A young and learning member calling reading papers “fun” without a second thought is already impressive progress when compared to the epistemic attitude of most people around us, I’d say.
+1 to that.
I also strongly agree with the fact that even the current small observable gains are impressive. I have observed an approximately 50% reduction in the average time it takes for me to explain foreign concepts for respective inferential distances, thanks to the reductionism and words sequences. While very anecdotal, if a 100% increase of efficiency in informal pedagogy is not impressive, please tell me where I can find all the other goldmines that so dramatically increase the ability to teach, and I’d also like an explanation why the hell it seems like no teachers anywhere are studying any of it.
Schools do not teach any critical thinking and for good reason. Ivan Illich wrote “Deschooling Society” in the 70s and John Taylor Gatto started writing the “The Underground History of American Education” in the 90s. Either should give you insight into why teachers do what they do, but Gattos’s “Weapons of Mass Instruction” is probably the best place to start. The short answer is that schools are designed from the top down to stunt the intellectual growth of children regardless of the intentions of teachers.
designed from the top to stunt intellectual growth
Maybe the result is that they stunt growth, but to infer intention from that is just an agency-fantasy. I would guess that the bereaucrats that actually think about the result have good intentions, even.
Maybe the result is that they stunt growth, but to infer intention from that is just an agency-fantasy. I would guess that the bereaucrats that actually think about the result have good intentions, even.
Eh, the Prussian school system was explicitly designed to create soldiers, and stunting intellectual growth is a part of that. It’s not much of a stretch to call it intentional.
I doubt that many school officials or politicians today know about the influences of the Prussian school system on e.g. the United States school system, or would guess that their present systems bear features deliberately designed to stunt intellectual growth.
I suspect that they mostly see the system that they were themselves educated in as normal by default, and only think to question the appropriateness of features that are specifically brought to their attention, and then only contemplate changing them in ways that are politically practical and advantageous from their positions. Expecting them to try and design and implement a school system that best meets their stated goals is like expecting a person to specify to a genie exactly how they want their mother removed from a burning building so as to save her life. The problem and its solution space simply doesn’t fall within the realms that they’re inclined to actually think about.
I do not know if you have read Gatto or not based on this. He points out that the system has no memory of its origin and that changes occur just like you describe with the result of deepening the problem. The last major school reform was GW Bush’s No Child Left Behind....if that tells you anything about who “fixes” the system.
No Child Left Behind was a stupid fix, but that doesn’t mean it was an ill intentioned fix.
I have actually just found the online text of “The Underground History of Education,” and started reading it, but so far am unimpressed and unlikely to finish it. I’m noticing a lot of cherrypicking to support his position, and he doesn’t give sources for his assertions at all (I went to the table of contents to look for a bibliography, and couldn’t find one, so I did a further search to see if this is the case in the print version and confirmed that the book contains no citations.)
I share his opinion that our current educational system is not well designed to get the best out of its students, but if I wanted to introduce someone to a writer who could effectively explain that point, I don’t think I’d recommend him. I’d probably recommend some of Eliezer’s essays, or maybe Paul Graham’s.
The statements of intent where made in writing and in speeches. I would do it for you but linking on the droid is not fun. Google “Rockefeller mencken quotes education” and the first link should lend some insight into the intent of the designers of the compulsory public school system. Gatto did a lot of research to support the thesis that schools are designed to dumb down the populace.
Gatto did a lot of research to support the thesis that schools are designed to dumb down the populace.
This may simply be jumping on an issue of semantics, but I’m concerned that this is really what he did, rather than doing a lot of research to find out whether the thesis was correct, or, more ideally, doing a lot of research before promoting the hypothesis to attention at all.
Well you can make wild speculations based off of my semantics or you can read for yourself. You seem to have chosen the former. Please return and clarify if you find his research faulty after you have read his work.
Well, the first link I get when I do the google search you suggested is this, and I’ve read that, but I’m not clear on what research of his you’re expecting me to read. The only work of his that appears to be available online is this, which contains assertions, but does not appear to support them with research as such.
