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Cynical opinion: School is first and foremost a place where kids are kept so they're busy. Much like compulsory military service is a place where young adults a

Cynical opinion: School is first and foremost a place where kids are kept so they're busy. Much like compulsory military service is a place where young adults are kept so they're busy. The answer to "Why aren't schools as good as they could be?" is mostly "Because they are as good as they need to be."

Dirlewanger 7y ago
Even more cynically: to paraphrase from George Carlin's last comedy special in 2008, public education will never get better because the powers-that-be don't want a well-rounded populace capable of critical thinking. "It's a big club, and you ain't in it"
- whatshisface 7y ago
  You don't need to resort to a conspiracy to explain the massive dysfunction in the US educational system. It explains itself: education is a mess, so smart critical people are rare, so it is hard to get them to teach and even harder to keep them teaching in the presence of overbearing and awful governance. The field of education research is also a mess on the level of 1910s psychology, and that's not helping the quality of schools either.
  - Mvhsz 7y ago
    > education is a mess, so smart critical people are rare, so it is hard to get them to teach I'm not sure I agree with this. If our schools were 10x as effective and we produced 10x as many smart people, I think we'd be having the same conversation. It would just be about how hard it is to recruit people to teach quantum computer programming when you can make 5 times as much working in the teleportation industry (facetious example, please don't debate the physics of this).
  - shantly 7y ago
    > The field of education research is also a mess on the level of 1910s psychology, and that's not helping the quality of schools either. The faddish education "research" stuff that ends up being implemented in schools and used as material for professional development is often on the level of bad pop-business books, for the same reasons that bad pop-business books are so common and so widely read, I suppose. Actually it's kind of like pop-parenting books and bad pop-business books had a baby and that baby is education books. They are, in the lingo of our times, hot garbage. Admin, principal through superintendent, are largely careerist political types with shockingly poor reasoning and critical thinking skills considering most of them have been granted a PhD—another problem: for a bunch of reasons including demand outstripping legitimate supply by a large margin and a whole pile of bad incentives, education degrees on all levels are about 99% bullshit and there's no shortage of morons who shouldn't have been able to achieve a bachelor's in anything running around with graduate degrees and an ego to match—so they're terrible at evaluating this stuff and quite gullible, while also being very certain of any decisions they make. It's a recipe for disaster.
- decasteve 7y ago
  The most cynical of us follow it down the rabbit hole to Foucault: "The university and in a general way, all teaching systems, which appear simply to disseminate knowledge, are made to maintain a certain social class in power; and to exclude the instruments of power of another social class."
ChicagoBoy11 7y ago
I'm a K-12 school admin and I think the dirty secret of our profession is that there's more truth to what you're saying than we'd all like to admit. To be sure, there are basic skills we do teach, and some kids do require interventions that school specialists can provide in a way that can meaningfully impact that child's life. But that's not the bulk of what "schooling" is. A nontrivial part of the job is simply daycare. I've had the benefit of working at very different schools in different continents, but had a control in the sense that they served very similar families. I often think about how much passion and energy were devoted to certain policies/programs/issues and how the schools land on the opposite side of them in a lot of them yet how little that seems to affect the student outcomes we observe.

Dirlewanger 7y ago

Even more cynically: to paraphrase from George Carlin's last comedy special in 2008, public education will never get better because the powers-that-be don't want a well-rounded populace capable of critical thinking. "It's a big club, and you ain't in it"

whatshisface 7y ago
You don't need to resort to a conspiracy to explain the massive dysfunction in the US educational system. It explains itself: education is a mess, so smart critical people are rare, so it is hard to get them to teach and even harder to keep them teaching in the presence of overbearing and awful governance. The field of education research is also a mess on the level of 1910s psychology, and that's not helping the quality of schools either.
- Mvhsz 7y ago
  > education is a mess, so smart critical people are rare, so it is hard to get them to teach I'm not sure I agree with this. If our schools were 10x as effective and we produced 10x as many smart people, I think we'd be having the same conversation. It would just be about how hard it is to recruit people to teach quantum computer programming when you can make 5 times as much working in the teleportation industry (facetious example, please don't debate the physics of this).
- shantly 7y ago
  > The field of education research is also a mess on the level of 1910s psychology, and that's not helping the quality of schools either. The faddish education "research" stuff that ends up being implemented in schools and used as material for professional development is often on the level of bad pop-business books, for the same reasons that bad pop-business books are so common and so widely read, I suppose. Actually it's kind of like pop-parenting books and bad pop-business books had a baby and that baby is education books. They are, in the lingo of our times, hot garbage. Admin, principal through superintendent, are largely careerist political types with shockingly poor reasoning and critical thinking skills considering most of them have been granted a PhD—another problem: for a bunch of reasons including demand outstripping legitimate supply by a large margin and a whole pile of bad incentives, education degrees on all levels are about 99% bullshit and there's no shortage of morons who shouldn't have been able to achieve a bachelor's in anything running around with graduate degrees and an ego to match—so they're terrible at evaluating this stuff and quite gullible, while also being very certain of any decisions they make. It's a recipe for disaster.
decasteve 7y ago
The most cynical of us follow it down the rabbit hole to Foucault: "The university and in a general way, all teaching systems, which appear simply to disseminate knowledge, are made to maintain a certain social class in power; and to exclude the instruments of power of another social class."

ChicagoBoy11 7y ago

I'm a K-12 school admin and I think the dirty secret of our profession is that there's more truth to what you're saying than we'd all like to admit. To be sure, there are basic skills we do teach, and some kids do require interventions that school specialists can provide in a way that can meaningfully impact that child's life. But that's not the bulk of what "schooling" is. A nontrivial part of the job is simply daycare. I've had the benefit of working at very different schools in different continents, but had a control in the sense that they served very similar families. I often think about how much passion and energy were devoted to certain policies/programs/issues and how the schools land on the opposite side of them in a lot of them yet how little that seems to affect the student outcomes we observe.