Author: Ian Welsh Page 5 of 410

Back during the pandemic, two things happened with students. Overall, they committed more suicides, BUT when schools were closed, suicide rates went down. (I predicted the latter at the time.)

Then there’s this lovely chart:

Well, well, well. Seems forcing people to do what they don’t want to do, in what is usually a socially oppressive environment, is bad for them.

There are, of course, those who thrive in school, and love it — usually the socially dominant kids. But for a lot of kids, school is Hell.

I think this has a lot to do with alignment of goals. I wrote recently about the epidemic of AI cheating and how to avoid it, but I think the smartest commentary I’ve seen on AI cheating, and cheating in general, is this one:

Has anyone stopped to ask WHY students cheat? Would a buddhist monk “cheat” at meditation? Would an artist “cheat” at painting? No. When process and outcomes are aligned, there’s no incentive to cheat. So what’s happening differently at colleges?

Back in the stone age, I took an introductory sociology class. The professor asked the students who were intending to be teachers to put up their hands. A forest. She told them to keep their hands up, and asked everyone who was planning on social work to put up their hands.

Out of a class of about a hundred and fifty, only three people’s hands weren’t up.

147 students weren’t taking sociology because they were interested in it, but because it was a way-station on the way to a goal.

The problem with “higher” education is that good jobs are locked by the requirement for degrees. The vast majority of students aren’t in university because they want to learn, they’re there because they need the credential. They don’t see the applicability of what they’re learning to their future jobs, in most cases correctly, so they just want to get through the courses with the least effort possible while getting the necessary grades.

Of course, they cheat. They’re being forced to waste three or four years and huge amounts of money on a chance of getting past the gatekeepers.

I used to amuse myself by talking to graduates. I’d ask them what their major was, then discuss it with them. Nine times out of ten, I knew more about the subject than they did, even though I’d never taken a single course in the topic at hand. They’d memorized enough to pass the tests, then immediately forgot it, because it had no relevance to their goals or their life.

The only case for requiring a bachelors degree, in a job that doesn’t use the knowledge taught by that course, is that it screens out people who won’t put up with bullshit and who won’t do what their told when it doesn’t align with their goals. A B.A. certifies to potential employers that, “this person will do what they’re told and put up with your bullshit. They barely need to be coerced, they do what is expected of them.”

Problems is, it also certifies that, “they will put in as little effort in the job as they can, unless it serves them to do otherwise.”

If it were up to me, I’d make it illegal to require unrelated educational credentials. Want to hire an engineer (an actual engineer, not a programmer)? Fine, ask for a degree. But if it’s just some unrelated job, no.

But I’d go even further, I’d mandate exams to test for job knowledge. (In person, supervised) similar to how a lot of companies test programmers. “Can you actually make a small program?”

Testing for jobs used to be pretty standard. Almost all civil service jobs were gated behind exams and so were a lot of private sector ones.

Then see how they perform for a few months.

Forcing people to do what they don’t want to do is sometimes necessary, to be sure. But it has to make sense. There’s plenty of evidence that good home-schooling teaches students skills faster than classroom teaching (and no, not all  home schooling is right wing nutjobs, where I grew up it was hippies.) As for socialization, there are other ways to socialize children, most of which are probably more pleasant and less harmful than the often hellish social circumstances in schools, especially high schools.

As for spending time with adults, well, that’s what children did for most of history. They weren’t stuck just with kids for most of the day, then just their parents. After all, you’re a kid for a lot less longer than you’re an adult, and it’s the adult world you need to know how to navigate.

I’m not saying mass schooling has or had no benefits. It obviously does and did. But can we find a better way to teach children?

This blog has always been free to read, but it isn’t free to produce. If you’d like to support my writing, I’d appreciate it. You can donate or subscribe by clicking on this link.