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Emil O. W. Kirkegaard's avatar

In Denmark, 27% of public school (0-10th grade) spending is on special education, which targets about 7% of students. It has seen large increases in recent years given the explosion in various diagnoses.

https://www.kl.dk/momentum/arkiv/2023/23-kun-omkring-hver-syvende-elev-fra-specialtilbud-faar-taget-en-ungdomsuddannelse

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Brett van Zuiden's avatar

Thank you for your thoughtful response! Let me start by sharing how much I appreciate you taking the time to engage with a random reader on the internet. This has been a real pleasure for me and has encouraged me to reach out to other authors whose work I enjoy; I hope it inspires others to do likewise.

It’s really hard to change one's mind, particularly when one’s personal and professional identities are wrapped up in a particular stance. This book and discussion has made me seriously consider the question “are you sure this whole system is worth saving?”, and while my answer is still yes, I am grateful for the prompt and we’ll see where time takes me.

As a parallel, while I am going to respond to some of the points you make, I wanted to center what my hopes were in reaching out to you in the first place. While I don’t expect to change your mind overall, my hope is that this conversation will prompt two things to consider:

1) Education is a really big Chesterton’s Fence. It would be really bad if we dismantled it and found ourselves with less ability to discover vaccines or a higher rate of child abuse. I recognize that this is a fully generalizable argument against changing anything, and that actually the consequences could be the opposite! I know that countenancing concerns like this in a book or political argument makes the argument less effective, but if you’re serious about advancing this policy I’d ask that you think deeply about these potential downsides and how to mitigate them. The one I’m most concerned about is in a world with greater parental choice (up to and including just paying parents money and having them choose what to do with it) how you handle situations where the desires of the child differ significantly from the desires of the parent.

2) There are exciting possible visions of what the education system could become. I’m personally excited to create a system where children spend more time exploring genuine interests and finding what lives at the intersection of what they’re good at, what they enjoy, and what can support their economic well-being. I think this looks like lots more electives and internships at the middle and high school level. There are other potential visions - I particularly like the visions explored in Neil Postman’s The End of Education and Peter Gray’s Free to Learn. Perhaps you look at these and think “nope, still not worth saving,” but maybe they’ll inspire some hope.

To the specifics - I’ll focus on the areas where we disagree that align with the above goals.

*Entrepreneurship*

To be clear, when I say “entrepreneurship” my definition expands far beyond silicon valley startups. This little-e entrepreneurship includes people selling craft goods on Etsy, self-employed refrigerator technicians, farmers, physicians running a small practice, etc. - roles where the gap between provider and customer is minimized. And while credentials might be helpful in impressing a potential customer, happy reference customers matter much more. The argument is that a world with more little-e entrepreneurship places much more emphasis on skills over credentials, not that credentials are worthless.

*Test-and-track*

I concede that doing a full lit review is more of an investment than I’m willing to make :) But, I will point out that the inclusion of “after 1970” (versus pre-civil rights act) somewhat validates my argument: test and track creates high-leverage points where racist people can do a lot of harm.

And I’m not opposed to having kids take tests to help them assess their abilities! But the correlation between e.g. one’s SAT Math score and one’s ability to be a professional software engineer is not 1.0. Perhaps our disagreement is one of degree: I am opposed to the _tracking_, where an adult tells a child what they can or cannot do based on a test, versus saying “hey - it looks like you’re pretty good at these things and less good at those things - perhaps you should try out X elective or apply for your next internship in Y field?” And if the child is adamant that they want to be a doctor or youtube streamer or civil engineer even if their test scores say otherwise I’d rather have them try it and fail (in a fast, low-stakes way, ideally in early high school) rather than having an adult tell them they can’t.

*School should be fun*

Agreed! Or at least more fun than currently. I think learning will always require pushing through some un-fun parts (practicing scales, memorizing kanji, etc.) but that’s okay. Lot’s of reformers (including me!) have ideas on how to change what happens in schools so that they inspire joy. My bet is that a well designed school actually is more fun and satisfying to a young person than pure structureless freedom.

*Fat tails*

I want to reemphasize that I’m looking at fat tails from society’s perspective, not the perspective of the individual. I thought the book’s case on the individual side was pretty complete; I felt this was a missing consideration from the societal calculus. I admit to not having done the spreadsheets, so perhaps the real response to me is “shut up and calculate,” but my argument for the fatness of the tails (again from a societal standpoint) is the absolutely _massive_ impact of some discoveries and inventions (dwarf wheat, mRNA vaccines, etc.)

And careful with your assumptions - I am in a Japanese course right now! And have an O-Chem textbook I’ve been meaning to get through, I recently worked through a book on modern physics, etc. - enrolling in 30 courses over the next four years sounds wonderful if I had not other obligations :)

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To return to the top - thank you for the book and for this opportunity; hopefully you found some of these points interesting to reflect on.

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