I think it’s a good insight and one I basically agree with that children, before they’re 16 or so in the UK at least, are treated in a way which robs them of their sovereignty and all else equal this is bad for both deontic and consequentialist reasons. I basically agree that the vast majority of content taught to 11-16 year neither increases their productivity in the workforce, nor do they enjoy studying it, nor does it make them better people. It is also true that when people are homeschooled or unschooled they do fine (I’ve read like 4 papers on outcomes of homeschooling and unschooling so I won’t make a stronger empirical claim than ‘fine’), and that biggest difficulty that certainly unschoolers have is others reactions.
However, I think you’re dramatically overstating your case. I think schooling for 3-10 year olds is incredibly valuable. There’s excellent empirical evidence that early years education is good for a whole range outcomes and is fantastic for the children of low income parents. In general both the actual content of the curriculum, i.e literacy and numeracy are very useful—functionally illiterate people have difficult lives. I there’s also the effect of general improvement in cognitive capacity and teaching the ability to make abstract, logical deductions. We see the effect of this when we ask individuals in communities in which there is no primary schooling to think abstractly. The most of these studies is on Russian peasants in 1907 but this has been replicated for instance with modern hunter-gatherer tribes. I also think that the socialisation aspect is important as well as the teaching of non-cognitive skills—in Pinker’s history of violence he provides evidence of the impact of schooling in reducing violence by improving impulse control, based on impulse control being a transferable, trainable characteristic.
I also just reject your claim that schooling is that unpleasant. Often it’s the place where kids spend the most time interacting with their friends, it gives people achievable goals which they get clear, regular feedback on and that’s pretty motiving in general and people who are bored often just fuck about at the back of the class which isn’t ideal but also doesn’t seem that bad. Just in general lots of the time in school is mostly made up of chatting to people you either don’t mind, quite like, or forge some of the deepest and most valuable friendships you ever have with.
Unschooling is more than fine. It is the only sensible approach to education. 4 papers may not be enough to understand the subject. You repeat a great deal of false claims mass-produced by the system or by the power of parrot-like peer reviewed research biased by career or financial interest. Here are the sentences based on inveterate myths of schooling: “excellent empirical evidence that early years education”, “functionally illiterate people have difficult lives”, “improvement in cognitive capacity and teaching the ability to make abstract, logical deductions socialization aspect”, etc.
Also: “improving impulse control” has many negative sides effects. In the end, without “impulse” you lose your love of life, incl. love of other people. Russian peasants did not have access to the Internet.
Last but not least, imagine your feelings if someone put you to jail and said: “I just reject your claim that prison is that unpleasant”. That’s a failure of empathy
Ok, so we have different epistemic systems, I obviously put much higher value academic social science ,where I think the methodology is good, than you do.
It’s a plausible claim that people with lower impulse control less enjoyment of experience, it’s not one that I’ve seen made before, my intuition says the effect size is probably small. Fundamentally, show me the evidence, although presumably it can’t be from academic social science.
Finally, it’s important to distinguish between empirical and moral claims. So, I think prisons are bad but in principle can be morally justified. I think mafia bosses should go to prison because I’m not a patient centered deontologist who rejects the the legitimacy of the state. Similarly, I think there are lots of plausible moral systems in which restricting children’s sovereignty can be fine or even morally required.
On the empirical matter, I don’t know we just disagree. But I’m 19, I was in school until I was 18, it was fine. My brother’s 17, I asked him, he said schools fine. I went to a normal school, he went to a normal school. My girlfriends also 19, she liked school. Maybe we’re all massive outliers, but when you ask people who’ve been to prison what they think of prison they say it’s terrible and when you ask people who’ve been to school what they think of school they mostly say it’s fine.
Compulsory schooling is a violation of human rights, and no utilitarian claim can override. The parallel with slavery is striking.
