/inventions" that we would be sad to be without came from people who, if we were in this counterfactual world with tracking, would have been discouraged from their chosen field. I have no idea what Norman Borlaug's IQ was, but he seems like exactly the sort of person who might slip through the cracks of a test-and-track system, and estimates about how many lives he's saved hover around 1 billion.
> "If that made sense." + "That's true, but maximizing taxes doesn't maximize society."
Totally agree! But in the book one of the arguments against school from a societal level is that it's a low/negative ROI investment, so these points are trying to argue that schools generate tax revenue in other ways (e.g. by enabling greater workforce participation).
Thanks for your reply.
The private school market is basically divided into two segments.
1) Usually but not always religious schools that try to operate at tuition levels closer to basic costs.
2) Elite educational institutions (sometimes affiliated with elite religious denominations like Episcopal) that charge insane amounts of tuition.
In my experience #1 schools tend to be able to operate for about 50% of the tuition of whatever the local school district spends, which varies throughout the country.
#2 schools often charge at least as much and often far more then the local school districts.
So the average is those two put together, but you can separate them out in the data.
Right now it's very hard to run a #1 school, because the competition, even if its inefficient and does things the parents don't like, is offering something for free. I suspect that if #1 schools could be put on equal footing they would steal a lot of people from public schools.
"book's argument is that we should get rid of the K-12 education system"
It is. I suspect Bryan would prefer a big child tax credit over a school voucher, and parents could decide if they want to spend it specifically on paid education (as an example of an alternative, they could pay themselves to homeschool, they could save it away to be a downpayment on their kids future house, etc).
I think parents should get more money they are in control of whether it be child tax credits or Education Savings Accounts.
On tracking, I just disagree. I don't know if a blog comment is the realm to debate this, but to me the statistical evidence is overwhelming and the counter arguments mostly seem to be emotional. Tracking makes basically everyone at every level happier and more productive.
At a personal level tracking has been an immense positive for me and lack of it I've observed to be an immense negative (have you ever seen hyper asian tiger parents try to turn their basically retard son into a Harvard grad, very sad).
Conclusion, I think we agree on a lot.
Also, regarding tracking - I'm a fan (and it sounds like you are as well) of helping students find the things that best match their skills and interest and then spend more time on those versus other things that aren't a good fit. I just think tracking is a strictly worse structure than exposing students to many different things and allowing them to choose what fits best. "Free market" vs. "Top-down", if you will.
And regarding parental desires vs. their child's desires, I agree it's messy 😬
In general, I'm aligned with giving parents more control about their child's educational setting. I work at a charter school!
One thing though that I try to keep in mind that (to me) temper some of the more extreme forms of this: there should be an acknowledgement that the parents have rights, the child has rights, and the situations where the child and parents want different things get very messy indeed.
An example: a child is gay, their parents don't accept their child's homosexuality and so pull them out of public school and use a voucher to put them into a very strict religious institution that tries to convert them. Possible today without vouchers, but easier with vouchers.
Another example: a girl wants to go to middle school, a parent says "nah girls don't school after 5th grade, I'm going to pocket the money and spend it on myself. I deserve it." Again, it's possible for people to be terrible parents today, but it's easier if you give them more control.
These are extreme examples! And likely rare. But there are situations where the desires of the child conflict with the desires of the parent, and "require everyone to go to a middle-of-the-road public option" has some upsides in these situations.
This is bad argumentation. You're using hypothetical extremes to justify outcomes that you acknowledge would be bad for most people, because you presuppose the alternative would be worse at the extremes.
I’m not trying to argue in poor faith! I’m trying to surface some of the extremes that temper my personal perspective on the degree to which parents should have full choice over their child’s education. You may have a different cost/benefit calculus than me or may have ideas on how to address these concerns when designing an alternative education system.
It sounded like you're saying that parents can't be trusted to make decisions for their children. As though their default would be to make bad decisions, so we should make it more difficult for them to make a bad, self-interested choice.
This is just not a reasonable way to approach the education system, even if there are parents who would sell their kids' lunch to buy more drugs.
Bottom of society situations would benefit from any structured requirement. We don't need to cater to their whims in order to design a system that maximizes societal benefits.
>valuing intelligence on a single dimension, and then limiting their career options as a result. I certainly would not want this for my child, it sounds dystopian.
Whether you would want it, or not, it's the reality for your child, and everyone else. IQ (and other dimension reduction tools for cognition, intelligence, and skill) is indeed a limiting factor for viable careers.
