7 ms·

School Is to Submit

86 points by Jerry2 11y ago

x5n1 11y ago
In my opinion the very ideas propping up the idea of work and the economy are flawed. They are flawed because work is not designed to meet human needs. Instead the output of work is designed to meet human needs. But people are so busy working they have little time to participate in the output of that work. Work itself is the end, because that is what you spend most of your time doing, it is the product in of itself. We should figure out how to produce work that actually improves well being. Not products or services which do that because they all actually fail to do that in the end if the people producing them are miserable. And they all are. Like let me give you an example. Say a worker produces a widget. They can produce the widget in an hour or in two hours. They feel better if they produce it in two hours. Modern work practices would force you to have them produce it in one hour to lock in that profit of the additional hour of work. At the end to cost of the item would be affected by how much time is given for work. Say the cost is doubled by doing things this way. At the end the worker earns the same, and say we do that with the whole economy and so everything costs twice that much. But workers are generally happier and more relaxed. To me that would be a better out come than goods that cost 1/2 as much. Not so for the economy. In fact it would be very good if we could use automation to do just this. Make work more pleasurable. But the way the economy is set up, and the logic that goes with it. This is simply not going to happen.
- backlava 11y ago
  In theory the market should balance this. Workers should be willing to accept less money for more rewarding work.
  - x5n1 11y ago
    Yes in theory but most work is organized around salary and freelance work is usually more work instead of a salary, so worse. The salary structure forces the type of logic I am writing about above. Every company wants to make as much profit and remain competitive. Therefore they don't really have the opportunity to provide easier or better work. Or even signal that with the amount of money they pay for via a salary. The economy does not do this at all. Read all job descriptions, they are all filled with terms like tight deadlines, etc.
  - coldtea 11y ago
    Only if this "more rewarding work" is available and at above subsistence level (nothing rewarding about doing what you like but barely being able to make ends meet and/or not being appreciated for it, which in the end destroys your enjoyment of your line of work too). And only as long as people aren't hammered 24/7 with ads and consumption imperatives -- a lot of people believe those can be easily resisted and that they never buy anything because of these etc, but statistically most of them are overestimating themselves, they are as susceptible as anyone to consumerism persuasion which includes ads, fashion, peer pressure, status signals, being more attractive to potential partners and tons of other things besides.
- marknutter 11y ago
  > But workers are generally happier and more relaxed Perhaps, but they will also be unemployed because their company's competitors would eat their lunch and put them out of business. However, I disagree that most workers would be happier being less productive. I think people generally take pride in their work and want to be productive as they can possibly be. They understand it benefits the company, the customer, their coworkers, and ultimately themselves because the company that can deliver the best product for the best price wins.
- yummyfajitas 11y ago
  At the end the worker earns the same, and say we do that with the whole economy and so everything costs twice that much. But workers are generally happier and more relaxed. The average worker doesn't earn the same in real terms - that's just not possible in this world. If you have 100 workers producing 100 loaves of bread the average (real) wage is 1 loaf which costs $1. If we adopt your policy the workers produce 50 loaves. The average real wage is now only 0.5 loaves of bread (== $1) but bread costs $2. You can't cut production without corresponding cuts in real wages.
  - x5n1 11y ago
    So automate to reduce the difference.
    - yummyfajitas 11y ago
      If that were possible then we'd simply be discussing a drop from 2 loaves/person to 1 loaf/person instead of 1 to 0.5.
- Joof 11y ago
  I'm of the opinion that a very large amount of the work we do now produces minimal value products in terms of general welfare and happiness (Facebook, finance, advertising, companies that support other companies doing useless things. Basically moving money around without producing things. Facebook does generate good research, so maybe that's it's benefit?) Therefore, the cost of society slowing down and doing less work is quite low. Having more time to explore novel ideas will probably become more beneficial to society in the future. Or maybe not, but I like to dream.
- petra 11y ago
  You don't even need automation to do this. It's just a matter of goals. For example, in Israel, a few years ago, all cashiers we're forced to stand they're full shift. And than the law changed and they must have a chair to sit on. The impact on the prices is negligible maybe even zero, the impact on profits is probably tiny if exists. The impact on the cashiers ? huge. So why did they do it the other way ? because capitalism at it's core is a system built on exploitation and power imbalances and races to the bottom. And it definitely needs to be fixed.
  - edanm 11y ago
    "because capitalism at it's core is a system built on exploitation and power imbalances and races to the bottom." That's a very strong claim, which I don't agree with at all. Why do you think this is true? Btw, that's an interesting story about the cashiers in Israel, haven't heard of it before. Do you have a citation?
    - x5n1 11y ago
      Capitalism in fact all economics is based on exploitation. definition of exploitation: make full use of and derive benefit from (a resource). > power imbalances Some people have capital, most people don't. Those who don't have it are exploited as in above. > races to the bottom This is a bit more difficult to prove. But from Wikipedia: "The race to the bottom is a socio-economic phrase which is used to describe government deregulation of the business environment or taxes in order to attract or retain economic activity in their jurisdictions. An outcome of globalization and free trade, the phenomenon may occur when competition increases between geographic areas over a particular sector of trade and production." We call this Economic Liberalism and it is the prevailing economic theory. There is a logic that justifies all of this as a good and positive thing from a societal or even a global development prespective. But the cost for all of these is definitely paid by the individual.
