there are powerful political forces who want to optimize education to let universities teach skills that are valuable to employeers. On the other hand you do have people on the left who think that universities should teach critical thinking and create a society of individuals who follow the ideals of the Enlightment. There’s a real conflict of values.
In this specific conflict, I would prefer having two kinds of school—universities and polytechnics—each optimized for one of the purposes, and let the students decide.
Seems to me that conflicts of values are worse when a unified decision has to be made for everyone. (Imagine that people would start insisting that only one subject can be ever taught at schools, and then we would have a conflict of values whether the subject should be English or Math. But that would be just a consequence of a bad decision at meta level.)
But yeah, I can imagine a situation with a conflict of values that cannot be solved by letting everyone pick their choice. And then the powerful people can push their choice, without being open about it.
Seems to me that conflicts of values are worse when a unified decision has to be made for everyone. (Imagine that people would start insisting that only one subject can be ever taught at schools, and then we would have a conflict of values whether the subject should be English or Math. But that would be just a consequence of a bad decision at meta level.)
You do have this in a case like teaching the theory of evolution.
You have plenty of people who are quite passionate but making an unified decision to teach everyone the theory of evolution, including the parents of children who don’t believe in the theory of evolution.
Germany has compulsory schooling. Some fundamental chrisitan don’t want their children in public schools. If you discuss the issue with people who have political power you find that those people don’t want that those children get taught some strange fundamental worldview that includes things like young earth creationism.
The want that the children learn the basic paradigm that people in German society follow.
On the other hand I’m not sure whether you can get a motivation like that from reading the newspaper. Everyone who’s involved in the newspaper believes that it’s worth to teach children the theory of evolution so it’s not worth writing a newspaper article about it.
Is it a secret persecution of fundamentalist Christians? The fundamentalist Christian from whom the government takes away the children for “child abuse” because the children don’t go to school feel perscecuted.
On the other hand the politician in question don’t really feel like the are persecuting fundamentalist Christians.
The ironic thing about it is that compulsory schooling was introduced in Germany for the stated purpose of turning children into ’good Christians”.
In a case like evolution, do you sincerely believe that the intellectual elite should use their power to push a Texan public school to teach evolution even if the parents of the children and the local board of education don’t want it?
The ironic thing about it is that compulsory schooling was introduced in Germany for the stated purpose of turning children into ’good Christians”.
Yeah, when people in power create tools to help them maintain the power, if those tools are universal enough, they will be reused by the people who get the power later.
In a case like evolution, do you sincerely believe that the intellectual elite should use their power to push a Texan public school to teach evolution even if the parents of the children and the local board of education don’t want it?
The trade-offs need to be discussed rationally. The answer would probably be “yes”, but there are some negative side effects. For example, you create a precedent for other elites to push their agenda. (Just like those Christians did with the compulsory education.) Maybe a third option could be found. (Something like: Don’t say what schools have to teach, but make the exams independent on schools. Make the evolutionary knowledge necessary to pass a biology exam. Make it public when students or schools or cities are “failing in biology”.)
Something like: Don’t say what schools have to teach, but make the exams independent on schools.
Why have governments control exams at all? Have different certifying authorities and employers are free to decide which authorities’ diploma they accept.
That could work! On the other hand, it may set up a situation where a person who is only guilty of being raised in the wrong place may never get a decent job. Wonder what can be done to prevent that as much as possible?
That depends on the parents. Yes, many parents (including mine and, presumably, yours) have the best interests of the child at heart, and have the knowledge and ability to be able to serve those interests quite well.
This is not, however, true of all parents. There’s no entrance exam for parenthood. Thus:
Some parents are directly abusive to their children (including: many parents who abuse alcohol and/or drugs)
Some parents are total idiots; even if they have the best interests of the child at heart, they have no idea what to do about it
Some parents are simply too mired in poverty; they can’t afford food for their children, never mind schooling
Some parents are, usually through no fault of their own, dead while their children are still young
Some parents are absent for some reason (possibly an acrimonious divorce? Possibly in order to find employment?)
An education bureaucrat, on the other hand, is a person hand-picked to make decisions for a vast number of children. Ideally, he is picked for his ability to do so; that is, he is not a total idiot, directly abusive, dead, or missing, and he has a reasonable budget to work with. He also has less time to devote to making a decision per child.