As with some other "dystopias," the disaster is more in the observation of the reality, than the reality itself, even when the observation partially mitigates that reality.
[E.g. Bryan describes opposition to largely free immigration on the grounds that it would be dystopic for the global poor to form a poverty stricken underclass in the US. Of course, the alternative under the status quo, is for those people to stay in their home countries, where they are far poorer than they'd be in the counterfactual, but it isn't "dystopic," since we don't have to look at them.]
In the case of education, as well, given the reality that career options are largely limited by intelligence, using measures of intelligence to make informed education and career decisions can partially mitigate the painful reality that half of children are beow average and 99% of people are outside of the 1% that will include the vast majority of those who will make revolutionary contributions, by finding viable options in which individuals *can* succeed and contribute, rather than stringing them along with the false hopes and dreams of blank-slatism, that "you can achieve anything, if you just put your mind to it," or the more agnostic, but still false, suggestion that we can't know who has what it takes to succeed, and "you may already be a winner!!!"
Of course, that doesn't mean that any particular testing regimen or its implementation is optimal, but those issues are distinct from the conceptual argument of "dystopia."
For an anecdote of the painful reality of the effects of a low IQ, and the exacerbating effect of ignoring it, you can see this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09-UbD-96Gw from someone with a measured IQ of 70, whose parents forced him to go to college (!), and who subsequently struggled mightily to work at McDonalds. If I recall, he explicitly denounces the approach of ignoring tests and their implications, noting that this places a cruel burden on intellectually challenged students.
This reality is most self-evident for the most challenged students, but it's hardly limited to them.
I've mentioned this on a few other comments, but I am not disagreeing with the fact that different people have different abilities and interests. I'm surprised though just how much people then interpret that to mean we must have *tests* that dictate to young children what they can and can't do with their life in a freedom-limiting, top-down fashion. There are so many better ways!
For instance, I'm in favor of designing a system where young people are exposed to many possible career options, given a chance to try them out in realistic and meaningful ways, and then allowing people to self-select into the career that best matches their interests and abilities.
I doubt the viability: Just checked the "professions" in Germany - and the were 171 entries for the letter "A" alone. In real life there are again many more different jobs/tasks than formal "professions" (think "influencer"/ dog-walker ...). And the same "profession" can be a radically different experience in real life (customers, colleagues, boss, function, company, ... ) In school, I did a gig in a traditional book-shop (out of business today. no surprise). In a Barnes & Noble it would have been different. Each book-shop in town would have been different. It was not worse than dreary school, but far from what I'd really wanted to do: secretary of defence ;) and 20 stints more would most likely not gotten me nearer to this or to what I ended up doing: teaching German at MAGU/UGTU in Russia and KSU in KSA.
"Average spending k-13 is higher."
You persist in being an idiot about this. First, no it's not. More importantly, that's per student spending, which includes immigrants and special ed kids, so you will still be on the hook paying for those kids.
https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2024/public-school-spending-per-pupil.html
Public school spending was $15,633 in back 2022 nationally.
Most school districts have seen very large increases the last few years to keep pace with inflation. My district just got a 9.4% increase despite lower overall enrollment. Non-School administrative positions are up 47.8% in the last seven years despite actual school positions only being up 14.8% and enrollment flatlining after COVID.
So $16/$17k seems like a reasonable estimate, probably low.
The big spender states are all well above $20k (even back in 2022). New York spends $29k per student! New York City spend $38k per student. It is expected to reach $44k by 2026.
https://www.chalkbeat.org/newyork/2023/4/11/23677827/budget-report-nyc-schools-funding-pupil-spending/#:~:text=Buoyed%20in%20recent%20years%20by,a%20new%20report%20published%20Tuesday.
And of course none of these numbers include the gargantuan underfunded pensions for all these people.
https://equable.org/unfunded-liabilities-for-state-pension-plans-in-2023/
Those numbers are fudged (they make some very generous assumptions about returns amongst other rosy projections), but they are still huge. They don't take it into the spending numbers above.
And the point goes whizzing over your head.
The thing that gets my goat is how many useful things could be taught but are not. For example, nowhere is the structure of a company or its typical functions taught. I was 25 before I knew what the difference was between sales and marketing. Or projects that simulate what working in different functions would be like. If the goal of school is to help people figure out what they want to do with their life, then the current approach seems pessimal for that -- keeping them away from employment, ignorant of what industries there are and how they work, studying old english literature and european history instead of biographies of successful entrepreneurs.