It’s true that I haven’t read John Taylor Gatto’s work beyond that essay and the page you suggested reading yourself, but I was not wildly speculating based on semantics, I was making an educated guess considering that this is how people ordinarily behave. I assign a much higher prior to someone, say, hearing that the American school system is inspired by the Prussian system, which was largely concerned with producing good citizen-soldiers, and concluding that the American system must be deliberately designed to stymy creative thought, and looking for more evidence to back up that assertion, than I do to someone deciding to find out what the intentions behind the American school system are, doing extensive research, and concluding that its programs are actually purpose-designed to dumb down the populace.
What little work of his that I’ve found accessible online certainly doesn’t shift me away from that assessment.
Sounds scary. I’ll look into it and update as appropriate.
You are postulating quite the conspiracy tho. Much more likely it seems that a few b’crats went bonkers, the way you sometimes get UFO nuts out of the military.
Not really. To militaristic Prussia of the time, creating good soldiers was simply the same as creating good citizens, and was considered a worthy goal. No conspiracy required, just doing what seemed obviously correct at the time. And then the Prussian system was so ‘advanced’ and ‘modern’ and ‘successful’ that others copied it.
American experts did not all agree with the ‘military’ goal, but it was believed by the relevant experts that the same sorts of virtues applied to factory workers.
Now people try to actually educate children via this system. It’s like making minor tweaks to a torture device and wondering why it is ineffective at relieving headaches. You put some ibuprofen on the screws, tighten them some more, and subjects report slightly less intense headaches than last time.
Not creating effective soldiers puts you at a military disadvantage. If Prussia was a major power at the time, surely other countries feared them. If other countries felt it was necessary to stifle their populace in order to ensure that they were capable of defending themselves against Prussia (or to defend themselves against the countries that took after Prussia), perhaps stifling the populace was thought to be a “lesser evil”, a sacrifice they justified as part of an arms race.
Maybe this wasn’t an evil conspiracy, but a terrible consequence of the prospect of war.
What’s the bias for: “Ahh! We’re in mortal danger! Quick, everybody, become stupid!”
By ‘good’ reason I meant one consistent with the purpose or function of schooling. It is to be taken as having a touch of humor based on people’s misunderstanding of the function of school believing it to be synonymous with education.
I suspect that free public education is on average about the same everywhere. Guessing teacher’s password and rote memorization are the easiest ways to teach, and an average teacher is not very good at what she does, so this method shows up by default. The idea that the US education is built on the “Prussian school system [which] was explicitly designed to create soldiers” and that’s why it is so bad seems like a conspiracy theory.
I would like to know if there are examples to the contrary (i.e. countries where an average high-school graduate is adept at independent learning and critical thinking).
John Taylor Gatto won the New York State teacher of the year award in 1991 (New York state’s education website). His ambition to be a great teacher led him to the realization that the system itself is broken and he was so disgusted with it that he resigned. The claims that John Taylor Gatto makes are much worse than that they’re defaulting to the teacher’s password. You have no idea. Consider this: You obviously value rational thought. Learning about things like logical fallacies and biases is a no-brainer to you, right? Why are so many people learning them here, at LessWrong, for the first time? From what I know of American public schools, most of them don’t teach these. What could cause our school systems to teach us square dancing and rote memorization of thousands of spellings of words for the sake of polish, but leave out basic pieces required for rational thought? Ask yourself this:
If you were making the curriculum, and you knew the kids would be turned lose into the world complete with the right to vote at 18 would you find any excuse good enough to let them out with no familiarity of logical fallacies, biases, etc.?
If your answer to this is “no” you already know that something is wrong.
I have a radar for conspiracy theories too, but what he explains in The Seven Lesson School Teacher (in the first chapter of his book “Dumbing us Down”) got past my conspiracy theory radar and made it to “oh crap”. If you want to fast forward past the pretty obvious stuff, start at #3 in that link, and if you want to begin with “oh crap” start with #4.
I have no idea if his claim that the American school system was based on the Prussian school system in order to create obedient soldiers is correct, or whether seeing the effects of schooling as intentional is just a matter of seeing agency where there is none due to bias. However, the problems he describes are worth consideration. That, I’m sure of.