    - petra 11y ago
      Citation:http://www.haaretz.com/news/new-law-requires-employers-to-supply-workers-with-chairs-1.212968 http://www.haaretz.com/news/new-law-requires-employers-to-su... >> "because capitalism at it's core is a system built on exploitation and power imbalances and races to the bottom." - races to the bottom - companies will do a lot to save cents per product, even sabotage quality. that's what i see in the appliance market - where everything is a piece of shit reliability wise. Same in the clothing market(shitty chemicals), ikea furniture, low quality of many software products, many electronic components(micro controllers), etc. Exploitation and power imbalances - Besides state protection - that's relatively hard to get, for many jobs, employers have most of the power and they behave accordingly. suicides in Apple factories(again it would matter to Apple almost at all if employees had reasonable conditions) or the story from Israel is one among many. Are you Israeli BTW?
tristanj 11y ago
One of the biggest benefits of schooling (that almost no one mentions) is that schools function as an enormous public daycare system that keeps children off the streets while parents work. This allows both parents to work instead of having one stay at home for childcare, increasing the size of the workforce and making the country more productive overall. Schooling has many benefits to the kids as well (which the author does address), but I find it really interesting that simply the existence of schools provides a benefit to society, even when nothing is taught there.
- wcummings 11y ago
  I think this is more true of primary and secondary school than college, but most college students are pretty useless, too. You really see this in action when school is closed and half your coworkers are missing.
- marknutter 11y ago
  But what if the kids were working instead, as apprentices? It would provide the same benefit and potentially earn the family more money as well, instead of cost them money in the form of property taxes.
  - paulmd 11y ago
    Why not coal miners? I mean, children are just training on what could hopefully be a life-long profession. /s No, the job market doesn't need more low-skilled workers who can be paid sub-minimum-wage (as such workers historically have been and inevitably will be afforded by the people who make such suggestions). Prison labor, mentally ill people, and teenage schoolkids are already used to undercut adult labor in such roles.
    - marknutter 11y ago
      > No, the job market doesn't need more low-skilled workers who can be paid sub-minimum-wage Hm, notice how I didn't say "low-skilled workers". Did you mean to reply to a different comment?
fiatjaf 11y ago
If you want to read something about why schools are bad, don't read this prententious and bizarre ode to the employment, read John Taylor Gatto's "The Seven Lesson Schoolteacher": http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
- xiaopingguo 11y ago
  That was indeed a much better read. Particularly liked the bit about the bells.
- throwadeedee 11y ago
  One of my favorite pieces of writing. Both in content and style.
panic 11y ago
Most nations today would be richer if they had long ago just submitted wholesale to a rich nation, allowing that rich nation to change their laws, customs, etc., and just do everything their way. But this idea greatly offends national and cultural pride. So nations stay poor. I'm sure the people of these nations would love to watch their culture be erased as they become an underclass in the territory of a powerful nation. Just ask the Native Americans! When firms and managers from rich places try to transplant rich practices to poor places, giving poor place workers exactly the same equipment, materials, procedures, etc., one of the main things that goes wrong is that poor place workers just refuse to do what they are told. They won’t show up for work reliably on time, have many problematic superstitions, hate direct orders, won’t accept tasks and roles that that deviate from their non-work relative status with co-workers, and won’t accept being told to do tasks differently than they had done them before, especially when new ways seem harder. "Many problematic superstitions?" What? Who is this guy even talking about? This sounds like a caricature, not an actual description of reality. The farming mode required humans to swallow many changes that didn’t feel nice or natural to foragers. While foragers are fiercely egalitarian, farmers are dominated by kings and generals, and have unequal property and classes. Farmers work more hours at less mentally challenging tasks, and get less variety via travel. Huge new cultural pressures, such as religions with moralizing gods, were needed to turn foragers into farmers. Again, how does he know this? Is he just making up stories, or is this based on some sort of evidence?
- vessenes 11y ago
  A couple comments; first, you have clearly never tried to manage a third-world work force/team. A single example came to mind quickly for me; a hotel I frequented in Mozambique had a serious problem with feral cats. Like 50 of them. They would come right up to your table, jump on it while you were elsewhere, and lick the butter of your plate. I like cats as much as the next guy, but seriously. It took a couple of months to get an exterminator in willing to deal with them; cats = black magic = no employees (relatively well educated and very well paid for the town) were willing to deal with them. The fact that you're writing this post in English significantly bolsters the point the author made about acculturation. You live in a world in which the English essentially won the culture war, and imposed their culture on a vast swath of the globe. (Check out this fine map of places England has not invaded for some perspective: http://www.humanosphere.org/basics/2013/08/map-of-the-day-where-the-brits-never-invaded/ http://www.humanosphere.org/basics/2013/08/map-of-the-day-wh...) While it might be controversial to say that English culture generates on average more wealth than some other cultures, I think it would be reasonably easy to demonstrate that something about the English acculturation of colonies left them better off financially than other European and Asian colonizers. And, by better off, I mean vastly better off. Compare Nigeria (British, $3k+ per person GDP) to CAR (French, $350 per person GDP). I'm not cherry picking, either. America to Mexico. We live in a world shaped by the Brits. To your point, financial well-being isn't anything like the only measure. At least in America, part of what made growth easy was whole-sale genocide. Places with more balanced colonization plans got much more strung out violence and economic difficulty. I would argue due to culture conflicts, at least in part. I don't think the author is disputing this in the essay, though. He is instead saying that more individualistic cultures who will not engage with Western school systems hurt their economic outcomes, for a variety of reasons.