And the above is just about "what you want to be when you grow up". If you expand the scope to "skills that will be useful in your life", e.g. changing a car tire before you're stuck on the side of the road, the universe of things goes way up. And how much more interested would kids be in that sort of learning! And instead they sit in classrooms with a required Masters of Ed lecturing to them.
With just a little imagination and self-reflection, I find it wild that more people aren't outraged about the status quo.
The original purpose of education was solely to prepare students for college, which in those days was very academic. We don't change it because no one would agree on it.
Teachers don't have to have a masters of Education. At the high school level, they are being lectured to by people who degreed in something other than education and passed a pretty substantial knowledge test.
Vocational ed is wildly expensive and oh, by the way, no, kids aren't more interested in learning how to change tires.
> We don't change it because no one would agree on it.
I think this is a point worth emphasizing: we as a society don't have broad agreement about why we education kids in the first place (good citizens? human capital investment? enabling good jobs?), plus a huge number of highly vested people who would come out with pitchforks if you tried to cut any part of the current curriculum, leading to the current world where it's *incredibly* difficult to change the curriculum. California just re-mandated the teaching of cursive in elementary school! Bonkers.
Author here - I agree that the curriculum could be optimized much more!
When I taught physics to average-ish students at an average-ish school, the primary goal was to get them thinking quantitatively at all, think "how do we (a civilization) know what we know about the physical world," and have some exposure/practice solving problems, extrapolating data, and the basics of the world. In general I was not super concerned with a bunch of stuff they'd forget immediately, whatever the state standards said.
"while child abuse unfortunately does happen in school settings, schools have created structural advantages that make it easier for them to prevent and catch this versus in the workplace".
This is flat wrong. It's rare that a modern workplace have employees treat eachother anywhere close to as badly as students treat eachother, employers usually aren't able to give hours of mandatory unpaid homework every day like schools do, and so on. If a manager does want to abuse children but students were allowed to leave then they would, unlike school.
Author here - thank you for sharing my thoughts with this group! I’m happy to take questions or engage with people who have different perspectives.
Currently juggling childcare responsibilities, but will respond as I am able.
Nice face saving nod to "oh, tracking is racist." Which is false.
I'm not sure what you're referring to when you say "which is false" - the evidence I've seen is that while you _could_ have a system for tracking that is race-blind, historically when these systems have been put into practice there end up being lots of high-leverage places where bigoted people can skew them towards racist ends.
Plus as I mention, if you think that different students should spend their time focused on things that better match their skills and interest, I think tracking is a strictly worse structure than exposing students to many different things and allowing them to choose what fits best. "Free market" vs. "Top-down", if you will.
Re fat tails, we have to ask whether your uncle or Steve Jobs would've been as likely to encounter a similarly-transformative experience had they been doing something else instead of school (like working). I'm inclined to say yes.
> I'm inclined to say yes
Maybe! It’s hard to run the counter factuals. Here’s what makes me inclined to think school is worth it:
1) it doesn’t take a big percentage difference for it to be worth it. As I wrote above, I think if requiring biology increased the odds of getting an mRNA vaccine for COVID by 5%, that’s probably worth it.
2) when left to their own devices, teenagers certainly don’t *seem* to spend their time learning. This is particularly true as the options for leisure (TikTok, video games) have become more compelling.
3) While young people would certainly learn some skills in the workplace, they’d likely be exposed to a much narrower set of skills than in school.
Again, I’m a reformer; I think schools can and should be redesigned to help young people find their path to a fulfilled life. But I do think that schools offer value over not offering school, and (in my opinion, for k12), enough value to justify the cost.
Regarding 1: Are you not comparing to a world with no education as opposed to one with education which looks quite different? It seems that encouraging wealthy/high status families to engage in a more aristocratic type of education would produce considerably more entrepreneurial/cognitive elites? Also apparently Sweden has a lively debate/salon culture in education that you may enjoy reading about: https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/popular-education-in-sweden-much. Basically, I like to focus on the counterfactual where "public" schooling is not compulsory to attend or fund. This would both leave more money in people's pockets to spend on other things —including education for their kids — as well as free up time for the pursuit of other opportunities.