That’s like claiming that bicycling is better than driving cars, as long as “driving cars’ includes cases where the cars are missing or broken.
If the parents are missing, dead, abusive, or total idiots (depending on how severe the “total” idiocy is), they can be replaced by adoptive or foster parents. You would need to compare bureaucrats to parents-with-replacement, not to parents-without-replacement, to get a meaningful comparison.
A question: How many people are so attached to being experts at parenting that they would rather see children jobless, unhappy, or dead than educated by experts in a particular field (whether biology or social studies)? Those are the people I worry about, when I imagine a system in which parents/government could decide all the time what their children learn and from what institution. For every parent or official that changes their religion just to get children into the best schools, willing to give up every alliance just to get the tribe’s offspring a better chance at life, and happy to give up their own authority in the name of a growing child’s happiness, there are many, many more who are not so caring and fair, I fear.
Experts in a field are far more likely to want to educate children better BECAUSE the above attachment to beliefs, politics, and authority is not, in their minds, in competition with their care for the children (or, at least, shouldn’t be, if those same things depend upon their knowledge). So, rather than saying we trust business, government, or one’s genetic donors, shouldn’t we be trying to make it so that the best teachers are trusted, period? Or, am I missing the point?
A question: How many people are so attached to being experts at parenting that they would rather see children jobless, unhappy, or dead than educated by experts in a particular field (whether biology or social studies)?
That’s a very odd question because you’re phrasing it as a hypothetical, thus forcing the logical answer to be “yes, being taught by an expert is better than having the child dead”, but you’re giving no real reason to believe the hypothetical is relevant to the real world. If experts could teleport to the moon, should we replace astronauts with them?
So, rather than saying we trust business, government, or one’s genetic donors, shouldn’t we be trying to make it so that the best teachers are trusted, period?
If you seriously believe what that is implying, that argument wouldn’t just apply to education. Why shouldn’t we just take away all children at birth (or grow them in the wombs of paid volunteers and prohibit all other childbearing) to have them completely raised by experts, not just educated by them?
Would it benefit the children more than being raised by the parents? Then the answer would be “yes.” Many people throughout history attempted to have their children raised by experts alone, so it is not without precedent, for all its strangeness. Nobles in particular entrusted their children to servants, tutors, and warriors, rather than seek to provide everything needed for a healthy (by their standards) childhood themselves. Caring about one’s offspring may include realizing that one needs lots of help.
By the way, I did not intend to cut off an avenue of exploration, here—merely to point out that the selection processes for business, government, and mating do not have anything to do with getting a better teacher or a person good at deciding what should be taught. If that does destroy some potential solution, I hope you forgive me, and would love to hear of that solution so I may change.
An education bureaucrat, on the other hand, is a person hand-picked to make decisions for a vast number of children.
You have an extremely over-idealistic view of how the education bureaucracy (or any bureaucracy for that matter) works.
For evolutionary reasons, parents have a strong desire to do what’s best for their child, bureaucracies on the other hand have all kinds of motivations (especially perpetuating the bureaucracy).
he is not a total idiot, directly abusive, dead, or missing,
You haven’t dealt with bureaucracy much, have you?
he has a reasonable budget to work with.
There are a lot of failing school systems with large budgets. Throwing money at a broken system doesn’t give you a working system, it gives you a broken system that wastes even more money.
For evolutionary reasons, parents have a strong desire to do what’s best for their child, bureaucracies on the other hand have all kinds of motivations (especially perpetuating the bureaucracy).
Evolution is satisfied if at least some of the children live to breed. There are several possible strategies that parents can follow here; having many children and encouraging promiscuity would satisfy evolutionary reasons and likely do so better than having few children and ensuring that they are properly educated. Evolutionary reasons are insufficient to ensure that what happens is good for the children; evolutionary reasons are satisfied by the presence of grandchildren.
he has a reasonable budget to work with.
There are a lot of failing school systems with large budgets. Throwing money at a broken system doesn’t give you a working system, it gives you a broken system that wastes even more money.