jseliger 11y ago
I explicitly tell students that total rebellion from the school system (or professor expectations) is usually really stupid—but so is total conformity. Students, and people in general, need to find ways to rebel intelligently. That's probably true in many companies too. A lot of employers, especially white collar / creative employers, don't want or need total drones. But they also can't have people who are utterly unable to work towards common goals. I remember a somewhat notorious guy at Google who got fired because he was wildly, vociferously opposed to much of what the rest of the company was doing much of the time. Can't remember his name, though.
- wutbrodo 11y ago
  I believe he left, not got fired. And iirc it wasn't about "much of what the company was doing" but just the stupid way the promotion system works (as well as a very, very niche product idea). Then again I'm mostly assuming we're talking about the same person because he was one of the only ones I would count as particularly "notorious". The fact that our recollections are so different might mean you're talking about someone from many years ago (before my tenure).
- askafriend 11y ago
  Are you referring to our beloved Michael O. Church?
Animats 11y ago
Well, yes. This isn't a new observation. Here's a modern overview, describing kindergarten as boot camp.[1] This idea goes back a long way in European tradition, when education was church-driven. Submission to authority is basic Catholic doctrine, and persists in most spinoffs from Catholicism. School as training for submission to authority went mainstream during the Industrial Revolution, when employers needed a large but passive workforce. But that's a longer story than I have time for now. [1] http://www.sociology101.net/readings/Learning-the-Student-Role.pdf http://www.sociology101.net/readings/Learning-the-Student-Ro...
ktRolster 11y ago
It's true there are plenty of problems with our school system, but....I've been to places that don't have school systems, and having a poor one is better than none. Also, I feel sorry for anyone who only views education as a way to get a job. They've missed out on a lot of beauty in the world.
- unimpressive 11y ago
  >Also, I feel sorry for anyone who only views education as a way to get a job. They've missed out on a lot of beauty in the world. One famous result from psychology is that having people focus on an extrinsic reward for doing something tends to completely overshadow the intrinsic reward involved in performance. Contrast this with the cost of tuition and the dots naturally connect. (Of course, the opportunity cost of spending four years of your life doing something shouldn't be understated either.)
deft 11y ago
No one has mentioned Ivan Illich's Deschooling Society yet? I obviously haven't read Bryan Caplan's book that's discussed in this article, but from the looks of it, none of his ideas are new. They've been explored before. I find his title interesting though, the problem isn't education, but schooling. Another commenter touched on this, but if you're actually interested in this subject check out Illich's book. It's a lot more radical than this hard to understand piece. Another thing, at the end why is the concept of appearing as "prestigious forager teachers" instead of the actual "dominating bosses" listed as a benefit? Maybe I'm not reading it right. tl;dr: read Illich.
- nickysielicki 11y ago
  Not sure if this is complete, but I found this link: http://www.preservenet.com/theory/Illich/Deschooling/intro.html http://www.preservenet.com/theory/Illich/Deschooling/intro.h...
yk 11y ago
> Most nations today would be richer if they had long ago just submitted wholesale to a rich nation, allowing that rich nation to change their laws, customs, etc., and just do everything their way. But this idea greatly offends national and cultural pride. So nations stay poor. The examples of China, Japan and the USA suggest the exact opposite. (Actually I do not know an example that would support the authors claim.) > When firms and managers from rich places try to transplant rich practices to poor places, giving poor place workers exactly the same equipment, materials, procedures, etc., one of the main things that goes wrong is that poor place workers just refuse to do what they are told. [Citation needed] and so on, and so on... In conclusion, I think were the essay falls apart is, that it does not examine different kinds of submit. 'submit' is a very different word if the pupil submits to a teacher out of a deep desire to learn a new skill or if someone submits to a warlord. (And both are very different from submitting to a boss at a workplace.) Plus it would be nice to see a rejection of the standard story, that school mainly teaches useful skills.
- ktRolster 11y ago
  The examples of China, Japan and the USA suggest the exact opposite. (Actually I do not know an example that would support the authors claim.) Indeed, the article would be better with less speculation (presented in the form of assertions) and more data collecting.
- chroma 11y ago
  > The examples of China, Japan and the USA suggest the exact opposite. (Actually I do not know an example that would support the authors claim.) What? Japan adopted representative democracy, human rights, capitalism, fractional reserve banking, the metric system, and even western attire. China is more authoritarian, but has made many of the same changes. Their economic prosperity is highly correlated with these changes. And I'm flabbergasted that you think the USA doesn't prove his point. The original American culture was from the native Americans. Once it was replaced with British culture, the economy of north america flourished. In places where native culture was replaced with others (Spanish/native culture in Mexico, Portuguese/native culture in Brazil, etc), the people haven't had the same level of success. Similarly, Spain and Portugal haven't had the same prosperity as the UK. When it comes to per capita GDP, the effect of culture is vastly underestimated. > [Citation needed] and so on, and so on... He links to a citation in the sentence after your quote.[1] The paper is a study of the differences in cotton mill productivity in various countries. The author accounts for varying levels of technology, training, and other factors. He finds that the biggest factor affecting productivity is culture. Honestly, I think you're reading this far too uncharitably. It's a blog post, not an academic paper. If the author took the time to address the objections in this thread, it would have been 10x as much work. 1. http://faculty.georgetown.edu/mh5/class/econ489/Clark-Why-Isn't-the%20-Whole-World-Developed.pdf http://faculty.georgetown.edu/mh5/class/econ489/Clark-Why-Is...