This dovetails into 2: Yes teenagers seem to not get up to much these days, but these are government schooled kids who are divorced from their communities and pacified with technology which I anticipate parents reigning in for future generations as people realize the harm it causes (cf. Haidt's "The Anxious Generation"). Seeing as the proportion of kids exiting high school who are agentic, intelligent, creative, and curious is fairly low, what kind of world would we live in if there was 1.5x or 2x of that population? Seeing as these are the types of people who bring dynamism to societies/economies, this could be a massive effect derived from just removing the requirement that most all kids make it through this stultifying institution.
As for 3: It seems that the younger the child, the more they benefit from a "massive input" model of education. As they mature, they should hone their skills on particular pursuits which they have a proclivity for. Once they reach a certain level of mastery, they can move onto another domain since maintenance of a high level of competence is much less laborious than establishing this competence in the first place. As for becoming well-rounded, I don't see why the social sphere can't handle this. You'd have family, friends, and community members — really anyone you have thick connections with — to converse with and share things you've learned with.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts by the way!
Different Perspectives I'd Offer to Brett van Zuiden:
1. I'm not sure I understand your "in a world with more entrepreneurship" comment, as in I'm not sure what point it makes. Should we ever expect to live in a world with more entrepreneurs than we have now? Does the fact that some industries have more potential for enterprising entrepreneurs to overcome their lack of credentials mean that 90-99% of people are not going to be dependent on their credentials for the first 5-10 years of their career?
2. Your fears about "test and track", I think, are hopeless and unresolvable. The reality is that different groups have different occupations preferences, and if given the freedom to choose, you would still see a major disparity is which occupations different groups choose for themselves. The disparities could even be larger under a free-to-choose approach like we've seen with Nordic women choosing STEM professions less now when they have more choices than historically. This is an argument for or against "test and track". I just want to disagree that we can assume less disparities in occupation with one approach versus the other.
3. 12-18yos should be working or developing their human capital in some. As Bryan illustrates, our current education system has no productive working element and barely increases human capital. Dismissing the option of having teenagers learn something useful while making money and being productive because there wouldn't be robust oversight is short-sighted and wrong.
First off, the greatest protection kids and teenagers alike have against abuse is their parents/supporters and the potential they have to act on their behalf. Parents are the primary acting force that protects kids, not schools. A school is only a safe place for kids insofar as the parents are monitoring the school's action and have the power to act against the school. I think the Canadian schools for indigenous kids are a good example of how unsafe schools can be when parents do not have the power to remove their kids from a schools or act against a school.
In short, parents will monitor the businesses their kids work at and will have the legal power to eviscerate these businesses if there is abuse. So how likely is there will be a substantial increase in abuse when parents will have that kind of power? I even be willing to argue it could be safer for kids because I'd bet that businesses are a lot easier successfully sue than government-protected schools. That would be an empirical question, though.
4. It doesn't make economic sense to spend trillions to force millions of people to suffer unproductively in the prime of their life for happy accidents. Further, just because your uncle found love through French class or Steve Jobs learned calligraphy does not show school helped your uncle find love or Steve Jobs make Apple successful. Your uncle is probably a good dude that was attractive to good women, and Steve Jobs could realized that nice looking text would be nice and borrowed a book on calligraphy from a library and learned then.
One idea that come in tow with signaling is that people don't need special training to succeed because our education system generally doesn't provide that anyway. Career success, successful romance, or brilliant entrepreneurship are not developed through school. Getting an education is just the goal our society has directed young people to succeed at to prove themselves. Because it is mostly a signal and not a determining factor, school and "getting an education" ought to be replaceable with a system that develops human capital better and/or lets young people have happier childhoods.
5. Your minor squabbles section is correct over Bryan in all accounts, in my opinion. I didn't consider either point when I read the book, so I felt enlightened from your perspectives there.
Thank you for the thoughtful response! I'll address your points individually, but I appreciate you taking the time.
1) I certainly think the world could be much more entrepreneurial! I hadn't realized it until it was pointed out to me (by the book Moral Mazes), but in the United States pre-1930 a much, much higher percentage of the U.S. labor force was doing work that was judged by the market rather than a corporate superior. Farmers, cobblers, carpenters, bricklayers, plumbers, etc. - in a field where your work is much more exposed to the market, what you know is much more important than a certificate demonstrating what you know. In a highly bureaucratic/corporate workforce, that's less true as Bryan points out in his book.
2) I don't have any problem with different individuals choosing different career paths, even if that shows up in discrepancies in aggregate statistics! I find the arguments that you refer to about Nordic women in STEM very compelling. My issue with test and track is that individuals aren't given the choice to decide for themselves and are instead told what they can and cannot pursue.
