Locking phones at school makes sense. Banning them completely would be inconvenient; there may be a good reason for parents to coordinate with their kids after the classes.
A disobedience guide for children, addressed to those facing physical abuse.
What I didn’t realize back then is that sometimes violence can be deterred not because you can outright win a conflict, but because it could be more costly than the victory is worth. I wish I’d fought harder and smarter, earlier.
Also (assuming that the environment disapproves of abuse), if the fight escalates, it becomes less deniable.
My anecdata is that everyone I know who skipped grades came out far the better for it, and we should do vastly more of this.
Yep, worked for me okay. The only downside was that I had one less year to compete at math olympiad.
The whole ‘emotional development’ form of argument seems crazy to me. Why would you want to take such a child and force them to ‘emotionally develop’ with dumber children their own age?
Technically, negative emotions are also emotions. :P
I sometimes ask people whether it would be okay to have an IQ 100 child study at school for IQ 70 children. And if not, what makes it so different from an IQ 130 child studying at school for IQ 100 children.
The usual responses are (a) “but that’s not the same, and IQ is a myth anyway; people with IQ 70 are retarded, but people with IQ 130 are indistinguishable from people with IQ 100 except for their ability to excel at IQ tests”, (b) “you need to learn how to live with IQ 100 people, because they are the majority, you can’t avoid them”. Both objections are wrong; smart people associate with other smart people, whether at job or in their free time.
And emotional development is much easier with people who are similar to you. Yes, ultimately you also need to understand people other than you, but that is an advanced lesson. Understanding people similar to you is the beginner lesson. You can’t simply skip beginner lessons without paying a price.
Ideal of course are schools that track each subject on its own, so you can skip kids around as appropriate and avoid boring them out of their minds.
This would obvious be the best, but logistically complicated from the perspective of making the schedule. If you want people to choose freely between different grades of math, it would be easiest to teach them all at the same time; but usually the same teachers are teaching different grades.
It could be done, but it requires greater changes that it seems.
The core justification is that the state of paying, and this allows profit from spending less and providing poor quality education. But if that is the case, why not compete by offering a better school that is still profitable? No explanation is given.
Trying to steelman the argument: Usually at market you choose from several different options, plus you often have an option not to buy at all (if you conclude that all offers suck, or all are too expensive). Even if you need to eat some food, you can e.g. substitute bread for rice if you conclude that all available bread sucks. Note that the “don’t buy anything” option works even against cartels to certain degree.
With education, you get a certain degree of geographical monopoly/cartel behavior, because most parents would not drive their children to school too far every day. So they need to choose among the local schools. Still a reasonable selection if you live in a big city, but less so in a small city or a village.
The usual monopoly behavior is to increase prices, but if the government is paying, the only remaining profit-maximizing strategy is to decrease the cost as low as possible. You don’t have to worry about too low quality, if parents don’t have much of a choice. And coordinating with your competitors is easy; they live next to you.
We have two stories:
Private schools steal resources and the best students from public schools.
Private school competition forces public schools to get their act together.
Everything in the left-wing, anti-market, statist and collectivist perspective says story one is a nightmare and story two is not a thing.
Everything in the pro-market, pro-freedom and standard economic perspective says story two should dominate, although the selection effect is still a concern.
I consider myself mostly pro-market, but my opinion is that good teachers are a scarce resource, and it is mostly a zero-sum game between schools trying to attract them. Not just private vs public. Even the good public schools are “stealing” teachers from the remaining public schools.
In theory, paying teachers more should attract more qualified people to the profession. In practice, how much more are you going to pay, and how many people will you attract? This probably depends a lot on the specific country, but I would expect the job market to be quite inelastic here—increasing teacher salaries by 10% or 20% would probably not attract many competent people. I mean, if you want someone good at math or computer science, you are kinda competing against the Silicon Valley; can you actually outpay them?
Competent people are rare, and the current educational system does not scale. That is the actual problem. Students are maybe 20% of the population (basically anyone between 6 and 18, plus the universities), so if you want 1 teacher per 20 students, then 1% of the population needs to become teachers. Note that 1% of the population is maybe 2% of the workforce (because excluding the kids, retired, disabled, etc.). Whatever traits and skills you expect a good teacher to have, it is probably too much to expect 2% of people to have that combination. Plus, many of those traits are wanted in other professions, too. (We also want e.g. doctors to be smart and empathic.)
What would help, in my opinion, is to make the system scale better, somehow. For example, I imagine we could use more video lessons. Like, one hour video lesson, one hour with a teacher. That would reduce the need of teachers by 50%, without compromising on quality, assuming that the videos are good. (The typical objection is that students can’t ask questions when they watch the video. But they could ask the question at the next lesson.) If we reduced the need for teachers by 50%, we could fire the worse half of them, and trust me, “the worse half of teachers” is pretty incompetent.