Yes. That means that the problems in those systems are not money; the problems in those systems lie elsewhere, and need to be dealt with separately.
he is not a total idiot, directly abusive, dead, or missing,
You haven’t dealt with bureaucracy much, have you?
...not that much, no. I would kind of expect that, when dealing with someone who will be making decisions that affect vast numbers of children, people will make some effort to consider the long-term effects of such choices. (I realise that, in some cases, this will involve words like ‘indoctrination’; there can be a dark side to long-term planning).
This may be over-idealistic on my part. The way I see it, though, it is not the bureaucrat’s job to be better at making decisions for children than the best parent, or even than the average parent. It is the bureaucrat’s job to create a floor; to ensure that no child is treated worse than a certain level.
The way I see it, though, it is not the bureaucrat’s job to be better at making decisions for children than the best parent, or even than the average parent. It is the bureaucrat’s job to create a floor; to ensure that no child is treated worse than a certain level.
It doesn’t (and can’t) work this way in practice. In practice what happens is that there is a disagreement between the bureaucracy and the parents. In that case whose views should prevail? If you answer “the bureaucracy’s” your floor is now also a ceiling, if you answer “the parents’ ” you’ve just gutted your floor. If you want to answer “the parents’ if their average or better and the bureaucracy’s otherwise” then the question becomes whose job is it to make that judgement, and we’re back to the previous two cases.
I would kind of expect that, when dealing with someone who will be making decisions that affect vast numbers of children, people will make some effort to consider the long-term effects of such choices.
I am not sure why exactly it does not work this way, but as a matter of fact, it does not. Specifically I am thinking about department of education in Slovakia. As far as I know, it works approximately like this: There are two kinds of people there; elected and unelected.
The elected people (not sure if only the minister, or more people) only care about short-term impression on their voters. They usually promise to “reform the school system” without being more specific, which is always popular, because everyone knows the system is horrible. There is no system behind the changes, it is usually a random drift of “we need one less hour of math, and one more hour of English, because languages are important” and “we need one less hour of English and one more hour of math, because former students can’t do any useful stuff”; plus some new paperwork for teachers.
The unelected people don’t give a shit about anything. They just sit there, take their money, and expect to sit there for the next decades. They have zero experience with teaching, and they don’t care. They just invent more paperwork for teachers, because then the existing paperwork explains why their jobs are necessary (someone must collect all the data, retype it to Excel, and create reports). The minister usually has no time or does not care enough to understand their work, optimize it, and fire those who are not needed. It is very easy for a bureaucrat to create a work for themselves, because paperwork recursively creates more paperwork. These people are not elected, so they don’t fear the votes; and the minister is dependent on their cooperation, so they don’t fear the minister.
For example, you create a precedent for other elites to push their agenda.
Maybe elites that push their agenda have a much better chance keeping their power that don’t? I’m not sure how much setting precedents limit further elites.
Something like: Don’t say what schools have to teach, but make the exams independent on schools. Make the evolutionary knowledge necessary to pass a biology exam. Make it public when students or schools or cities are “failing in biology”.
Basically you try to make the system more complicated to still get what you want but make people feel less manipulated.
Complicated and intransparent systems lead to conspiracy theories.
In this specific conflict, I would prefer having two kinds of school—universities and polytechnics—each optimized for one of the purposes, and let the students decide.
Seems to me that conflicts of values are worse when a unified decision has to be made for everyone. (Imagine that people would start insisting that only one subject can be ever taught at schools, and then we would have a conflict of values whether the subject should be English or Math. But that would be just a consequence of a bad decision at meta level.)
But yeah, I can imagine a situation with a conflict of values that cannot be solved by letting everyone pick their choice. And then the powerful people can push their choice, without being open about it.
You do have this in a case like teaching the theory of evolution.
You have plenty of people who are quite passionate but making an unified decision to teach everyone the theory of evolution, including the parents of children who don’t believe in the theory of evolution.
Germany has compulsory schooling. Some fundamental chrisitan don’t want their children in public schools. If you discuss the issue with people who have political power you find that those people don’t want that those children get taught some strange fundamental worldview that includes things like young earth creationism. The want that the children learn the basic paradigm that people in German society follow.