John Taylor Gatto won the New York State teacher of the year award in 1991 (New York state’s education website). His ambition to be a great teacher led him to the realization that the system itself is broken and he was so disgusted with it that he resigned. The claims that John Taylor Gatto makes are much worse than that they’re defaulting to the teacher’s password.
This was the only one of the education theorists that I studied while getting my teachning qualification that was remotely inspiring.
Man, Gatto spurred off so much thought for me. That was in my early 20′s so it’s not all readily coming to mind right now, but wow. I feel like… he explained so much. I’m not sure why you say he’s inspiring. So much of life that didn’t make any sense began to make sense after that. But that was one of the worst existential crises I’ve ever experienced. To realize that your whole life you had been stifled by the thing you thought was teaching you: abominable. There are horrors worse than death. That is one of them.
When I was 17, I decided to tear my whole reality apart because I noticed that it contained too many flaws. This was excruciating and terrifying. When I was 18, I had the undignified experience of realizing I could not allow myself to vote because I wasn’t taught to think critically and was still learning to. When I was in my early 20′s, I discovered logical fallacies and went “SOMEBODY WROTE THIS ALL DOWN!!?!!?? Why didn’t I know about this!?” I was a mess of a young woman—it took years of effort to put together a decently competent mind after all that.
Failing to teach reasoning skills in school is a crime against humanity.
John Taylor Gatto won the New York State teacher of the year award in 1991 (New York state’s education website). His ambition to be a great teacher led him to the realization that the system itself is broken and he was so disgusted with it that he resigned.
This pattern matches to the standard failure mode where exceptional individuals assume that others are more like them and therefore more competent than they actually are. This causes them to conclude that institutions are more flawed than they actually are.
I have no idea if his Prussian school system claim is right, or whether the idea that this was all intentional is just a matter of seeing agency where there is none due to bias.
It’s at least partly right, but strikes me as weak evidence. Horace Mann and several of his contemporaries admired the Prussian system and introduced reforms to American schooling based on it—but he probably wasn’t trying to foster exactly the same features that later commentators have objected to. There have also been several major changes to American public schooling since then, many of them divergent with the development of the Prussian (and, later, German) school system.
It’s plausible to me that the American school system functionally prioritizes inculcating obedience to authority, whether it was designed that way or fell into that arrangement through a process of evolution. But that’s a claim that’s got to stand or fall on an analysis of the system as it currently exists, not of its remote origins.
What could cause our school systems to teach us square dancing and rote memorization of thousands of spellings of words for the sake of polish, but leave out basic pieces required for rational thought?
My thesis is that to a good first approximation the purpose of schools, like that of the TSA, is to instill and ensure compliance in the populace, not to educate. I should probably go and read this Gatto, he’s come up before in discussions like this one.
I really question whether a “world full of leaders” would necessarily fail. These discussions about the original purpose of schooling seem to come down to that question. Is it that the leaders at the time didn’t want to give up leadership to have a strong populace, or is it that they had no clue how to organize a strong populace in a way that makes them as effective as stifling them does?
I mean, it’s pretty counter-intuitive that stifling a populace will make it more effective, even if it gives you the ability to organize them better.
And it’s really questionable that a populace full of leaders wouldn’t figure out how to organize itself.
On the one hand, we could argue that the information overload of a species that is rapidly gaining knowledge will worsen if their minds aren’t standardized somehow. We could also ask “Are there different ways to standardize, some stifling, some not?” and “Would standardizing them by stifling them cause more or less information overload compared with standardizing them around a theme of rational thought?”
The standardizing by stifling option reduces the number of new ideas being created, but prevents bad ideas from being culled, which allows them to build up.
The standardizing by rationality option doesn’t necessarily mean you need to stifle creativity (and I think creativity is necessary for rational thought—lest every decision you make be subject to the flaws inherent in an option set too small, like with false dichotomy) but it would cause people to cull a large number of ideas that they waste time on right now AND it would give them a way to agree on things. Right now, we have a bunch of people who believe in opinion. They say “Everyone has their opinion. Let’s respect each other’s opinion.” as if they cannot be proven true or false, more or less effective. I think the problem is they don’t know enough about how to test ideas.