But I expect this not to happen, for various reasons. People in education are extremely conservative.
school choice would not hold schools accountable for good results. (...) what are the mechanisms that might make this happen?
This depends on how children are graded, and how much parents realize that getting worse grades at a better school may signify better results that getting better grades at a worse school.
I pessimistically assume that most parents will be inflexible and conclude that A is always better than B. Then most people will prefer schools with most grade inflation. The schools with most grade inflation will probably not have the best teachers or the best students.
Schools have a dual role of teaching / providing credentials. A school that promises to give your child good credentials no matter what may be preferable to a school that teaches better but gives fair credentials.
Locking phones at school makes sense. Banning them completely would be inconvenient; there may be a good reason for parents to coordinate with their kids after the classes.
Also (assuming that the environment disapproves of abuse), if the fight escalates, it becomes less deniable.
Yep, worked for me okay. The only downside was that I had one less year to compete at math olympiad.
Technically, negative emotions are also emotions. :P
I sometimes ask people whether it would be okay to have an IQ 100 child study at school for IQ 70 children. And if not, what makes it so different from an IQ 130 child studying at school for IQ 100 children.
The usual responses are (a) “but that’s not the same, and IQ is a myth anyway; people with IQ 70 are retarded, but people with IQ 130 are indistinguishable from people with IQ 100 except for their ability to excel at IQ tests”, (b) “you need to learn how to live with IQ 100 people, because they are the majority, you can’t avoid them”. Both objections are wrong; smart people associate with other smart people, whether at job or in their free time.
And emotional development is much easier with people who are similar to you. Yes, ultimately you also need to understand people other than you, but that is an advanced lesson. Understanding people similar to you is the beginner lesson. You can’t simply skip beginner lessons without paying a price.
This would obvious be the best, but logistically complicated from the perspective of making the schedule. If you want people to choose freely between different grades of math, it would be easiest to teach them all at the same time; but usually the same teachers are teaching different grades.
It could be done, but it requires greater changes that it seems.
Trying to steelman the argument: Usually at market you choose from several different options, plus you often have an option not to buy at all (if you conclude that all offers suck, or all are too expensive). Even if you need to eat some food, you can e.g. substitute bread for rice if you conclude that all available bread sucks. Note that the “don’t buy anything” option works even against cartels to certain degree.
With education, you get a certain degree of geographical monopoly/cartel behavior, because most parents would not drive their children to school too far every day. So they need to choose among the local schools. Still a reasonable selection if you live in a big city, but less so in a small city or a village.
The usual monopoly behavior is to increase prices, but if the government is paying, the only remaining profit-maximizing strategy is to decrease the cost as low as possible. You don’t have to worry about too low quality, if parents don’t have much of a choice. And coordinating with your competitors is easy; they live next to you.
I consider myself mostly pro-market, but my opinion is that good teachers are a scarce resource, and it is mostly a zero-sum game between schools trying to attract them. Not just private vs public. Even the good public schools are “stealing” teachers from the remaining public schools.
In theory, paying teachers more should attract more qualified people to the profession. In practice, how much more are you going to pay, and how many people will you attract? This probably depends a lot on the specific country, but I would expect the job market to be quite inelastic here—increasing teacher salaries by 10% or 20% would probably not attract many competent people. I mean, if you want someone good at math or computer science, you are kinda competing against the Silicon Valley; can you actually outpay them?
Competent people are rare, and the current educational system does not scale. That is the actual problem. Students are maybe 20% of the population (basically anyone between 6 and 18, plus the universities), so if you want 1 teacher per 20 students, then 1% of the population needs to become teachers. Note that 1% of the population is maybe 2% of the workforce (because excluding the kids, retired, disabled, etc.). Whatever traits and skills you expect a good teacher to have, it is probably too much to expect 2% of people to have that combination. Plus, many of those traits are wanted in other professions, too. (We also want e.g. doctors to be smart and empathic.)
What would help, in my opinion, is to make the system scale better, somehow. For example, I imagine we could use more video lessons. Like, one hour video lesson, one hour with a teacher. That would reduce the need of teachers by 50%, without compromising on quality, assuming that the videos are good. (The typical objection is that students can’t ask questions when they watch the video. But they could ask the question at the next lesson.) If we reduced the need for teachers by 50%, we could fire the worse half of them, and trust me, “the worse half of teachers” is pretty incompetent.
But I expect this not to happen, for various reasons. People in education are extremely conservative.
This depends on how children are graded, and how much parents realize that getting worse grades at a better school may signify better results that getting better grades at a worse school.
I pessimistically assume that most parents will be inflexible and conclude that A is always better than B. Then most people will prefer schools with most grade inflation. The schools with most grade inflation will probably not have the best teachers or the best students.
Schools have a dual role of teaching / providing credentials. A school that promises to give your child good credentials no matter what may be preferable to a school that teaches better but gives fair credentials.