On the other hand I’m not sure whether you can get a motivation like that from reading the newspaper. Everyone who’s involved in the newspaper believes that it’s worth to teach children the theory of evolution so it’s not worth writing a newspaper article about it.
Is it a secret persecution of fundamentalist Christians? The fundamentalist Christian from whom the government takes away the children for “child abuse” because the children don’t go to school feel perscecuted. On the other hand the politician in question don’t really feel like the are persecuting fundamentalist Christians.
The ironic thing about it is that compulsory schooling was introduced in Germany for the stated purpose of turning children into ’good Christians”.
In a case like evolution, do you sincerely believe that the intellectual elite should use their power to push a Texan public school to teach evolution even if the parents of the children and the local board of education don’t want it?
Yeah, when people in power create tools to help them maintain the power, if those tools are universal enough, they will be reused by the people who get the power later.
The trade-offs need to be discussed rationally. The answer would probably be “yes”, but there are some negative side effects. For example, you create a precedent for other elites to push their agenda. (Just like those Christians did with the compulsory education.) Maybe a third option could be found. (Something like: Don’t say what schools have to teach, but make the exams independent on schools. Make the evolutionary knowledge necessary to pass a biology exam. Make it public when students or schools or cities are “failing in biology”.)
Why have governments control exams at all? Have different certifying authorities and employers are free to decide which authorities’ diploma they accept.
That could work! On the other hand, it may set up a situation where a person who is only guilty of being raised in the wrong place may never get a decent job. Wonder what can be done to prevent that as much as possible?
And this differs from the status quo, how?
I was under the impression you wanted to improve things significantly. Hence why I mentioned that issue—and it IS an issue.
My point is that a child’s parents are more likely to make good decisions for the child then education bureaucrats.
That depends on the parents. Yes, many parents (including mine and, presumably, yours) have the best interests of the child at heart, and have the knowledge and ability to be able to serve those interests quite well.
This is not, however, true of all parents. There’s no entrance exam for parenthood. Thus:
Some parents are directly abusive to their children (including: many parents who abuse alcohol and/or drugs)
Some parents are total idiots; even if they have the best interests of the child at heart, they have no idea what to do about it
Some parents are simply too mired in poverty; they can’t afford food for their children, never mind schooling
Some parents are, usually through no fault of their own, dead while their children are still young
Some parents are absent for some reason (possibly an acrimonious divorce? Possibly in order to find employment?)
An education bureaucrat, on the other hand, is a person hand-picked to make decisions for a vast number of children. Ideally, he is picked for his ability to do so; that is, he is not a total idiot, directly abusive, dead, or missing, and he has a reasonable budget to work with. He also has less time to devote to making a decision per child.
That’s like claiming that bicycling is better than driving cars, as long as “driving cars’ includes cases where the cars are missing or broken.
If the parents are missing, dead, abusive, or total idiots (depending on how severe the “total” idiocy is), they can be replaced by adoptive or foster parents. You would need to compare bureaucrats to parents-with-replacement, not to parents-without-replacement, to get a meaningful comparison.
A question: How many people are so attached to being experts at parenting that they would rather see children jobless, unhappy, or dead than educated by experts in a particular field (whether biology or social studies)? Those are the people I worry about, when I imagine a system in which parents/government could decide all the time what their children learn and from what institution. For every parent or official that changes their religion just to get children into the best schools, willing to give up every alliance just to get the tribe’s offspring a better chance at life, and happy to give up their own authority in the name of a growing child’s happiness, there are many, many more who are not so caring and fair, I fear.
Experts in a field are far more likely to want to educate children better BECAUSE the above attachment to beliefs, politics, and authority is not, in their minds, in competition with their care for the children (or, at least, shouldn’t be, if those same things depend upon their knowledge). So, rather than saying we trust business, government, or one’s genetic donors, shouldn’t we be trying to make it so that the best teachers are trusted, period? Or, am I missing the point?
That’s a very odd question because you’re phrasing it as a hypothetical, thus forcing the logical answer to be “yes, being taught by an expert is better than having the child dead”, but you’re giving no real reason to believe the hypothetical is relevant to the real world. If experts could teleport to the moon, should we replace astronauts with them?