3) I agree that we should reform schools to be better at developing human capital. I disagree with Bryan that we should get rid of schools in favor of having kids get jobs instead. While I wish that more parents were highly involved in their child's education, outside of a small number of affluent suburban districts the most common situation is that parents are totally uninvolved. I don't think that would change if schools were replaced with students in the workforce. And yes, abuse in school is non-zero and tragic when it occurs, but as I mention schools are *designed* to be places that are safe for kids and so have structural advantages around keeping these rates low that are not the case in the workplace.
4) > It doesn't make economic sense to spend trillions to force millions of people to suffer unproductively in the prime of their life for happy accidents.
Maybe! I actually think it would be worth running the numbers here. The COVID vaccines saved a lot of people's lives! I agree that it's hard to know the counterfactuals here; I personally find the "Fat Tails" reasoning compelling and I felt like it was not acknowledged in Bryan's book so I raised it. If someone ran the numbers I could be convinced otherwise, and if someone has different priors and so disagrees I respect that.
5) 👍 Thanks!
" it’s easy to say that I should have taken that course and the other students shouldn’t have, but I don’t think you could have predicted who would have their life changed by a course a priori. "
right, so maybe Shakespeare isn't such a "waste" after all; certainly there's plenty there to last a lifetime - no matter what the woke kooks - who are doing more to ruin schools than anyone - say
Shakespeare specifically is just neither that good a writer nor writing in consistent language, and what was "eternal" about him was long taken into other, better works.
Mr Caplan concedes that the largest benefit of schools is that they act as day jails for unruly youth. Not sure how Mr. Zuiden didn't see this in the book.
It's not a coincidence that public schooling came into prominence when the western world was industrializing and people moved into the cities in large numbers. Having a bunch of kids running around all day while their parents were in the factories was a recipe for disaster.
Just read Lindbergh (Charles Lindbergh). He essentially flunked out of college. He just wasn’t interested. Once he found a topic that moved him, he threw himself at it with amazing enthusiasm.
Society has got to be better off waiting for each individual to reach out. A bit of general education is fine. We push too much.
We should keep in mind the degree to which deeply rooted learning comes from trial-and-error as opposed to a regimented curriculum. Yes there's a small but significant proportion of the population who learn quite by following the logic and integrating new information into a mental scaffolding which leads to a certain consilience very useful for cognitively demanding work, but this is *roughly* indicated by IQ anyway, so we could just test most people like we do with standardized tests to get an idea of a kid's capacity for that kind of work
For everyone else, they just need to learn by doing, taking mentors' advice, and making mistakes in the process of trying to solve a new problem or fix something that went awry. This is related to the notion of "massive input" which seems to represent how children learn. You just need to toss a whole bunch of things at them, and their proclivities will endear them towards things which come more easily. Part of maturation is putting in the extra effort to go past the surface level of those subjects you're endeared to and actually becoming competent at it. Right now we basically force kids to go straight to the mature "mode" of learning towards subjects which they are not particularly privy towards, so it's no surprise that people are turned off from putting in the work to go past the bare minimum of what's required of them.
Even I, who self-taught myself most of the math that I know (up through some graduate level stuff), was leaning more and more with time towards just doing the minimum because not only was the extra work to gain a fuller understanding not rewarding, but often it was costly because it diverted time from the other things I was supposed to be doing for that class or another class. That said, I do want to contribute that learning about applications of previous concepts allowed me to return to previous topics with a newfound appreciation as well as cognitive priming which made uptake both quicker and more long lasting. The example I'll give here was how algebraic topology encodes topological information within the algebraic structure of a group, and the ubiquitous long exact sequences we utilized to compute homology groups gave me an appreciation for the utility of the isomorphism theorems in group theory. And aside from the utility, there's a certain "this is too good to be true, but yet it's true" that you experience when you realize just how broadly applicable those isomorphism theorems are. You're seriously telling me that what elements get mapped to zero by a homomorphism force degeneracies (many-to-one mappings) upon the rest of the domain? That's radical man.
“I think a better approach that we use in my school network is to focus on broad exposure to different career paths early (internships/apprenticeships, job shadows, student entrepreneurship, etc.) and then let young people naturally sort out what they like and are good at vs. deciding it for them via a test
Define early? I was tested and tracked in 4th grade, after crying about how easy and boring the homework was. That seems too early to do what you’re suggesting, but I don’t want elementary schoolers to needlessly suffer in the wrong classes either.