Assuming that a populace made of soldiers makes a country safer may be incorrect, too. Why did people in Nazi Germany adopt the morals of the Nazis or fail to oppose them effectively? According to Dabrowski’s theory, there are 5 levels of of moral development, and the one that 75% of the population is at (level two) is characterized by it’s adoption of authority’s morals—they do not think for themselves about morality or realize their own hypocrisy or question their authority’s morality (that happens at level 3). They just follow it blindly.
I’ve heard people argue that we need schools like these to keep people organized and to have soldiers… but if the “organized” thinkers are going to result in a proliferation of useless ideas and the “soldiers” are liable to kill their own citizens as well as actual enemies, then we may be both more disorganized and less secure than if we were to choose some other school system.
Perhaps this is the key to the problem you pose—if the desired outcomes are organization and national security (as opposed to, say, wielding tyrannical power), then perhaps posing a better educational solution to the problems of organization and national security is the key that would change this.
I am very, very heartened to see that someone (Eliezer) has finally made progress in gathering people around a theme of refining rationality. That needed to happen. I’ve been thinking that needed to happen for years now—because the general population needs thinking skills, because gifted people are socially fractured, a million reasons.
I wonder if the people here have what it takes to invent an education system that is better at security and organization.
You seem to be reading these comments out of context. Cliff notes: That is John Taylor Gatto’s claim—that the American school system is based on the Prussian school system which was designed to create soldiers and the Prussian belief was that this required them to do things that stunted intellectual growth. Shminux said JTG seemed like a conspiracy theorist and my comment was in response to that.
You should definitely read JTG. At least read “The Seven Lesson School Teacher” (linked in my previous comment) if nothing else.
True: I had only read a small part of the thread at that time. My intent was to point out that there are plenty of others here on LW who have considered questions like the one above, and who have (in my case independently) come to conclusions that align with those you attribute to JTG. (That’s not hugely surprising, given Eliezer’s educational background.)
I wasn’t aware of the Prussian connection specifically, Wikipedia seems to confirm that the Prussian system has inspired other countries (including mine). (Not that I trust WP overmuch, but other sources concur.)
I have no idea if his claim that the American school system was based on the Prussian school system is right, or whether seeing the effects of schooling as intentional is just a matter of seeing agency where there is none due to bias. However, the problems he describes are worth consideration. That, I’m sure of.
My sense is that the education system struggles with the transition between learning-to-read and reading-to-learn. Those of us who make that transition easily often struggle with teacher’s password issues, but teacher’s password is probably only the second most frequent failure mode in public education.
My sense is that the education system struggles with the transition between learning-to-read and reading-to-learn.
Somewhat off-topic: high schools anywhere don’t seem to explicitly teach the only essential skill a college student must need: learning to learn:
How do I figure out what I need to know for a given class, how do I figure out what I do not know, and how do I go about learning it efficiently?
is not a question students learn to ask or answer. Everyone who completes a post-secondary education tends to come up with some sort of implicit heuristics that get them through, few do it consciously.
The International Baccalaureate explicitly acknowledges this as a key issue, and claims to teach these skills specifically.
I can speak from personal experience in saying that they utterly fail at this—the coursework alone might be slightly better, but the implementation is still much too reliant on teachers, and their behaviors has an effect several orders of magnitude greater than the standard material in how much the learning to learn is actually made part of the students versus just giving us a couple more passwords that seem to be about other passwords.
They also completely ignore the recursivity issue (learning to learn to learn to learn … ), which means students are left to deal with this problem on their own, lest they become stuck wasting enormous amounts of time attempting to perfectly optimize their learning methods and never accomplish any actual non-meta learning.
Mind, this is meant to be taken as a rant/anecdote. I might (though I wouldn’t say it’s highly likely) have just gotten the worst of it and the programme generally fares better, for all I know.
It’s even worse than that. I don’t think anyone knows how to teach people to learn. Obviously, individuals have done it, but human knowledge does not appear to contain a process that basically any ordinary teacher can follow to cause any ordinary student to learn how to learn.