If you are 19, you have a better standing in this discussion. If you liked school, you have the right to underestimate the damage. Perhaps overtime, with some analysis, you will realize that most of your smarts and knowledge come from your own work and passion, and the impact of school was minimal or perhaps even a distraction. You need to realize, however, that in a global picture you are a lucky outlier, esp. at this age. Defendants of the school in your age category are a minority, and recruit mostly from Straight A high achievers who hate their golden path questioned. If school was ok for you, no wonder you do not feel your rights were violated. If you come from a friendly school system (e.g. Finland, Norway, etc.), you may have actually been gently indoctrinated that school is a fantastic necessity. It is very unhealthy to be told to learn things outside your interest, and accept it without protest. Protestlessness indicates amazing coincidence of interests, or unhealthy conditioning in which you are partly deprived of your own reasoning in matters of knowledge assessment.
When you say “school is fine”, it is a horrible verdict. I say “learning is the best thing in life”. In my book, school robbed you of 12 years of the best thing in life and gave you “fine goods” in return. If you count how many hours you spent in a school bench, and how little it would take today for your to learn it all on your own, you cannot but just be outraged with that “fine effect” at the cost of 20,000+ hours. Imagine you could get all this time back now and turn it into some thing productive or something you love. Still feels fine?
Impulse control can be healthy or unhealthy. If you develop a stoic mind, you will live longer. If you control your urge to sleep to show up for school in time, you will damage your brain.
A great deal of prisoners are very much like school graduates. They got accustomed to the comfort of having few decisions to make. For many prisoners, life after long sentences is more scary than prison itself. Similarly, graduates experience a culture shock when they are supposed to show autonomy, intelligence and own decision making. Those qualities wither in conditions of captivity.
Mod warning: I agree with some of the position you are defending here, but I don’t think your comments have kept in line with the usual discussion norms we have here, and have generally included too much hyperbole and strawmanning of opposing positions. I would probably recommend commenting less, or checking out other core writing on the site to understand what kind of culture we are aiming for (the sequences/R:A-Z are the usual place to start). This is your first warning, if you continue posting comments that run into the same problems, we might give you a temporary ban.
Welp, less than 24 hours after making this comment we got registrations for 5 sockpuppet accounts that have done nothing but upvote literally all of Piwo’s comments and posts. We have reverted all of those votes, and have now banned Piwo. Please don’t do this.
Hello. I am a different person who has been asked to paste here his answer to the ban on his behalf. Do not worry, I won’t comment any further or be active here.
”At times I am proud when I am being censored. These are the times when my convictions are deep and pure. It instills a sense of superiority. As if wondering when the rest of the world will catch up. As for upvoting, I did certainly upvote several comments that I liked. I rarely downvote. I recall that my comments had almost no upvotes which I attributed to my coming late to this article thinking its heyday has passed. My only concern was that nobody was reading and I was wasting my time. I do not treat commenting as a popularity contest. the word “sockpuppet account” I had to Google. I am not that literate in social media. I venture into this world only because the brutal violations of human rights that I witness on a daily basis.”
I don’t want to make this into a big internet argument but an explanation is in order I think. My account is incidentally also only a few days old so I won’t be mad if you think I just created it for the upvotes.
This article made the rounds in a community. I strongly suspect many of the members upvoted piwos comments. I am pretty sure there were no VPNs etc. involved.
I am very confident that one IP-address created at least 6 accounts for the express purpose of doing nothing but upvoting Piwo’s comments. Those were definitely not organic account creations.
We also saw some other new users show up and vote much more organically, and I was not referring to those. We might have accidentally deleted one of them, but the accounts I am talking about where really very obviously sockpuppet accounts created by one person.
Ok, if the IPs were the same I suspect some user(s) of the community went overzealous. This should not be taken as representative of the community and/or piwo. I know he has very strong opinions about education but I would vouch for him and pretty much guarantee that he did not try to upvote himself with fake accounts. Sorry about the mess.
PS: I respect that you did not delete piwos comments and can understand that this all looks a bit fishy and hope you can take it all with a bit of humor. At least you’re not the Signal admin that was overrun by Elon Musks followers :)
Could you let me know what user this was for? There is a chance that one of the accounts was not actually a sockpuppet (we banned and deleted 7 accounts, 6 of which had obviously invalid spam names, and one which looked very suspicious but we weren’t as confident that they were a sockpuppet account, so there is a chance we had a false-positive).
We detected a cluster of sockpuppet accounts from VPN IP addresses, all upvoting comments by piwo and nothing else. We can’t definitively prove that this was piwo upvoting themself, but given that there was already a moderator warning, I think this is enough to ban.
