I sometimes suspect that mass institutionalized schooling is net harmful because it kills off personal curiosity and fosters the mindset that education necessarily consists of being enrolled in a school and obeying commands issued by an authority (as opposed to learners directly seeking out knowledge and insight from self-chosen books and activities). I say sometimes suspect rather than believe because my intense emotional involvement with this issue causes me to doubt my rationality: therefore I heavily discount my personal impressions on majoritarian grounds.
OK, you’re the second person in this thread I’ve seen advocating this view, so maybe my pro-school view is the minority one here.
The idea of curiosity is very compelling, but how often does productive curiosity actually occur in people who don’t go to school? Modern society has lots of things to be curious about: television, video games, fan fiction, skateboarding, model rockets, etc. The level of interesting-ness doesn’t correlate with the level of importance (examples of fields with potential large improvements for humanity: theoretical physics, chemistry, computer science, artificial intelligence, biology, etc.) If you believe model rockets are a sure lead-in to theoretical physics or chemistry, I think you’re being overly optimistic.
The most important effect of school is providing an external force that gets people to study these (relatively) boring but important fields. Also, you get benefits like learning to speak in public, being able to use expensive school facilities, having lots of other people to converse with on the topics you’re learning, etc. To do boring things on your own, you need self-discipline, which is hard to come by. School does a great job of augmenting self-discipline.
By the way, I thought about school much the same way you did until I left high school (two years early) and went to community college. I can’t explain why, but for some reason it’s a million times better.
Well, in community college, you’re now the “customer”, and determine what you want to study, and how to study. It still provides a framework, but you’re much freer in that framework. The question is to what extent can we get similar benefits in earlier schooling. AFAICT, the best way to do so would be to make more of it optional. (Another pet project of mine would be to separate grading/certification and teaching. They’re very different things, and having the same entity do both of them seems like a recipe for altering one to make the other look good.)
″...separate grading/certification and teaching....”
John Stuart Mill advocates that in the last chapter of On Liberty. He wanted the state to be in charge of testing and certification, but get out of the teaching business altogether (except for providing funding for educating the poor). I like the idea.
(Another pet project of mine would be to separate grading/certification and teaching. They’re very different things, and having the same entity do both of them seems like a recipe for altering one to make the other look good.)
I really think this is the domino that could trigger reform throughout the entire system. The problem is that there are only a few professions that require a specific, critical skill-set which can be easily tested and which completion of a degree does not guarantee.
“I sometimes suspect that mass institutionalized schooling is net harmful because it kills off personal curiosity and fosters the mindset that education necessarily consists of being enrolled in a school and obeying commands issued by an authority”
Yes, I agree. Look at the success EY has had as an autodidact. His scientific career is ~10 years ahead of mine (and the gap would be more like 50 years if I hadn’t found OB + his other writings). I spent soooooooooo much time studying theoretical physics… because that is what is socially acceptable for a mathematically talented young scientist to study in the top universities. [edit: most autodidacts probably end up not doing as well. Selection Bias, etc. But it is a tantalizing piece of evidence
I agree in principle. The problem is kids in the workplace. When you’re gardening and making necklaces, the children can float around among the adults, learn by observation, and from one another. When both parents are sitting in front of a computer all day...
And in the US there’s the whole North-Korea style pledging of allegiance to a piece of coloured cloth. So no shock then that USAans seem to run to “heavily indoctrinated” (and hence woo-girls, laugh-tracks, zinger comedy, etc) - and also no shock that in a Pew Poll of US adults in 2007, 68% of respondents said that they believed that angels and demons intervene in their everyday lives. (Presumably a lot of those people attended school at some stage, and yet managed to get to adulthood believe in the equivalent of the easter bunny).
Outside of your borders, all of that freaks us civilised folks out.
Please do not derail threads to promote your political opinions.
In addition, you appear to be suffering from the halo effect here—pledging allegiance is Bad (because it’s similar to North Korea) and superstition, “woo-girls, laugh-tracks, zinger comedy, etc” and being “heavily indoctrinated” all magically follow. Bad Things somehow generating other Bad Things is pretty damn magical thinking, but it’s a common pattern to fall into (if you’re lazy you get fat, if you ban prayer in schools you get school shootings.)
If, on the other hand, you have some theory as to how “North-Korea style pledging of allegiance to a piece of coloured cloth” is somehow the cause of all these things, and it is relevant to, y’know, rationality, then I advise you to write a top-level post on the topic.
And for the record, I’m not American, and while the low sanity waterline is a problem—and not just in America—I am not especially freaked out by people “pledging allegiance” to their country, or for that matter by laugh tracks.