That’s one of the top ten things I think we’d have after a good Singularity that we don’t have now. Maybe even top five.
+1 to that.
I also strongly agree with the fact that even the current small observable gains are impressive. I have observed an approximately 50% reduction in the average time it takes for me to explain foreign concepts for respective inferential distances, thanks to the reductionism and words sequences. While very anecdotal, if a 100% increase of efficiency in informal pedagogy is not impressive, please tell me where I can find all the other goldmines that so dramatically increase the ability to teach, and I’d also like an explanation why the hell it seems like no teachers anywhere are studying any of it.
Schools do not teach any critical thinking and for good reason. Ivan Illich wrote “Deschooling Society” in the 70s and John Taylor Gatto started writing the “The Underground History of American Education” in the 90s. Either should give you insight into why teachers do what they do, but Gattos’s “Weapons of Mass Instruction” is probably the best place to start. The short answer is that schools are designed from the top down to stunt the intellectual growth of children regardless of the intentions of teachers.
Maybe the result is that they stunt growth, but to infer intention from that is just an agency-fantasy. I would guess that the bereaucrats that actually think about the result have good intentions, even.
Eh, the Prussian school system was explicitly designed to create soldiers, and stunting intellectual growth is a part of that. It’s not much of a stretch to call it intentional.
I doubt that many school officials or politicians today know about the influences of the Prussian school system on e.g. the United States school system, or would guess that their present systems bear features deliberately designed to stunt intellectual growth.
I suspect that they mostly see the system that they were themselves educated in as normal by default, and only think to question the appropriateness of features that are specifically brought to their attention, and then only contemplate changing them in ways that are politically practical and advantageous from their positions. Expecting them to try and design and implement a school system that best meets their stated goals is like expecting a person to specify to a genie exactly how they want their mother removed from a burning building so as to save her life. The problem and its solution space simply doesn’t fall within the realms that they’re inclined to actually think about.
Indeed. (I should clarify that I was interpreting the original inventors of the Volksschule were the ‘top’, not, say, Arne Duncan.)
I do not know if you have read Gatto or not based on this. He points out that the system has no memory of its origin and that changes occur just like you describe with the result of deepening the problem. The last major school reform was GW Bush’s No Child Left Behind....if that tells you anything about who “fixes” the system.
No Child Left Behind was a stupid fix, but that doesn’t mean it was an ill intentioned fix.
I have actually just found the online text of “The Underground History of Education,” and started reading it, but so far am unimpressed and unlikely to finish it. I’m noticing a lot of cherrypicking to support his position, and he doesn’t give sources for his assertions at all (I went to the table of contents to look for a bibliography, and couldn’t find one, so I did a further search to see if this is the case in the print version and confirmed that the book contains no citations.)
I share his opinion that our current educational system is not well designed to get the best out of its students, but if I wanted to introduce someone to a writer who could effectively explain that point, I don’t think I’d recommend him. I’d probably recommend some of Eliezer’s essays, or maybe Paul Graham’s.
Oops, I accidentally only considered US and Canada. (tho I know little of what goes on in the American system, now that I think about it)
The US system took heavily from the Prussian school. The history is fascinating to say the least.
The statements of intent where made in writing and in speeches. I would do it for you but linking on the droid is not fun. Google “Rockefeller mencken quotes education” and the first link should lend some insight into the intent of the designers of the compulsory public school system. Gatto did a lot of research to support the thesis that schools are designed to dumb down the populace.
This may simply be jumping on an issue of semantics, but I’m concerned that this is really what he did, rather than doing a lot of research to find out whether the thesis was correct, or, more ideally, doing a lot of research before promoting the hypothesis to attention at all.
Well you can make wild speculations based off of my semantics or you can read for yourself. You seem to have chosen the former. Please return and clarify if you find his research faulty after you have read his work.
Well, the first link I get when I do the google search you suggested is this, and I’ve read that, but I’m not clear on what research of his you’re expecting me to read. The only work of his that appears to be available online is this, which contains assertions, but does not appear to support them with research as such.