timthorn 11y ago
The idea he proposes sounds very similar to the University Technical Colleges in the UK. Taking students at 14, they try to have a very work like atmosphere, with 9-5 workdays, no homework, and a curriculum with a large project based component run in conjunction with business so that students are solving actual problems seen in real business.
joelthelion 11y ago
And learning to read is to brainwash you. sigh...
KaiserPro 11y ago
> * foragers are fiercely egalitarian* [citation needed] because human nature is egalitarian isn't it. > Most nations today would be richer if they had long ago just submitted wholesale to a rich nation What you mean is, British colonialism is the only way to run a country. That sort of thinking lead to wholesale massacres, and the British loosing 4 consecutive wars in Afghanistan. This is the sort of thinking that died out in the 1930s when the indian servants poisoned their british master's tea. Of course you don't suggest that spain should have submitted to the moors, who were demonstrably more advanced in financial, artistic and technological means. Progress doesn't happen because the populous reject change, its because progress only happens through chance. The industrial revolution was sustained in england because, despite massive political change, england didn't completely purge/remodel the upper-classes. There was the same level of suffering and servitude. > Forager children aren’t told what to do; they just wander around and do what they like [citation needed] Have you ever fucking seen how foraging works? The child follows the parent and actively learns, or they die when they get lost. Do you think that the knowledge that some red berries are bad is instinctive? > While human foragers are especially averse to even a hint of domination, they are also especially eager to take “orders” Logic isn't your strong suit is it? Basically your article could be summed up as: Humans don't like being bullied or enslaved. If you change the practices of leaders, the plebs will follow.
yotamoron 11y ago
Read 'deschooling society' by Ivan Illich. Will help you understand a thing or two about what is school all about.
tmptmp 11y ago
Some things in this article I would like to object and to point out are (although I am not here to support or argue for/against the current schools): >>But they won’t be publicly ranked and corrected nearly as often as in school, even though such things will happen far more often than their ancestors would have tolerated. Are you kidding? Their ancesters would even be publicly killed/maimed by other foragers if they couldn't perform as expected or didn't conform to the rules of the society. I hate when modern people try to paint very rosy pictures of the past, especially of the so called tribal (hunter-gatherer) people. Many tribal societies can be seen to be guided by a single principle "survival of the fittest" and generally the survival function is some combination of "ability to perform as expected by other tribals" and "conformity to arbitrarily chosen rules by the tribal society". >>They don’t have a single random boss they don’t respect, but can instead be trained by many adults, can select them to be the most prestigious adults around, and can stop training with each when they like. Here the author ignores one important aspect :- not even the forager children can stop training with each "when they like": there are many important factors to be considered here; that if a forager kid has not yet learnt how to "earn food and other things needed to survive" he/she must continue training and it may be under those adult(s) he/she may or may not like to train under. >>Have teachers continually give students complex assignments with new ambiguous instructions, using the excuse of helping students to learn new things. If any human language is used to give instructions, those instructions will be ambiguous. I doubt if the foragers used any unambiguous human language. In short, the rise and need of schools is a very important topic and this article leaves too much out. If time permits, I will write my thoughts on it.
rrss1122 11y ago
For a website called Overcoming Bias, the bias in the article is fairly transparent.
pizzasynthesis 11y ago
This self-fellating cultural revisionist drivel is exactly the sort of meta-analysis I'd expect from someone who has spent too long codependent with academia and thusly suffers from an irrational self-hatred and tunnel vision and a lingering feeling that their qualifications are much narrower than they'd like to believe. The author only once cites an external party (three links to the very same blog along with a link to their colleague's book). Even that study says: > The proximate cause of inefficiency in at least some cases was the workers' refusal to accept more machinery, but the choices of workers correlated with the local real wage. Whatever constrained the choices of workers in cotton textiles, or whatever determined their preferences, must have applied to all of the local labor force. Unfortunately the sources on the textile industry do not allow me to go with any confidence beyond this limited ascription of responsibility to local influences. So workers in Bombay, who were being payed less than workers in England, refused to take on more responsibilities until they received higher wages. Sounds pretty fair to me. Given the information at hand, we could posit that Western countries were more successful at organizing labor instead of assuming, like the author does, that it can be fundamentally attributed to culture, and that less-developed countries like India should just adopt Western culture. Maybe if they adopted Western culture, they could come colonize Western nations, then they'd be really successful. /s I can't see this as anything more than some sort of strange philosophical flexing, and the author could stand to get another degree--perhaps this time in history.