Do you seriously think that the Pledge of Allegiance (and other similar things) are not designed to indoctrinate? Let’s go to the writings of the guy who penned the Pledge of Allegiance:
″..the training of citizens in the common knowledge and the common duties of citizenship belongs irrevocably to the State.” (emphasis mine)
The foundational aim of indoctrination is to get people when their minds are sufficiently plastic as to have few critical filters (i.e., in childhood) and to ‘re-wire’ the plastic brain/mind with the indoctrinator’s desired trope at the front. This is done by rote (church liturgies, pledges and so forth).
As elsewhere, you commit a logical fallacy: that the fact that you’re unaware of the work that has been done showing that propaganda works, means that it doesn’t.
Also, bad things do cause other bad things if the other bad things stem from a reduction in a defence mechanism, where the reduction was caused by the initial bad thing. Bombing water treatment (bad thing) and sewage plants causes increases in water borne disease (other bad things).
There’s no requirement for magic (and therefore no requirement for attempts at deploying hackneyed middle-school debating tropes).
There is a very sound basis for believing that attempts to indoctrinate lead to a tendency for the population to be indoctrinated: the best basis that I can think of is that governments invest heavily in indoctrination using the same methodology as developed by Bernays and later Goebbels. If the methdology was not leading to the desired result, .gov would change it (I’m no admirer of .gov’s ability to get things right, but the indoctrination of the pubic is the sine qua non of the tax-parasite’s life).
Indoctrinated individuals have a greater tendency to lower levels of critical thinking (ever had an argument with a born again Christian? cheap shot, but I can give you a bunch of cites from the psych lit, too). Thus any device that increases the net level of indoctrination will cause—not by ‘magic’ - an increase in other things associated with reduced critical faculties.
What’s with the formatting? Please adhere to standard conventions, there’s a reason for them (did I do that right?).
Also, you’re overusing applause lights in your comments, it’s frankly annoying. We’re at least trying not to march our little soldier arguments against each other, but to shift our opinions as we encounter flaws in our arguments and strength in the other commenters’. Goebbels and born-against-Christian (hah, I’m gonna leave that typo in) examples just kill rational discourse.
While I agree with your comment, I must say said formatting is simply being (over)used for emphasis, and it seems like rather a cheap shot to attack it.
The remark on the formatting was not meant as a cheap shot or to denigrate the content in any way. At least for me bold/colored text interspersed in a paragraph makes it significantly harder to read and to focus on the flow of the sentences and their nuances. You always have some bold attention! screaming word in your immediate peripheral vision. If it’s a short comment making a single point that is acceptable, but in a multiparagraphed comment it gets tedious.
So I’m happy to lead our arguments where noone has gone before, just not to lead them there boldly …
It’s been some time since I checked the standard style manuals: is there really a stated style for emphasis in comments on the internet? It would not surprise me too much—there are a lot of people with too much time on their hands, who like telling others what to do (and the less important the sphere of endeavour, the more urgent the need to be boss of it). [Oh, and apologies in advance for not using em-dashes...]
As to whether you “d[id] that right”, it depends. Reading it back to myself, it would appear not. Try all-caps on the bold bits and see if it makes sense hen you read it out loud… then do the same for the material to which you took stylistic objection and see if that makes sense.
As to Goebells: that specific example really needed to be in there, since he made clear that he admired Bernays (and the American eugenics movement). Born-against-Christians are the handiest example of indoctrination.
I don’t know what “applause lights” are: doubtless some egregious thing that is so important that it merited a new jargonistic term for the [meta]cognoscenti to use to beat us ‘mundanes’. (What does the style manual say about italicising Italian words on the internet?)
LBNL: if you don’t think that there is a clique here who is, quite specifically, “march[ing] [their] little soldier arguments”, I think you have not been paying attention. It’s as bad as coming across a coven of Randians, and almost as correct-line as the Freepers (the trolling of Freepers is one of life’s little joys).
The sort of people who say “Your entire theory of life and morals is incomplete and would bee useless for programming an AI” in response to a 21-word phrase at the end of a comment which did not purport to be exhaustive or complete, and was never put forward as a candidate for coding an AI.
Also the sort of people who say “What you said doesn’t make sense to me, so you must be wrong and not know what you’re talking about” while revealing gaping holes in their understanding of early-undergraduate material that is absolutely central to the issue at hand.
I’ve taught people like that—usually at first year level: people who throw about words like “utilitarian” and “consequentialist”, while steadfastly ignoring the long-term consequences of the system they are advocating (or implicitly supporting) and attacking anybody they view as ideologically impure. It’s hilarious.
