When Caplan’s “case against education” came out, I thought for a while why we need schools, and came to the conclusion that schools train reliability. The ability to sit there and do the task even if you don’t like it. It’s not a natural human skill: kids are flaky and hate learning to be less flaky. School has to change the kid’s personality by force and make it stick. That’s why it takes ten years.
If you want to learn that skill as an adult, the bad news is it will take a while and it will feel bad, like any forced personality change. Like training a dog, but the dog is you. The only way is to commit to doing specific things on a daily or weekly basis, and stick with them for a long time (years). And if you fall of the wagon, you must start over, not tell yourself you’ve made “progress”. The kid who skips a day of school every month on a whim isn’t 5% less reliable than his classmates, he’s years behind.
Very skeptical that school teaches the skill of “sit there and do the task if you don’t like it”. Rather, it seems to train something like “sit there and do the minimum needed to give the impression of doing it until you’re allowed to go home”, and a number of other harmful mindsets that I at least have needed to actively unlearn in order to actually get things done in a more real-life context.
The second paragraph also seems to promote a dangerous mindset in my view. Committing to do something for the sake of committing to something is the same kind of fake school behavior which is hard because one’s mind correctly sees it as pointless. The kid who skips a day of school every month on a whim is only “years behind” in the sense that he hasn’t allowed his natural judgment of what’s a good use of his time to be hammered away and subjected to arbitrary rules which need to be followed for the sake of being followed. That is a good thing.
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]
Way more complicated path than “school teaches X”. School (talking primary and secondary here, not college) teaches basic conformity in a direct way—you avoid punishment by not calling attention to yourself except in approved ways. School also directly teaches a very small set of facts and skills.
School INDIRECTLY teaches a lot more. Or maybe it’s better to say that school provides an environment and opportunity for parents and peers to teach/reinforce a whole lot of societal values and skills.
Some will learn to “sit there and do the task even if you don’t like/value it”, some will learn “do the minimum to not be punished”, some will learn that if you get sent to the library for not participating, you can read all day instead of sitting there. Some will even learn to decide what’s the best path for themselves, and how to get some value from the routine without letting it crush them.
So, for some (maybe even many), school is an important part of teaching/training reliability. It’s wrong to say that “school teaches it”, but it’s also wrong to imply that school is irrelevant in teaching it.
The kid who skips a day of school every month on a whim is only “years behind” in the sense that he hasn’t allowed his natural judgment of what’s a good use of his time to be hammered away and subjected to arbitrary rules which need to be followed for the sake of being followed.
Yeah, I know a kid like that. Follows his natural judgment all the way. Mostly it tells him to play Fortnite.
Hanson has argued that graduating with a bachelor’s degree signals that you possess the ability to dependably show up on time, sit in a seat for a long while, and obey instructions from superiors. If you can’t do those things, then you’re going to have a lot of trouble in office jobs.
When Caplan’s “case against education” came out, I thought for a while why we need schools, and came to the conclusion that schools train reliability. The ability to sit there and do the task even if you don’t like it. It’s not a natural human skill: kids are flaky and hate learning to be less flaky. School has to change the kid’s personality by force and make it stick. That’s why it takes ten years.
If you want to learn that skill as an adult, the bad news is it will take a while and it will feel bad, like any forced personality change. Like training a dog, but the dog is you. The only way is to commit to doing specific things on a daily or weekly basis, and stick with them for a long time (years). And if you fall of the wagon, you must start over, not tell yourself you’ve made “progress”. The kid who skips a day of school every month on a whim isn’t 5% less reliable than his classmates, he’s years behind.
Very skeptical that school teaches the skill of “sit there and do the task if you don’t like it”. Rather, it seems to train something like “sit there and do the minimum needed to give the impression of doing it until you’re allowed to go home”, and a number of other harmful mindsets that I at least have needed to actively unlearn in order to actually get things done in a more real-life context.
The second paragraph also seems to promote a dangerous mindset in my view. Committing to do something for the sake of committing to something is the same kind of fake school behavior which is hard because one’s mind correctly sees it as pointless. The kid who skips a day of school every month on a whim is only “years behind” in the sense that he hasn’t allowed his natural judgment of what’s a good use of his time to be hammered away and subjected to arbitrary rules which need to be followed for the sake of being followed. That is a good thing.
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]
Way more complicated path than “school teaches X”. School (talking primary and secondary here, not college) teaches basic conformity in a direct way—you avoid punishment by not calling attention to yourself except in approved ways. School also directly teaches a very small set of facts and skills.
School INDIRECTLY teaches a lot more. Or maybe it’s better to say that school provides an environment and opportunity for parents and peers to teach/reinforce a whole lot of societal values and skills.
Some will learn to “sit there and do the task even if you don’t like/value it”, some will learn “do the minimum to not be punished”, some will learn that if you get sent to the library for not participating, you can read all day instead of sitting there. Some will even learn to decide what’s the best path for themselves, and how to get some value from the routine without letting it crush them.
So, for some (maybe even many), school is an important part of teaching/training reliability. It’s wrong to say that “school teaches it”, but it’s also wrong to imply that school is irrelevant in teaching it.
I’d go with “school should (be a part of) teaching it”.
Yeah, I know a kid like that. Follows his natural judgment all the way. Mostly it tells him to play Fortnite.
Hanson has argued that graduating with a bachelor’s degree signals that you possess the ability to dependably show up on time, sit in a seat for a long while, and obey instructions from superiors. If you can’t do those things, then you’re going to have a lot of trouble in office jobs.