86 points by Jerry2 11y ago

x5n1 11y ago

In my opinion the very ideas propping up the idea of work and the economy are flawed. They are flawed because work is not designed to meet human needs. Instead the output of work is designed to meet human needs. But people are so busy working they have little time to participate in the output of that work. Work itself is the end, because that is what you spend most of your time doing, it is the product in of itself. We should figure out how to produce work that actually improves well being. Not products or services which do that because they all actually fail to do that in the end if the people producing them are miserable. And they all are. Like let me give you an example. Say a worker produces a widget. They can produce the widget in an hour or in two hours. They feel better if they produce it in two hours. Modern work practices would force you to have them produce it in one hour to lock in that profit of the additional hour of work. At the end to cost of the item would be affected by how much time is given for work. Say the cost is doubled by doing things this way. At the end the worker earns the same, and say we do that with the whole economy and so everything costs twice that much. But workers are generally happier and more relaxed. To me that would be a better out come than goods that cost 1/2 as much. Not so for the economy. In fact it would be very good if we could use automation to do just this. Make work more pleasurable. But the way the economy is set up, and the logic that goes with it. This is simply not going to happen.

backlava 11y ago
In theory the market should balance this. Workers should be willing to accept less money for more rewarding work.
- x5n1 11y ago
  Yes in theory but most work is organized around salary and freelance work is usually more work instead of a salary, so worse. The salary structure forces the type of logic I am writing about above. Every company wants to make as much profit and remain competitive. Therefore they don't really have the opportunity to provide easier or better work. Or even signal that with the amount of money they pay for via a salary. The economy does not do this at all. Read all job descriptions, they are all filled with terms like tight deadlines, etc.
- coldtea 11y ago
  Only if this "more rewarding work" is available and at above subsistence level (nothing rewarding about doing what you like but barely being able to make ends meet and/or not being appreciated for it, which in the end destroys your enjoyment of your line of work too). And only as long as people aren't hammered 24/7 with ads and consumption imperatives -- a lot of people believe those can be easily resisted and that they never buy anything because of these etc, but statistically most of them are overestimating themselves, they are as susceptible as anyone to consumerism persuasion which includes ads, fashion, peer pressure, status signals, being more attractive to potential partners and tons of other things besides.
marknutter 11y ago
> But workers are generally happier and more relaxed Perhaps, but they will also be unemployed because their company's competitors would eat their lunch and put them out of business. However, I disagree that most workers would be happier being less productive. I think people generally take pride in their work and want to be productive as they can possibly be. They understand it benefits the company, the customer, their coworkers, and ultimately themselves because the company that can deliver the best product for the best price wins.
yummyfajitas 11y ago
At the end the worker earns the same, and say we do that with the whole economy and so everything costs twice that much. But workers are generally happier and more relaxed. The average worker doesn't earn the same in real terms - that's just not possible in this world. If you have 100 workers producing 100 loaves of bread the average (real) wage is 1 loaf which costs $1. If we adopt your policy the workers produce 50 loaves. The average real wage is now only 0.5 loaves of bread (== $1) but bread costs $2. You can't cut production without corresponding cuts in real wages.
- x5n1 11y ago
  So automate to reduce the difference.
  - yummyfajitas 11y ago
    If that were possible then we'd simply be discussing a drop from 2 loaves/person to 1 loaf/person instead of 1 to 0.5.
Joof 11y ago
I'm of the opinion that a very large amount of the work we do now produces minimal value products in terms of general welfare and happiness (Facebook, finance, advertising, companies that support other companies doing useless things. Basically moving money around without producing things. Facebook does generate good research, so maybe that's it's benefit?) Therefore, the cost of society slowing down and doing less work is quite low. Having more time to explore novel ideas will probably become more beneficial to society in the future. Or maybe not, but I like to dream.
petra 11y ago
You don't even need automation to do this. It's just a matter of goals. For example, in Israel, a few years ago, all cashiers we're forced to stand they're full shift. And than the law changed and they must have a chair to sit on. The impact on the prices is negligible maybe even zero, the impact on profits is probably tiny if exists. The impact on the cashiers ? huge. So why did they do it the other way ? because capitalism at it's core is a system built on exploitation and power imbalances and races to the bottom. And it definitely needs to be fixed.
- edanm 11y ago
  "because capitalism at it's core is a system built on exploitation and power imbalances and races to the bottom." That's a very strong claim, which I don't agree with at all. Why do you think this is true? Btw, that's an interesting story about the cashiers in Israel, haven't heard of it before. Do you have a citation?
  - x5n1 11y ago
    Capitalism in fact all economics is based on exploitation. definition of exploitation: make full use of and derive benefit from (a resource). > power imbalances Some people have capital, most people don't. Those who don't have it are exploited as in above. > races to the bottom This is a bit more difficult to prove. But from Wikipedia: "The race to the bottom is a socio-economic phrase which is used to describe government deregulation of the business environment or taxes in order to attract or retain economic activity in their jurisdictions. An outcome of globalization and free trade, the phenomenon may occur when competition increases between geographic areas over a particular sector of trade and production." We call this Economic Liberalism and it is the prevailing economic theory. There is a logic that justifies all of this as a good and positive thing from a societal or even a global development prespective. But the cost for all of these is definitely paid by the individual.
  - petra 11y ago
    Citation:http://www.haaretz.com/news/new-law-requires-employers-to-supply-workers-with-chairs-1.212968 http://www.haaretz.com/news/new-law-requires-employers-to-su... >> "because capitalism at it's core is a system built on exploitation and power imbalances and races to the bottom." - races to the bottom - companies will do a lot to save cents per product, even sabotage quality. that's what i see in the appliance market - where everything is a piece of shit reliability wise. Same in the clothing market(shitty chemicals), ikea furniture, low quality of many software products, many electronic components(micro controllers), etc. Exploitation and power imbalances - Besides state protection - that's relatively hard to get, for many jobs, employers have most of the power and they behave accordingly. suicides in Apple factories(again it would matter to Apple almost at all if employees had reasonable conditions) or the story from Israel is one among many. Are you Israeli BTW?