It’s been some time since I checked the standard style manuals: is there really a stated style for emphasis in comments on the internet?
No. There are, however, community norms in this particular corner of the internet.
As to Goebells: that specific example really needed to be in there, since he made clear that he admired Bernays (and the American eugenics movement). Born-against-Christians are the handiest example of indoctrination.
Still, it is generally a good idea to avoid politicized examples, especially here.
I don’t know what “applause lights” are: doubtless some egregious thing that is so important that it merited a new jargonistic term for the [meta]cognoscenti to use to beat us ‘mundanes’.
LBNL: if you don’t think that there is a clique here who is, quite specifically, “march[ing] [their] little soldier arguments”, I think you have not been paying attention. It’s as bad as coming across a coven of Randians, and almost as correct-line as the Freepers (the trolling of Freepers is one of life’s little joys).
The sort of people who say “Your entire theory of life and morals is incomplete and would bee useless for programming an AI” in response to a 21-word phrase at the end of a comment which did not purport to be exhaustive or complete, and was never put forward as a candidate for coding an AI.
Also the sort of people who say “What you said doesn’t make sense to me, so you must be wrong and not know what you’re talking about” while revealing gaping holes in their understanding of early-undergraduate material that is absolutely central to the issue at hand.
I’ve taught people like that—usually at first year level: people who throw about words like “utilitarian” and “consequentialist”, while steadfastly ignoring the long-term consequences of the system they are advocating (or implicitly supporting) and attacking anybody they view as ideologically impure. It’s hilarious.
Do you seriously think that the Pledge of Allegiance (and other similar things) are not designed to indoctrinate? Let’s go to the writings of the guy who penned the Pledge of Allegiance:
″..the training of citizens in the common knowledge and the common duties of citizenship belongs irrevocably to the State.” (emphasis mine)
The foundational aim of indoctrination is to get people when their minds are sufficiently plastic as to have few critical filters (i.e., in childhood) and to ‘re-wire’ the plastic brain/mind with the indoctrinator’s desired trope at the front. This is done by rote (church liturgies, pledges and so forth).
I am not claiming that it is not indoctrination, by that definition. Nor am I claiming that it is. I am asserting that the term “indoctrination” is counterproductive, as the connotations, particularly the political ones, are likely to interfere with discussion and clear thinking. I also note that this comment section is probably not the place for such discussion.
There’s no requirement for magic (and therefore no requirement for attempts at deploying hackneyed middle-school debating tropes).
Of course not.
If, on the other hand, you have some theory as to how “North-Korea style pledging of allegiance to a piece of coloured cloth” is somehow the cause of all these things, and it is relevant to, y’know, rationality, then I advise you to write a top-level post on the topic.
I stand by this statement.
Thus any device that increases the net level of indoctrination will cause—not by ‘magic’ - an increase in other things associated with reduced critical faculties.
This is usually referred to here as the need to “raise the sanity waterline”—I’m not sure where the term originates—and as I said, I am aware that it’s a problem, but I don’t see why Americans pledging allegiance is an especially vital part of that.
Incidentally, while this does not alter the substance of your post, I note that your writing style seems needlessly rhetorical, which is likely to attract hostility from people pattern-matching to various ideologues. This is a website dedicated to rationality, not politics.
I sometimes suspect that mass institutionalized schooling is net harmful because it kills off personal curiosity and fosters the mindset that education necessarily consists of being enrolled in a school and obeying commands issued by an authority (as opposed to learners directly seeking out knowledge and insight from self-chosen books and activities). I say sometimes suspect rather than believe because my intense emotional involvement with this issue causes me to doubt my rationality: therefore I heavily discount my personal impressions on majoritarian grounds.
I don’t actually believe it as such, but I think J. Michael Bailey et al. are onto something.
OK, you’re the second person in this thread I’ve seen advocating this view, so maybe my pro-school view is the minority one here.
The idea of curiosity is very compelling, but how often does productive curiosity actually occur in people who don’t go to school? Modern society has lots of things to be curious about: television, video games, fan fiction, skateboarding, model rockets, etc. The level of interesting-ness doesn’t correlate with the level of importance (examples of fields with potential large improvements for humanity: theoretical physics, chemistry, computer science, artificial intelligence, biology, etc.) If you believe model rockets are a sure lead-in to theoretical physics or chemistry, I think you’re being overly optimistic.
The most important effect of school is providing an external force that gets people to study these (relatively) boring but important fields. Also, you get benefits like learning to speak in public, being able to use expensive school facilities, having lots of other people to converse with on the topics you’re learning, etc. To do boring things on your own, you need self-discipline, which is hard to come by. School does a great job of augmenting self-discipline.