It’s true that I haven’t read John Taylor Gatto’s work beyond that essay and the page you suggested reading yourself, but I was not wildly speculating based on semantics, I was making an educated guess considering that this is how people ordinarily behave. I assign a much higher prior to someone, say, hearing that the American school system is inspired by the Prussian system, which was largely concerned with producing good citizen-soldiers, and concluding that the American system must be deliberately designed to stymy creative thought, and looking for more evidence to back up that assertion, than I do to someone deciding to find out what the intentions behind the American school system are, doing extensive research, and concluding that its programs are actually purpose-designed to dumb down the populace.
What little work of his that I’ve found accessible online certainly doesn’t shift me away from that assessment.
Sounds scary. I’ll look into it and update as appropriate.
You are postulating quite the conspiracy tho. Much more likely it seems that a few b’crats went bonkers, the way you sometimes get UFO nuts out of the military.
Not really. To militaristic Prussia of the time, creating good soldiers was simply the same as creating good citizens, and was considered a worthy goal. No conspiracy required, just doing what seemed obviously correct at the time. And then the Prussian system was so ‘advanced’ and ‘modern’ and ‘successful’ that others copied it.
American experts did not all agree with the ‘military’ goal, but it was believed by the relevant experts that the same sorts of virtues applied to factory workers.
Now people try to actually educate children via this system. It’s like making minor tweaks to a torture device and wondering why it is ineffective at relieving headaches. You put some ibuprofen on the screws, tighten them some more, and subjects report slightly less intense headaches than last time.
Not creating effective soldiers puts you at a military disadvantage. If Prussia was a major power at the time, surely other countries feared them. If other countries felt it was necessary to stifle their populace in order to ensure that they were capable of defending themselves against Prussia (or to defend themselves against the countries that took after Prussia), perhaps stifling the populace was thought to be a “lesser evil”, a sacrifice they justified as part of an arms race.
Maybe this wasn’t an evil conspiracy, but a terrible consequence of the prospect of war.
What’s the bias for: “Ahh! We’re in mortal danger! Quick, everybody, become stupid!”
Bayesians vs. Barbarians
I wrote a quick introduction to Gatto’s claims of detrimental schooling practices that I think will give you a quick idea of whether it’s worth continuing to look into. Let me know what your reaction is? I’m curious.
What is the “good” reason? Or did you not mean to agree with this practice?
By ‘good’ reason I meant one consistent with the purpose or function of schooling. It is to be taken as having a touch of humor based on people’s misunderstanding of the function of school believing it to be synonymous with education.
Oh, okay. I guess I didn’t know your personality well enough yet to assume the correct things. Thanks. (:
I suspect that free public education is on average about the same everywhere. Guessing teacher’s password and rote memorization are the easiest ways to teach, and an average teacher is not very good at what she does, so this method shows up by default. The idea that the US education is built on the “Prussian school system [which] was explicitly designed to create soldiers” and that’s why it is so bad seems like a conspiracy theory.
I would like to know if there are examples to the contrary (i.e. countries where an average high-school graduate is adept at independent learning and critical thinking).
John Taylor Gatto won the New York State teacher of the year award in 1991 (New York state’s education website). His ambition to be a great teacher led him to the realization that the system itself is broken and he was so disgusted with it that he resigned. The claims that John Taylor Gatto makes are much worse than that they’re defaulting to the teacher’s password. You have no idea. Consider this: You obviously value rational thought. Learning about things like logical fallacies and biases is a no-brainer to you, right? Why are so many people learning them here, at LessWrong, for the first time? From what I know of American public schools, most of them don’t teach these. What could cause our school systems to teach us square dancing and rote memorization of thousands of spellings of words for the sake of polish, but leave out basic pieces required for rational thought? Ask yourself this:
If you were making the curriculum, and you knew the kids would be turned lose into the world complete with the right to vote at 18 would you find any excuse good enough to let them out with no familiarity of logical fallacies, biases, etc.?
If your answer to this is “no” you already know that something is wrong.