If you seriously believe what that is implying, that argument wouldn’t just apply to education. Why shouldn’t we just take away all children at birth (or grow them in the wombs of paid volunteers and prohibit all other childbearing) to have them completely raised by experts, not just educated by them?
Would it benefit the children more than being raised by the parents? Then the answer would be “yes.” Many people throughout history attempted to have their children raised by experts alone, so it is not without precedent, for all its strangeness. Nobles in particular entrusted their children to servants, tutors, and warriors, rather than seek to provide everything needed for a healthy (by their standards) childhood themselves. Caring about one’s offspring may include realizing that one needs lots of help.
By the way, I did not intend to cut off an avenue of exploration, here—merely to point out that the selection processes for business, government, and mating do not have anything to do with getting a better teacher or a person good at deciding what should be taught. If that does destroy some potential solution, I hope you forgive me, and would love to hear of that solution so I may change.
You have an extremely over-idealistic view of how the education bureaucracy (or any bureaucracy for that matter) works.
For evolutionary reasons, parents have a strong desire to do what’s best for their child, bureaucracies on the other hand have all kinds of motivations (especially perpetuating the bureaucracy).
You haven’t dealt with bureaucracy much, have you?
There are a lot of failing school systems with large budgets. Throwing money at a broken system doesn’t give you a working system, it gives you a broken system that wastes even more money.
Evolution is satisfied if at least some of the children live to breed. There are several possible strategies that parents can follow here; having many children and encouraging promiscuity would satisfy evolutionary reasons and likely do so better than having few children and ensuring that they are properly educated. Evolutionary reasons are insufficient to ensure that what happens is good for the children; evolutionary reasons are satisfied by the presence of grandchildren.
Yes. That means that the problems in those systems are not money; the problems in those systems lie elsewhere, and need to be dealt with separately.
...not that much, no. I would kind of expect that, when dealing with someone who will be making decisions that affect vast numbers of children, people will make some effort to consider the long-term effects of such choices. (I realise that, in some cases, this will involve words like ‘indoctrination’; there can be a dark side to long-term planning).
This may be over-idealistic on my part. The way I see it, though, it is not the bureaucrat’s job to be better at making decisions for children than the best parent, or even than the average parent. It is the bureaucrat’s job to create a floor; to ensure that no child is treated worse than a certain level.
It doesn’t (and can’t) work this way in practice. In practice what happens is that there is a disagreement between the bureaucracy and the parents. In that case whose views should prevail? If you answer “the bureaucracy’s” your floor is now also a ceiling, if you answer “the parents’ ” you’ve just gutted your floor. If you want to answer “the parents’ if their average or better and the bureaucracy’s otherwise” then the question becomes whose job is it to make that judgement, and we’re back to the previous two cases.
I am not sure why exactly it does not work this way, but as a matter of fact, it does not. Specifically I am thinking about department of education in Slovakia. As far as I know, it works approximately like this: There are two kinds of people there; elected and unelected.
The elected people (not sure if only the minister, or more people) only care about short-term impression on their voters. They usually promise to “reform the school system” without being more specific, which is always popular, because everyone knows the system is horrible. There is no system behind the changes, it is usually a random drift of “we need one less hour of math, and one more hour of English, because languages are important” and “we need one less hour of English and one more hour of math, because former students can’t do any useful stuff”; plus some new paperwork for teachers.
The unelected people don’t give a shit about anything. They just sit there, take their money, and expect to sit there for the next decades. They have zero experience with teaching, and they don’t care. They just invent more paperwork for teachers, because then the existing paperwork explains why their jobs are necessary (someone must collect all the data, retype it to Excel, and create reports). The minister usually has no time or does not care enough to understand their work, optimize it, and fire those who are not needed. It is very easy for a bureaucrat to create a work for themselves, because paperwork recursively creates more paperwork. These people are not elected, so they don’t fear the votes; and the minister is dependent on their cooperation, so they don’t fear the minister.
Maybe elites that push their agenda have a much better chance keeping their power that don’t? I’m not sure how much setting precedents limit further elites.
Basically you try to make the system more complicated to still get what you want but make people feel less manipulated.
Complicated and intransparent systems lead to conspiracy theories.