By the way, I thought about school much the same way you did until I left high school (two years early) and went to community college. I can’t explain why, but for some reason it’s a million times better.
Well, in community college, you’re now the “customer”, and determine what you want to study, and how to study. It still provides a framework, but you’re much freer in that framework. The question is to what extent can we get similar benefits in earlier schooling. AFAICT, the best way to do so would be to make more of it optional. (Another pet project of mine would be to separate grading/certification and teaching. They’re very different things, and having the same entity do both of them seems like a recipe for altering one to make the other look good.)
″...separate grading/certification and teaching....”
John Stuart Mill advocates that in the last chapter of On Liberty. He wanted the state to be in charge of testing and certification, but get out of the teaching business altogether (except for providing funding for educating the poor). I like the idea.
I should really get around to reading On Liberty one of these days.
I really think this is the domino that could trigger reform throughout the entire system. The problem is that there are only a few professions that require a specific, critical skill-set which can be easily tested and which completion of a degree does not guarantee.
“I sometimes suspect that mass institutionalized schooling is net harmful because it kills off personal curiosity and fosters the mindset that education necessarily consists of being enrolled in a school and obeying commands issued by an authority”
Yes, I agree. Look at the success EY has had as an autodidact. His scientific career is ~10 years ahead of mine (and the gap would be more like 50 years if I hadn’t found OB + his other writings). I spent soooooooooo much time studying theoretical physics… because that is what is socially acceptable for a mathematically talented young scientist to study in the top universities. [edit: most autodidacts probably end up not doing as well. Selection Bias, etc. But it is a tantalizing piece of evidence
See the wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autodidact
]
So you found OB and his other writings 40 years ago?
Also, kudos for spending a lot of time studying theoretical physics.
That isn’t implied. It merely suggests that OB and his other writings facilitated learning which would have taken 40 years without these resources.
I agree in principle. The problem is kids in the workplace. When you’re gardening and making necklaces, the children can float around among the adults, learn by observation, and from one another. When both parents are sitting in front of a computer all day...
And in the US there’s the whole North-Korea style pledging of allegiance to a piece of coloured cloth. So no shock then that USAans seem to run to “heavily indoctrinated” (and hence woo-girls, laugh-tracks, zinger comedy, etc) - and also no shock that in a Pew Poll of US adults in 2007, 68% of respondents said that they believed that angels and demons intervene in their everyday lives. (Presumably a lot of those people attended school at some stage, and yet managed to get to adulthood believe in the equivalent of the easter bunny).
Outside of your borders, all of that freaks us civilised folks out.
Please do not derail threads to promote your political opinions.
In addition, you appear to be suffering from the halo effect here—pledging allegiance is Bad (because it’s similar to North Korea) and superstition, “woo-girls, laugh-tracks, zinger comedy, etc” and being “heavily indoctrinated” all magically follow. Bad Things somehow generating other Bad Things is pretty damn magical thinking, but it’s a common pattern to fall into (if you’re lazy you get fat, if you ban prayer in schools you get school shootings.)
If, on the other hand, you have some theory as to how “North-Korea style pledging of allegiance to a piece of coloured cloth” is somehow the cause of all these things, and it is relevant to, y’know, rationality, then I advise you to write a top-level post on the topic.
And for the record, I’m not American, and while the low sanity waterline is a problem—and not just in America—I am not especially freaked out by people “pledging allegiance” to their country, or for that matter by laugh tracks.
Do you seriously think that the Pledge of Allegiance (and other similar things) are not designed to indoctrinate? Let’s go to the writings of the guy who penned the Pledge of Allegiance:
″..the training of citizens in the common knowledge and the common duties of citizenship belongs irrevocably to the State.” (emphasis mine)
The foundational aim of indoctrination is to get people when their minds are sufficiently plastic as to have few critical filters (i.e., in childhood) and to ‘re-wire’ the plastic brain/mind with the indoctrinator’s desired trope at the front. This is done by rote (church liturgies, pledges and so forth).
As elsewhere, you commit a logical fallacy: that the fact that you’re unaware of the work that has been done showing that propaganda works, means that it doesn’t.
Also, bad things do cause other bad things if the other bad things stem from a reduction in a defence mechanism, where the reduction was caused by the initial bad thing. Bombing water treatment (bad thing) and sewage plants causes increases in water borne disease (other bad things).
There’s no requirement for magic (and therefore no requirement for attempts at deploying hackneyed middle-school debating tropes).