tristanj 11y ago

One of the biggest benefits of schooling (that almost no one mentions) is that schools function as an enormous public daycare system that keeps children off the streets while parents work. This allows both parents to work instead of having one stay at home for childcare, increasing the size of the workforce and making the country more productive overall. Schooling has many benefits to the kids as well (which the author does address), but I find it really interesting that simply the existence of schools provides a benefit to society, even when nothing is taught there.

wcummings 11y ago
I think this is more true of primary and secondary school than college, but most college students are pretty useless, too. You really see this in action when school is closed and half your coworkers are missing.
marknutter 11y ago
But what if the kids were working instead, as apprentices? It would provide the same benefit and potentially earn the family more money as well, instead of cost them money in the form of property taxes.
- paulmd 11y ago
  Why not coal miners? I mean, children are just training on what could hopefully be a life-long profession. /s No, the job market doesn't need more low-skilled workers who can be paid sub-minimum-wage (as such workers historically have been and inevitably will be afforded by the people who make such suggestions). Prison labor, mentally ill people, and teenage schoolkids are already used to undercut adult labor in such roles.
  - marknutter 11y ago
    > No, the job market doesn't need more low-skilled workers who can be paid sub-minimum-wage Hm, notice how I didn't say "low-skilled workers". Did you mean to reply to a different comment?

fiatjaf 11y ago

If you want to read something about why schools are bad, don't read this prententious and bizarre ode to the employment, read John Taylor Gatto's "The Seven Lesson Schoolteacher": http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt

xiaopingguo 11y ago
That was indeed a much better read. Particularly liked the bit about the bells.
throwadeedee 11y ago
One of my favorite pieces of writing. Both in content and style.

panic 11y ago

Most nations today would be richer if they had long ago just submitted wholesale to a rich nation, allowing that rich nation to change their laws, customs, etc., and just do everything their way. But this idea greatly offends national and cultural pride. So nations stay poor. I'm sure the people of these nations would love to watch their culture be erased as they become an underclass in the territory of a powerful nation. Just ask the Native Americans! When firms and managers from rich places try to transplant rich practices to poor places, giving poor place workers exactly the same equipment, materials, procedures, etc., one of the main things that goes wrong is that poor place workers just refuse to do what they are told. They won’t show up for work reliably on time, have many problematic superstitions, hate direct orders, won’t accept tasks and roles that that deviate from their non-work relative status with co-workers, and won’t accept being told to do tasks differently than they had done them before, especially when new ways seem harder. "Many problematic superstitions?" What? Who is this guy even talking about? This sounds like a caricature, not an actual description of reality. The farming mode required humans to swallow many changes that didn’t feel nice or natural to foragers. While foragers are fiercely egalitarian, farmers are dominated by kings and generals, and have unequal property and classes. Farmers work more hours at less mentally challenging tasks, and get less variety via travel. Huge new cultural pressures, such as religions with moralizing gods, were needed to turn foragers into farmers. Again, how does he know this? Is he just making up stories, or is this based on some sort of evidence?

vessenes 11y ago
A couple comments; first, you have clearly never tried to manage a third-world work force/team. A single example came to mind quickly for me; a hotel I frequented in Mozambique had a serious problem with feral cats. Like 50 of them. They would come right up to your table, jump on it while you were elsewhere, and lick the butter of your plate. I like cats as much as the next guy, but seriously. It took a couple of months to get an exterminator in willing to deal with them; cats = black magic = no employees (relatively well educated and very well paid for the town) were willing to deal with them. The fact that you're writing this post in English significantly bolsters the point the author made about acculturation. You live in a world in which the English essentially won the culture war, and imposed their culture on a vast swath of the globe. (Check out this fine map of places England has not invaded for some perspective: http://www.humanosphere.org/basics/2013/08/map-of-the-day-where-the-brits-never-invaded/ http://www.humanosphere.org/basics/2013/08/map-of-the-day-wh...) While it might be controversial to say that English culture generates on average more wealth than some other cultures, I think it would be reasonably easy to demonstrate that something about the English acculturation of colonies left them better off financially than other European and Asian colonizers. And, by better off, I mean vastly better off. Compare Nigeria (British, $3k+ per person GDP) to CAR (French, $350 per person GDP). I'm not cherry picking, either. America to Mexico. We live in a world shaped by the Brits. To your point, financial well-being isn't anything like the only measure. At least in America, part of what made growth easy was whole-sale genocide. Places with more balanced colonization plans got much more strung out violence and economic difficulty. I would argue due to culture conflicts, at least in part. I don't think the author is disputing this in the essay, though. He is instead saying that more individualistic cultures who will not engage with Western school systems hurt their economic outcomes, for a variety of reasons.