I have a radar for conspiracy theories too, but what he explains in The Seven Lesson School Teacher (in the first chapter of his book “Dumbing us Down”) got past my conspiracy theory radar and made it to “oh crap”. If you want to fast forward past the pretty obvious stuff, start at #3 in that link, and if you want to begin with “oh crap” start with #4.
I have no idea if his claim that the American school system was based on the Prussian school system in order to create obedient soldiers is correct, or whether seeing the effects of schooling as intentional is just a matter of seeing agency where there is none due to bias. However, the problems he describes are worth consideration. That, I’m sure of.
This was the only one of the education theorists that I studied while getting my teachning qualification that was remotely inspiring.
Man, Gatto spurred off so much thought for me. That was in my early 20′s so it’s not all readily coming to mind right now, but wow. I feel like… he explained so much. I’m not sure why you say he’s inspiring. So much of life that didn’t make any sense began to make sense after that. But that was one of the worst existential crises I’ve ever experienced. To realize that your whole life you had been stifled by the thing you thought was teaching you: abominable. There are horrors worse than death. That is one of them.
When I was 17, I decided to tear my whole reality apart because I noticed that it contained too many flaws. This was excruciating and terrifying. When I was 18, I had the undignified experience of realizing I could not allow myself to vote because I wasn’t taught to think critically and was still learning to. When I was in my early 20′s, I discovered logical fallacies and went “SOMEBODY WROTE THIS ALL DOWN!!?!!?? Why didn’t I know about this!?” I was a mess of a young woman—it took years of effort to put together a decently competent mind after all that.
Failing to teach reasoning skills in school is a crime against humanity.
This pattern matches to the standard failure mode where exceptional individuals assume that others are more like them and therefore more competent than they actually are. This causes them to conclude that institutions are more flawed than they actually are.
It’s at least partly right, but strikes me as weak evidence. Horace Mann and several of his contemporaries admired the Prussian system and introduced reforms to American schooling based on it—but he probably wasn’t trying to foster exactly the same features that later commentators have objected to. There have also been several major changes to American public schooling since then, many of them divergent with the development of the Prussian (and, later, German) school system.
It’s plausible to me that the American school system functionally prioritizes inculcating obedience to authority, whether it was designed that way or fell into that arrangement through a process of evolution. But that’s a claim that’s got to stand or fall on an analysis of the system as it currently exists, not of its remote origins.
My thesis is that to a good first approximation the purpose of schools, like that of the TSA, is to instill and ensure compliance in the populace, not to educate. I should probably go and read this Gatto, he’s come up before in discussions like this one.
I really question whether a “world full of leaders” would necessarily fail. These discussions about the original purpose of schooling seem to come down to that question. Is it that the leaders at the time didn’t want to give up leadership to have a strong populace, or is it that they had no clue how to organize a strong populace in a way that makes them as effective as stifling them does?
I mean, it’s pretty counter-intuitive that stifling a populace will make it more effective, even if it gives you the ability to organize them better.
And it’s really questionable that a populace full of leaders wouldn’t figure out how to organize itself.
On the one hand, we could argue that the information overload of a species that is rapidly gaining knowledge will worsen if their minds aren’t standardized somehow. We could also ask “Are there different ways to standardize, some stifling, some not?” and “Would standardizing them by stifling them cause more or less information overload compared with standardizing them around a theme of rational thought?”
The standardizing by stifling option reduces the number of new ideas being created, but prevents bad ideas from being culled, which allows them to build up.
The standardizing by rationality option doesn’t necessarily mean you need to stifle creativity (and I think creativity is necessary for rational thought—lest every decision you make be subject to the flaws inherent in an option set too small, like with false dichotomy) but it would cause people to cull a large number of ideas that they waste time on right now AND it would give them a way to agree on things. Right now, we have a bunch of people who believe in opinion. They say “Everyone has their opinion. Let’s respect each other’s opinion.” as if they cannot be proven true or false, more or less effective. I think the problem is they don’t know enough about how to test ideas.