There is a very sound basis for believing that attempts to indoctrinate lead to a tendency for the population to be indoctrinated: the best basis that I can think of is that governments invest heavily in indoctrination using the same methodology as developed by Bernays and later Goebbels. If the methdology was not leading to the desired result, .gov would change it (I’m no admirer of .gov’s ability to get things right, but the indoctrination of the pubic is the sine qua non of the tax-parasite’s life).
Indoctrinated individuals have a greater tendency to lower levels of critical thinking (ever had an argument with a born again Christian? cheap shot, but I can give you a bunch of cites from the psych lit, too). Thus any device that increases the net level of indoctrination will cause—not by ‘magic’ - an increase in other things associated with reduced critical faculties.
What’s with the formatting? Please adhere to standard conventions, there’s a reason for them (did I do that right?).
Also, you’re overusing applause lights in your comments, it’s frankly annoying. We’re at least trying not to march our little soldier arguments against each other, but to shift our opinions as we encounter flaws in our arguments and strength in the other commenters’. Goebbels and born-against-Christian (hah, I’m gonna leave that typo in) examples just kill rational discourse.
While I agree with your comment, I must say said formatting is simply being (over)used for emphasis, and it seems like rather a cheap shot to attack it.
The remark on the formatting was not meant as a cheap shot or to denigrate the content in any way. At least for me bold/colored text interspersed in a paragraph makes it significantly harder to read and to focus on the flow of the sentences and their nuances. You always have some bold attention! screaming word in your immediate peripheral vision. If it’s a short comment making a single point that is acceptable, but in a multiparagraphed comment it gets tedious.
So I’m happy to lead our arguments where noone has gone before, just not to lead them there boldly …
It’s been some time since I checked the standard style manuals: is there really a stated style for emphasis in comments on the internet? It would not surprise me too much—there are a lot of people with too much time on their hands, who like telling others what to do (and the less important the sphere of endeavour, the more urgent the need to be boss of it). [Oh, and apologies in advance for not using em-dashes...]
As to whether you “d[id] that right”, it depends. Reading it back to myself, it would appear not. Try all-caps on the bold bits and see if it makes sense hen you read it out loud… then do the same for the material to which you took stylistic objection and see if that makes sense.
As to Goebells: that specific example really needed to be in there, since he made clear that he admired Bernays (and the American eugenics movement). Born-against-Christians are the handiest example of indoctrination.
I don’t know what “applause lights” are: doubtless some egregious thing that is so important that it merited a new jargonistic term for the [meta]cognoscenti to use to beat us ‘mundanes’. (What does the style manual say about italicising Italian words on the internet?)
LBNL: if you don’t think that there is a clique here who is, quite specifically, “march[ing] [their] little soldier arguments”, I think you have not been paying attention. It’s as bad as coming across a coven of Randians, and almost as correct-line as the Freepers (the trolling of Freepers is one of life’s little joys).
The sort of people who say “Your entire theory of life and morals is incomplete and would bee useless for programming an AI” in response to a 21-word phrase at the end of a comment which did not purport to be exhaustive or complete, and was never put forward as a candidate for coding an AI.
Also the sort of people who say “What you said doesn’t make sense to me, so you must be wrong and not know what you’re talking about” while revealing gaping holes in their understanding of early-undergraduate material that is absolutely central to the issue at hand.
I’ve taught people like that—usually at first year level: people who throw about words like “utilitarian” and “consequentialist”, while steadfastly ignoring the long-term consequences of the system they are advocating (or implicitly supporting) and attacking anybody they view as ideologically impure. It’s hilarious.
No. There are, however, community norms in this particular corner of the internet.
Still, it is generally a good idea to avoid politicized examples, especially here.
Was that really necessary? Applause Lights.
Firstly, Arguments As Soldiers.
Secondly, please provide specific examples if you have some criticism, don’t just sort people into a reference class containing idiots.
I am not claiming that it is not indoctrination, by that definition. Nor am I claiming that it is. I am asserting that the term “indoctrination” is counterproductive, as the connotations, particularly the political ones, are likely to interfere with discussion and clear thinking. I also note that this comment section is probably not the place for such discussion.
Of course not.
I stand by this statement.
This is usually referred to here as the need to “raise the sanity waterline”—I’m not sure where the term originates—and as I said, I am aware that it’s a problem, but I don’t see why Americans pledging allegiance is an especially vital part of that.
Incidentally, while this does not alter the substance of your post, I note that your writing style seems needlessly rhetorical, which is likely to attract hostility from people pattern-matching to various ideologues. This is a website dedicated to rationality, not politics.