I think it’s a good insight and one I basically agree with that children, before they’re 16 or so in the UK at least, are treated in a way which robs them of their sovereignty and all else equal this is bad for both deontic and consequentialist reasons. I basically agree that the vast majority of content taught to 11-16 year neither increases their productivity in the workforce, nor do they enjoy studying it, nor does it make them better people. It is also true that when people are homeschooled or unschooled they do fine (I’ve read like 4 papers on outcomes of homeschooling and unschooling so I won’t make a stronger empirical claim than ‘fine’), and that biggest difficulty that certainly unschoolers have is others reactions.
However, I think you’re dramatically overstating your case. I think schooling for 3-10 year olds is incredibly valuable. There’s excellent empirical evidence that early years education is good for a whole range outcomes and is fantastic for the children of low income parents. In general both the actual content of the curriculum, i.e literacy and numeracy are very useful—functionally illiterate people have difficult lives. I there’s also the effect of general improvement in cognitive capacity and teaching the ability to make abstract, logical deductions. We see the effect of this when we ask individuals in communities in which there is no primary schooling to think abstractly. The most of these studies is on Russian peasants in 1907 but this has been replicated for instance with modern hunter-gatherer tribes. I also think that the socialisation aspect is important as well as the teaching of non-cognitive skills—in Pinker’s history of violence he provides evidence of the impact of schooling in reducing violence by improving impulse control, based on impulse control being a transferable, trainable characteristic.
I also just reject your claim that schooling is that unpleasant. Often it’s the place where kids spend the most time interacting with their friends, it gives people achievable goals which they get clear, regular feedback on and that’s pretty motiving in general and people who are bored often just fuck about at the back of the class which isn’t ideal but also doesn’t seem that bad. Just in general lots of the time in school is mostly made up of chatting to people you either don’t mind, quite like, or forge some of the deepest and most valuable friendships you ever have with.
Unschooling is more than fine. It is the only sensible approach to education. 4 papers may not be enough to understand the subject. You repeat a great deal of false claims mass-produced by the system or by the power of parrot-like peer reviewed research biased by career or financial interest. Here are the sentences based on inveterate myths of schooling: “excellent empirical evidence that early years education”, “functionally illiterate people have difficult lives”, “improvement in cognitive capacity and teaching the ability to make abstract, logical deductions socialization aspect”, etc.
Also: “improving impulse control” has many negative sides effects. In the end, without “impulse” you lose your love of life, incl. love of other people. Russian peasants did not have access to the Internet.
Last but not least, imagine your feelings if someone put you to jail and said: “I just reject your claim that prison is that unpleasant”. That’s a failure of empathy
Ok, so we have different epistemic systems, I obviously put much higher value academic social science ,where I think the methodology is good, than you do.
It’s a plausible claim that people with lower impulse control less enjoyment of experience, it’s not one that I’ve seen made before, my intuition says the effect size is probably small. Fundamentally, show me the evidence, although presumably it can’t be from academic social science.
Finally, it’s important to distinguish between empirical and moral claims. So, I think prisons are bad but in principle can be morally justified. I think mafia bosses should go to prison because I’m not a patient centered deontologist who rejects the the legitimacy of the state. Similarly, I think there are lots of plausible moral systems in which restricting children’s sovereignty can be fine or even morally required.
On the empirical matter, I don’t know we just disagree. But I’m 19, I was in school until I was 18, it was fine. My brother’s 17, I asked him, he said schools fine. I went to a normal school, he went to a normal school. My girlfriends also 19, she liked school. Maybe we’re all massive outliers, but when you ask people who’ve been to prison what they think of prison they say it’s terrible and when you ask people who’ve been to school what they think of school they mostly say it’s fine.
Compulsory schooling is a violation of human rights, and no utilitarian claim can override. The parallel with slavery is striking.