> Define early? I was tested and tracked in 4th grade, after crying about how easy and boring the homework was.
An alternative: after crying about how easy and boring the homework was, the school said "would you like to try a more advanced/accelerated set of work?" and you (or realistically at this age your parents) said "sure!"
Same result, no testing, no tracking
His computer course and his uncle's French course were serendipitous. How do we keep the serendipity and ditch the drudgery?
Is there a way to increase serendipity? This seems a bit paradoxical. If we know how to predict it, it isn’t serendipity. Other parts of life can also spark serendipity.
Maybe instead of thinking of it as serendipity, we should think of it as uncovering someone's true calling or potential. That sounds less paradoxical, but actually may be no less difficult.
I don’t think serendipity can justify education.
> Maybe instead of thinking of it as serendipity, we should think of it as uncovering someone's true calling or potential. That sounds less paradoxical, but actually may be no less difficult.
To me, this is one of the most important purposes of education. I am inspired to do work to reform the system towards this end. A good example of this in practice: at Summit Public Schools (the charter network where I work) we run a program called Expeditions, where four times a year we pause all "normal" courses for a 2-week period. Students are given a menu of possible Expeditions experiences early in the year and are matched based on which ones they rank that they are most interested in. Expeditions courses are everything from Wilderness Science to Auto Mechanics to Pre-law to Robotics to Personal Finance. It's a huge effort to pull off, and I wish we could do it more than 8 weeks a year, but it is worth it; students are exposed to a much broader set of potential post-high-school life pathways and they consistently rate it as one of the best parts of their high school experience, both in high school and as alumni.
His assertion that schools gain little when students are classified with IEPs is false (see Thomas Sowell’s book on Charter Schools). His point is flawed if only for the fact that public schools are not managed like private schools (tuitions must cover all expenses at private schools while government schools are funded by taxpayer dollars so additional funding due to special education adds up quickly when 100 or more kids are reclassified)
Author here - I haven’t read Sowell, but I do work at a charter school and I can confidently state that the cost of providing mandated individualized services to students with IEPs exceeds the additional funding we receive for them, and that this is the case at every school I’ve talked to.
I don't know about the admin side but teachers tend to avoid it, lots of extra work for them too.
hahaha. Thomas Sowell might be an expert in his subject, but he's an idiot on education.
The *average* sped kid costs twice as much as a non-sped kid. Sped for LDs is a waste. Sped for severely disabled kids who can't be educated who need special buses and two paras and diaper changes twice a day, plus a wildly expensive wheel chair is just institutional care. They cost about $100K/year.
For higher education, I fear the advocates aren't willing to give the real best defense -- it's more about the social benefits and pleasure than any kind of education.
Having a period of time to form friendships with other young people of around the same age and a time to learn how to live away from home and mix with people from around the country is incredibly valuable. People fucking love their time in college and make lifelong friendships.
Of course, taking this seriously would mean cutting a bunch of excess programs and slimming things down.
Author here: I agree that is a benefit of today’s system, but the university system is actually not well optimized for this either! If you wanted to design an institution towards this goal I think you could do significantly better (and cheaper) than the college setting.
Probably could if you were a dictator. But I think if you tried in our society it's quite likely that what you would get is similarly large wasteful spending on some kind of status signalling competition without the positive externalities that universities create.
First, I think it would be really hard to convince many people it was worth the money if you spelled this out directly. Moreover, in terms of the space of possibilities it's pretty amazing that instead of this role being filled by something like the military or tech company intern programs -- with the resulting goodwill that now goes to alumni donations going to support for defense contractors or brand loyalty -- we instead get something where that's channeled into a system with relatively valuable research externalities.
I'm not so much arguing that our system is even close to optimal in a theoretical sense, merely that societies virtually never achieve that kind of efficiency in these sort of things and all things considered it's a much better equilibrium than most ones I think plausibly could have resulted so we should be careful about messing too much with it.
I know Bryan isn't going to buy this but my sense is that we actually have quite a bit of evidence people are extremely irrational in terms of choices they make prospectively about socialization (we don't like to think of friends as things one buys and we don't appreciate how hard it is to just get up and join a club or other alternative so we don't properly weigh these impacts on our happiness very well).
If and when we start doing our public discourse about costs and benefits in terms of studies about utility rather than primarily in terms of dollars maybe then it will make sense to radically reforem the system.