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The title is misleading (it was meant to be intriguing, but doesn't convey the summary of the article well). The letter, in fact, is a well-balanced rebuke to
by romwell 7y ago
The title is misleading (it was meant to be intriguing, but doesn't convey the summary of the article well).
The letter, in fact, is a well-balanced rebuke to Caplan's treatise "The Case Against Education".
The tl;dr of the treatise is that schools manufacture signaling instead of value, with the implication that they inherently cannot produce value.
This rebuke is that the schools produce signaling because they are incentives are aligned this way. Producing signal vs. value becomes a prisoner's dilemma, where it's rational to focus on manufacturing signal.
Ergo, the schools and educators are not to blame. Hate the game, don't hate the player.
I agree with the rebuke.
- ikeboy 7y agoThis is a rebuke only to the extent that "the emperor enjoys the breeze" is a rebuke to someone pointing out that the emperor is naked.
- romwell 7y agoNot quite. It's like someone someone is pointing out that the emperor is naked, and the rebuke is "Have you considered that we are all at a beach, and invited the Emperor to go skinny dipping with us". Merely pointing out that the emperor is naked, without sufficient consideration for context, implies that there is something terribly wrong with the emperor. You'd think that the guy just walks around naked! Now with context, you understand that if you expect the Emperor to be clothed, then perhaps you shouldn't have spent the whole week convincing him to go skinny-dipping with you, and then act surprised when you are both at a beach. The fault, if any, is with what you asked of the Emperor. So here we are with education. We tell our kids to do well in school so that they could go to a good college and get a good job (a chain that revolves around signaling!), measure the education by signaling it provides (acceptance rates, employment rates out of college), and then insert surprised Pikachu write books about how education is a waste because it's about signaling!
- ikeboy 7y agoI think many if not most people involved in academia would strongly disagree that it teaches you nothing. Caplan's thesis was certainly not widely accepted prior to publication.
- jessriedel 7y ago> with the implication that they inherently cannot produce value. Where in Caplan's book does it say this? To the contrary, I believe he points to specific cases where we know schools could produce more value (e.g., spaced repetition) but do not.