If you are 19, you have a better standing in this discussion. If you liked school, you have the right to underestimate the damage. Perhaps overtime, with some analysis, you will realize that most of your smarts and knowledge come from your own work and passion, and the impact of school was minimal or perhaps even a distraction. You need to realize, however, that in a global picture you are a lucky outlier, esp. at this age. Defendants of the school in your age category are a minority, and recruit mostly from Straight A high achievers who hate their golden path questioned. If school was ok for you, no wonder you do not feel your rights were violated. If you come from a friendly school system (e.g. Finland, Norway, etc.), you may have actually been gently indoctrinated that school is a fantastic necessity. It is very unhealthy to be told to learn things outside your interest, and accept it without protest. Protestlessness indicates amazing coincidence of interests, or unhealthy conditioning in which you are partly deprived of your own reasoning in matters of knowledge assessment.
When you say “school is fine”, it is a horrible verdict. I say “learning is the best thing in life”. In my book, school robbed you of 12 years of the best thing in life and gave you “fine goods” in return. If you count how many hours you spent in a school bench, and how little it would take today for your to learn it all on your own, you cannot but just be outraged with that “fine effect” at the cost of 20,000+ hours. Imagine you could get all this time back now and turn it into some thing productive or something you love. Still feels fine?
Impulse control can be healthy or unhealthy. If you develop a stoic mind, you will live longer. If you control your urge to sleep to show up for school in time, you will damage your brain.
A great deal of prisoners are very much like school graduates. They got accustomed to the comfort of having few decisions to make. For many prisoners, life after long sentences is more scary than prison itself. Similarly, graduates experience a culture shock when they are supposed to show autonomy, intelligence and own decision making. Those qualities wither in conditions of captivity.
Mod warning: I agree with some of the position you are defending here, but I don’t think your comments have kept in line with the usual discussion norms we have here, and have generally included too much hyperbole and strawmanning of opposing positions. I would probably recommend commenting less, or checking out other core writing on the site to understand what kind of culture we are aiming for (the sequences/R:A-Z are the usual place to start). This is your first warning, if you continue posting comments that run into the same problems, we might give you a temporary ban.
Welp, less than 24 hours after making this comment we got registrations for 5 sockpuppet accounts that have done nothing but upvote literally all of Piwo’s comments and posts. We have reverted all of those votes, and have now banned Piwo. Please don’t do this.
Hello. I am a different person who has been asked to paste here his answer to the ban on his behalf. Do not worry, I won’t comment any further or be active here.
”At times I am proud when I am being censored. These are the times when my convictions are deep and pure. It instills a sense of superiority. As if wondering when the rest of the world will catch up. As for upvoting, I did certainly upvote several comments that I liked. I rarely downvote. I recall that my comments had almost no upvotes which I attributed to my coming late to this article thinking its heyday has passed. My only concern was that nobody was reading and I was wasting my time. I do not treat commenting as a popularity contest. the word “sockpuppet account” I had to Google. I am not that literate in social media. I venture into this world only because the brutal violations of human rights that I witness on a daily basis.”
I don’t want to make this into a big internet argument but an explanation is in order I think. My account is incidentally also only a few days old so I won’t be mad if you think I just created it for the upvotes.
This article made the rounds in a community. I strongly suspect many of the members upvoted piwos comments. I am pretty sure there were no VPNs etc. involved.
I am very confident that one IP-address created at least 6 accounts for the express purpose of doing nothing but upvoting Piwo’s comments. Those were definitely not organic account creations.
We also saw some other new users show up and vote much more organically, and I was not referring to those. We might have accidentally deleted one of them, but the accounts I am talking about where really very obviously sockpuppet accounts created by one person.
Ok, if the IPs were the same I suspect some user(s) of the community went overzealous. This should not be taken as representative of the community and/or piwo. I know he has very strong opinions about education but I would vouch for him and pretty much guarantee that he did not try to upvote himself with fake accounts. Sorry about the mess.
PS: I respect that you did not delete piwos comments and can understand that this all looks a bit fishy and hope you can take it all with a bit of humor. At least you’re not the Signal admin that was overrun by Elon Musks followers :)
Could you let me know what user this was for? There is a chance that one of the accounts was not actually a sockpuppet (we banned and deleted 7 accounts, 6 of which had obviously invalid spam names, and one which looked very suspicious but we weren’t as confident that they were a sockpuppet account, so there is a chance we had a false-positive).
We detected a cluster of sockpuppet accounts from VPN IP addresses, all upvoting comments by piwo and nothing else. We can’t definitively prove that this was piwo upvoting themself, but given that there was already a moderator warning, I think this is enough to ban.