jseliger 11y ago

I explicitly tell students that total rebellion from the school system (or professor expectations) is usually really stupid—but so is total conformity. Students, and people in general, need to find ways to rebel intelligently. That's probably true in many companies too. A lot of employers, especially white collar / creative employers, don't want or need total drones. But they also can't have people who are utterly unable to work towards common goals. I remember a somewhat notorious guy at Google who got fired because he was wildly, vociferously opposed to much of what the rest of the company was doing much of the time. Can't remember his name, though.

wutbrodo 11y ago
I believe he left, not got fired. And iirc it wasn't about "much of what the company was doing" but just the stupid way the promotion system works (as well as a very, very niche product idea). Then again I'm mostly assuming we're talking about the same person because he was one of the only ones I would count as particularly "notorious". The fact that our recollections are so different might mean you're talking about someone from many years ago (before my tenure).
askafriend 11y ago
Are you referring to our beloved Michael O. Church?

Animats 11y ago

Well, yes. This isn't a new observation. Here's a modern overview, describing kindergarten as boot camp.[1] This idea goes back a long way in European tradition, when education was church-driven. Submission to authority is basic Catholic doctrine, and persists in most spinoffs from Catholicism. School as training for submission to authority went mainstream during the Industrial Revolution, when employers needed a large but passive workforce. But that's a longer story than I have time for now. [1] http://www.sociology101.net/readings/Learning-the-Student-Role.pdf http://www.sociology101.net/readings/Learning-the-Student-Ro...

ktRolster 11y ago

It's true there are plenty of problems with our school system, but....I've been to places that don't have school systems, and having a poor one is better than none. Also, I feel sorry for anyone who only views education as a way to get a job. They've missed out on a lot of beauty in the world.

unimpressive 11y ago
>Also, I feel sorry for anyone who only views education as a way to get a job. They've missed out on a lot of beauty in the world. One famous result from psychology is that having people focus on an extrinsic reward for doing something tends to completely overshadow the intrinsic reward involved in performance. Contrast this with the cost of tuition and the dots naturally connect. (Of course, the opportunity cost of spending four years of your life doing something shouldn't be understated either.)

deft 11y ago

No one has mentioned Ivan Illich's Deschooling Society yet? I obviously haven't read Bryan Caplan's book that's discussed in this article, but from the looks of it, none of his ideas are new. They've been explored before. I find his title interesting though, the problem isn't education, but schooling. Another commenter touched on this, but if you're actually interested in this subject check out Illich's book. It's a lot more radical than this hard to understand piece. Another thing, at the end why is the concept of appearing as "prestigious forager teachers" instead of the actual "dominating bosses" listed as a benefit? Maybe I'm not reading it right. tl;dr: read Illich.

nickysielicki 11y ago
Not sure if this is complete, but I found this link: http://www.preservenet.com/theory/Illich/Deschooling/intro.html http://www.preservenet.com/theory/Illich/Deschooling/intro.h...

yk 11y ago

> Most nations today would be richer if they had long ago just submitted wholesale to a rich nation, allowing that rich nation to change their laws, customs, etc., and just do everything their way. But this idea greatly offends national and cultural pride. So nations stay poor. The examples of China, Japan and the USA suggest the exact opposite. (Actually I do not know an example that would support the authors claim.) > When firms and managers from rich places try to transplant rich practices to poor places, giving poor place workers exactly the same equipment, materials, procedures, etc., one of the main things that goes wrong is that poor place workers just refuse to do what they are told. [Citation needed] and so on, and so on... In conclusion, I think were the essay falls apart is, that it does not examine different kinds of submit. 'submit' is a very different word if the pupil submits to a teacher out of a deep desire to learn a new skill or if someone submits to a warlord. (And both are very different from submitting to a boss at a workplace.) Plus it would be nice to see a rejection of the standard story, that school mainly teaches useful skills.

ktRolster 11y ago
The examples of China, Japan and the USA suggest the exact opposite. (Actually I do not know an example that would support the authors claim.) Indeed, the article would be better with less speculation (presented in the form of assertions) and more data collecting.
chroma 11y ago
> The examples of China, Japan and the USA suggest the exact opposite. (Actually I do not know an example that would support the authors claim.) What? Japan adopted representative democracy, human rights, capitalism, fractional reserve banking, the metric system, and even western attire. China is more authoritarian, but has made many of the same changes. Their economic prosperity is highly correlated with these changes. And I'm flabbergasted that you think the USA doesn't prove his point. The original American culture was from the native Americans. Once it was replaced with British culture, the economy of north america flourished. In places where native culture was replaced with others (Spanish/native culture in Mexico, Portuguese/native culture in Brazil, etc), the people haven't had the same level of success. Similarly, Spain and Portugal haven't had the same prosperity as the UK. When it comes to per capita GDP, the effect of culture is vastly underestimated. > [Citation needed] and so on, and so on... He links to a citation in the sentence after your quote.[1] The paper is a study of the differences in cotton mill productivity in various countries. The author accounts for varying levels of technology, training, and other factors. He finds that the biggest factor affecting productivity is culture. Honestly, I think you're reading this far too uncharitably. It's a blog post, not an academic paper. If the author took the time to address the objections in this thread, it would have been 10x as much work. 1. http://faculty.georgetown.edu/mh5/class/econ489/Clark-Why-Isn't-the%20-Whole-World-Developed.pdf http://faculty.georgetown.edu/mh5/class/econ489/Clark-Why-Is...

