Like, it seems like many jobs kinda suck and mess with your motivation in the same way that school does (including the part where many people put in the minimum until they go home) and school in fact prepares you for that.
(Or more accurately, like school, there’s a mix of people who put in the minimum work, and people who are motivated by the institution-sponsored-status-game and put in more. And this seems roughly like the system working as intended?)
I think doing intellectual work is probably a rare edge case that requires you to ‘actually be motivated’. But this is more like a rare edge case than a central example. And it makes sense to look at the world in horror and be like ‘geez, why do we live like this?’ and fix it, but the problems are upstream of school.
I do think that my 5th grade experience, in particular, destroyed a bit of my motivation by giving me several hours of homework a night (more than I would receive pretty much ever), until I stopped caring at some point, and then it took me a few years to recover. But that seemed like an anomaly.
I agree that having gone to school is probably useful for many types of work, but I suspect that the reliability it trains is pretty specific to those kinds of jobs, whereas I read the original post as talking about reliability in the context of your personal life and social relationships. My hunch is that for social reliability, it’s neutral or a harm. I doubt that hunter-gatherers were unreliable tribesmates due to their lack of schooling.
Hmm. Okay yeah I could see that. In particular, school (esp. American elementary—high school) doesn’t really train “maintaining a schedule in a complex, adaptable environment where you are responsible for making your own plans.” (College sort of does, but still not much)
Whereas I had to learn to be interpersonally dependable by interacting with humans in a looser network of friends and professional colleagues after college.
[Edit: I read the OP as talking about dependability as… I dunno 67% professional/long-term-project sense, 33% social, where the sort-of-school that you can’t just coast through actually helps]
Is there a reason it can’t be doing both?
Like, it seems like many jobs kinda suck and mess with your motivation in the same way that school does (including the part where many people put in the minimum until they go home) and school in fact prepares you for that.
(Or more accurately, like school, there’s a mix of people who put in the minimum work, and people who are motivated by the institution-sponsored-status-game and put in more. And this seems roughly like the system working as intended?)
I think doing intellectual work is probably a rare edge case that requires you to ‘actually be motivated’. But this is more like a rare edge case than a central example. And it makes sense to look at the world in horror and be like ‘geez, why do we live like this?’ and fix it, but the problems are upstream of school.
I do think that my 5th grade experience, in particular, destroyed a bit of my motivation by giving me several hours of homework a night (more than I would receive pretty much ever), until I stopped caring at some point, and then it took me a few years to recover. But that seemed like an anomaly.
I agree that having gone to school is probably useful for many types of work, but I suspect that the reliability it trains is pretty specific to those kinds of jobs, whereas I read the original post as talking about reliability in the context of your personal life and social relationships. My hunch is that for social reliability, it’s neutral or a harm. I doubt that hunter-gatherers were unreliable tribesmates due to their lack of schooling.
Hmm. Okay yeah I could see that. In particular, school (esp. American elementary—high school) doesn’t really train “maintaining a schedule in a complex, adaptable environment where you are responsible for making your own plans.” (College sort of does, but still not much)
Whereas I had to learn to be interpersonally dependable by interacting with humans in a looser network of friends and professional colleagues after college.
[Edit: I read the OP as talking about dependability as… I dunno 67% professional/long-term-project sense, 33% social, where the sort-of-school that you can’t just coast through actually helps]