Assuming that a populace made of soldiers makes a country safer may be incorrect, too. Why did people in Nazi Germany adopt the morals of the Nazis or fail to oppose them effectively? According to Dabrowski’s theory, there are 5 levels of of moral development, and the one that 75% of the population is at (level two) is characterized by it’s adoption of authority’s morals—they do not think for themselves about morality or realize their own hypocrisy or question their authority’s morality (that happens at level 3). They just follow it blindly.
I’ve heard people argue that we need schools like these to keep people organized and to have soldiers… but if the “organized” thinkers are going to result in a proliferation of useless ideas and the “soldiers” are liable to kill their own citizens as well as actual enemies, then we may be both more disorganized and less secure than if we were to choose some other school system.
Perhaps this is the key to the problem you pose—if the desired outcomes are organization and national security (as opposed to, say, wielding tyrannical power), then perhaps posing a better educational solution to the problems of organization and national security is the key that would change this.
I am very, very heartened to see that someone (Eliezer) has finally made progress in gathering people around a theme of refining rationality. That needed to happen. I’ve been thinking that needed to happen for years now—because the general population needs thinking skills, because gifted people are socially fractured, a million reasons.
I wonder if the people here have what it takes to invent an education system that is better at security and organization.
Another big thing that’s missing from school is the idea of applying one’s thinking to a significant decision, and then acting on it.
I call this problem “spending crucial developmental years in simulation land”.
You seem to be reading these comments out of context. Cliff notes: That is John Taylor Gatto’s claim—that the American school system is based on the Prussian school system which was designed to create soldiers and the Prussian belief was that this required them to do things that stunted intellectual growth. Shminux said JTG seemed like a conspiracy theorist and my comment was in response to that.
You should definitely read JTG. At least read “The Seven Lesson School Teacher” (linked in my previous comment) if nothing else.
True: I had only read a small part of the thread at that time. My intent was to point out that there are plenty of others here on LW who have considered questions like the one above, and who have (in my case independently) come to conclusions that align with those you attribute to JTG. (That’s not hugely surprising, given Eliezer’s educational background.)
I wasn’t aware of the Prussian connection specifically, Wikipedia seems to confirm that the Prussian system has inspired other countries (including mine). (Not that I trust WP overmuch, but other sources concur.)
The thing that’s wrong is that nobody knows about rationality, and of those who do, most don’t care.
Not everyone knows about heuristics and biases. A b’crat who did wouldn’t care enough to put his career on the line.
Would have upvoted just for this.
My sense is that the education system struggles with the transition between learning-to-read and reading-to-learn. Those of us who make that transition easily often struggle with teacher’s password issues, but teacher’s password is probably only the second most frequent failure mode in public education.
Somewhat off-topic: high schools anywhere don’t seem to explicitly teach the only essential skill a college student must need: learning to learn:
is not a question students learn to ask or answer. Everyone who completes a post-secondary education tends to come up with some sort of implicit heuristics that get them through, few do it consciously.
The International Baccalaureate explicitly acknowledges this as a key issue, and claims to teach these skills specifically.
I can speak from personal experience in saying that they utterly fail at this—the coursework alone might be slightly better, but the implementation is still much too reliant on teachers, and their behaviors has an effect several orders of magnitude greater than the standard material in how much the learning to learn is actually made part of the students versus just giving us a couple more passwords that seem to be about other passwords.
They also completely ignore the recursivity issue (learning to learn to learn to learn … ), which means students are left to deal with this problem on their own, lest they become stuck wasting enormous amounts of time attempting to perfectly optimize their learning methods and never accomplish any actual non-meta learning.
Mind, this is meant to be taken as a rant/anecdote. I might (though I wouldn’t say it’s highly likely) have just gotten the worst of it and the programme generally fares better, for all I know.
Thanks for actually being a little specific on that. I’ve heard it a lot, but my thot is always “but what does that even mean”.
It’s even worse than that. I don’t think anyone knows how to teach people to learn. Obviously, individuals have done it, but human knowledge does not appear to contain a process that basically any ordinary teacher can follow to cause any ordinary student to learn how to learn.
That’s one of the top ten things I think we’d have after a good Singularity that we don’t have now. Maybe even top five.