timthorn 11y ago

The idea he proposes sounds very similar to the University Technical Colleges in the UK. Taking students at 14, they try to have a very work like atmosphere, with 9-5 workdays, no homework, and a curriculum with a large project based component run in conjunction with business so that students are solving actual problems seen in real business.

joelthelion 11y ago

And learning to read is to brainwash you. sigh...

KaiserPro 11y ago

> * foragers are fiercely egalitarian* [citation needed] because human nature is egalitarian isn't it. > Most nations today would be richer if they had long ago just submitted wholesale to a rich nation What you mean is, British colonialism is the only way to run a country. That sort of thinking lead to wholesale massacres, and the British loosing 4 consecutive wars in Afghanistan. This is the sort of thinking that died out in the 1930s when the indian servants poisoned their british master's tea. Of course you don't suggest that spain should have submitted to the moors, who were demonstrably more advanced in financial, artistic and technological means. Progress doesn't happen because the populous reject change, its because progress only happens through chance. The industrial revolution was sustained in england because, despite massive political change, england didn't completely purge/remodel the upper-classes. There was the same level of suffering and servitude. > Forager children aren’t told what to do; they just wander around and do what they like [citation needed] Have you ever fucking seen how foraging works? The child follows the parent and actively learns, or they die when they get lost. Do you think that the knowledge that some red berries are bad is instinctive? > While human foragers are especially averse to even a hint of domination, they are also especially eager to take “orders” Logic isn't your strong suit is it? Basically your article could be summed up as: Humans don't like being bullied or enslaved. If you change the practices of leaders, the plebs will follow.

yotamoron 11y ago

Read 'deschooling society' by Ivan Illich. Will help you understand a thing or two about what is school all about.

tmptmp 11y ago

Some things in this article I would like to object and to point out are (although I am not here to support or argue for/against the current schools): >>But they won’t be publicly ranked and corrected nearly as often as in school, even though such things will happen far more often than their ancestors would have tolerated. Are you kidding? Their ancesters would even be publicly killed/maimed by other foragers if they couldn't perform as expected or didn't conform to the rules of the society. I hate when modern people try to paint very rosy pictures of the past, especially of the so called tribal (hunter-gatherer) people. Many tribal societies can be seen to be guided by a single principle "survival of the fittest" and generally the survival function is some combination of "ability to perform as expected by other tribals" and "conformity to arbitrarily chosen rules by the tribal society". >>They don’t have a single random boss they don’t respect, but can instead be trained by many adults, can select them to be the most prestigious adults around, and can stop training with each when they like. Here the author ignores one important aspect :- not even the forager children can stop training with each "when they like": there are many important factors to be considered here; that if a forager kid has not yet learnt how to "earn food and other things needed to survive" he/she must continue training and it may be under those adult(s) he/she may or may not like to train under. >>Have teachers continually give students complex assignments with new ambiguous instructions, using the excuse of helping students to learn new things. If any human language is used to give instructions, those instructions will be ambiguous. I doubt if the foragers used any unambiguous human language. In short, the rise and need of schools is a very important topic and this article leaves too much out. If time permits, I will write my thoughts on it.

rrss1122 11y ago

For a website called Overcoming Bias, the bias in the article is fairly transparent.

pizzasynthesis 11y ago

This self-fellating cultural revisionist drivel is exactly the sort of meta-analysis I'd expect from someone who has spent too long codependent with academia and thusly suffers from an irrational self-hatred and tunnel vision and a lingering feeling that their qualifications are much narrower than they'd like to believe. The author only once cites an external party (three links to the very same blog along with a link to their colleague's book). Even that study says: > The proximate cause of inefficiency in at least some cases was the workers' refusal to accept more machinery, but the choices of workers correlated with the local real wage. Whatever constrained the choices of workers in cotton textiles, or whatever determined their preferences, must have applied to all of the local labor force. Unfortunately the sources on the textile industry do not allow me to go with any confidence beyond this limited ascription of responsibility to local influences. So workers in Bombay, who were being payed less than workers in England, refused to take on more responsibilities until they received higher wages. Sounds pretty fair to me. Given the information at hand, we could posit that Western countries were more successful at organizing labor instead of assuming, like the author does, that it can be fundamentally attributed to culture, and that less-developed countries like India should just adopt Western culture. Maybe if they adopted Western culture, they could come colonize Western nations, then they'd be really successful. /s I can't see this as anything more than some sort of strange philosophical flexing, and the author could stand to get another degree--perhaps this time in history.