9 ms·

The case for mutual educational disarmament

45 points by jkuria 5y ago

neonate 5y ago
https://archive.is/jQNxo https://archive.is/jQNxo
v_london 5y ago
Holding university entrance exams earlier seems like a recipe for disaster that would hurt disadvantaged students the most. This may be just my experience, but the older you get, the more time you get to catch up with students from better families. Coming from a working class background, I only started to study actively in high school (the culture I grew up in discouraged and actively mocked boys who read books or liked maths) which means that had the entrance exam be held at the beginning of high school, I would not have done as well as I did at the ned of high school. The problem with building a meritocratic system is that everyone wants capable kids from poor backgrounds to raise to the top, but the elite doesn't want their average kids to fall down in society to their expected rank. One of the jobs of the elite schools is to prop us these average kids and to make them seem smart to outsiders: anyone who has studied in an "elite" university has a story about the rich kids who spend their days partying, intending to only pass the easiest classes in the school because that's all they need - their parents have already arranged an entry-level job for them.
- summm 5y ago
  That culture is everywhere in schools, not limited to poor people, also in middle class. These kids are suffering, and thus culture needs to be fought. Instead teachers and society are lazy and say "lol whatever boys will be boys, let's just let this kids suffer and waste more time until they are grown ups and then maybe the bullies catch up academically" Is that what you are proposing?
- inglor_cz 5y ago
  There isn't much meritocracy in the system, at least as far as I can see. In Czech we have a saying "the wolf has eaten, but the goat remained whole" for situations like that. The American elite wants to be seen as anti-racist, which means elevating at least some kids from the ghettos to the Ivy Leagues etc. At the same time, the American elite is still mostly white and does not want to jeopardize future of their own offspring, and many of those offspring are indeed average. It seems to me that the current way to square those two interests is to raise tuition really high, combine it with legacy admissions (even an average kid of rich parents will be able to thread the needle there) and raise higher admission obstacles for Asians who would otherwise qualify in high numbers on knowledge alone.
  - watwut 5y ago
    The from ghetto don't go to Ivy League. These are middle and upper class blacks studying there. Like really, not every educated black rose from ghetto.
  - fallingknife 5y ago
    Yes exactly. And also dumb down public schools by not teaching advanced classes and getting rid of magnet schools like the Democrats are doing in multiple states. While of course still teaching those classes at the private schools that upper middle class and above can afford. Gotta keep those smart poor people in their place.
    - pclmulqdq 5y ago
      This is fairly new. Magnet schools and accelerated classes for smart poor people used to be something that we considered good, because we want at least a few smart people getting educated. Now that "smart poor people" generally means "people of asian descent," we're changing course and getting rid of all of those programs.
    - okaram 5y ago
      Do you have a ref for any state that is eliminating magnets? I hadn't heard ...
      - fallingknife 5y ago
        https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/18/nyregion/nyc-schools-admissions-segregation.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/18/nyregion/nyc-schools-admi...
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
  - tomp 5y ago
    A disproportionate percentage of the US elite is also Jewish. Yet they, as a society, seem to have mostly overcome the tensions that have plagued Jews and white non-Jews in Europe for a very long time. What makes you think that the US "melting pot" culture cannot overcome other obstacles (currently IMO mostly exemplified with the rising Asian "elite")
- parineum 5y ago
  >The problem with building a meritocratic system is that everyone wants capable kids from poor backgrounds to raise to the top, but the elite doesn't want their average kids to fall down in society to their expected rank. I disagree with the second half of this. I think it simply creates an arm race that the wealthy win. A rich family looks at what it takes to get their kid into Harvard and they do what they can, no matter the cost. A poor family simply can't compete on an otherwise equal footing. Even if we socialize all the advantages that the rich currently have, they simply do even more in response. The real problem with a meritocratic system is that rich people from good schools with private tutors actually get a better education, that's what all the hubub is about. Poverty leads to worse education and worse educated people are less prepared for the more difficult course load of college. Through no fault of their own, they are less ideal candidates. That's the injustice. It's cognitive dissonance to simultaneously recognize that injustice but not recognize that poor students are actually substantially less prepared for college at 18.
  - crusty 5y ago
    This just doesn't fit the evidence. I've wanted Freakonomics or similar to cover this for a decade but haven't really seen/heard seen anything... If getting into top (TOP!) universities correlated with education/aptitude alone, the wealthy would pay more to get thier kids educated but the best teachers. But they don't do this, they pay to dollar for their children to get educated by the "best" schools. But what makes them the best schools is their ability to get more kids into better universities. If education were the critical component of these schools, they'd pay premium rates for the best teachers, but often the teacher salaries at these private schools are lower than those at the public schools they compete with in the area. That suggests that it isn't the education provided by the teachers that's the most important component of these schools. There's a whole stew of other factors that these schools rely on to get kids into top placements that had nothing to do with actual education.
    - fallingknife 5y ago
      You are only considering salary and not overall quality of life. As one of my teachers at private school said, "you get paid a little less, but you don't have to worry about being robbed by your students in the parking lot."
zozbot234 5y ago
The article misidentifies education as a zero-sum positional good, whereas what's often zero sum is credentialing, and often a rather peculiar kind of credential that doesn't reflect much real-world usefulness. Reduce the impact of these credentials, and people will feel less of a need to wastefully compete for them.
rewq4321 5y ago
Underwhelming conclusion to the article IMO: > What if the gaokao (and similar tests) were held earlier in a pupil’s career? If these exams truly test the knowledge required for university, they must be held just before university starts. But if such tests mostly serve as filters, sifting better students from worse, they need not be held so late. An aptitude test at 16 years of age, say, will probably generate a similar ranking as one held two years later. The tests would remain stressful. But an earlier gaokao would save families a year or two of costly cramming, shortening “the obstacle course”, as Hirsch put it, without much changing the results. Such tests will always have high stakes. But they need not require such high effort. I was somewhat "late" in terms of some aspects of my development, and so there's a chance I'd have been put on a particular track simply because my peers were more biologically mature. I won't pretend to know the solution here (though I'm interested in the research around "mastery-based" learning), but I do know that sometimes a system is in a deeper local optima than you expect, and making small changes like the one suggested here isn't enough to get it out. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastery_learning#:~:text=Mastery%20learning%20is%20a%20set,they%20are%20given%20enough%20time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastery_learning#:~:text=Maste....
baybal2 5y ago
One big problem across the developed world, which was later replicated in Asia is that high school exams morphed into university entry exams. A person can have god knows how much more educational, and work experience in between high school+few years in instutute, and a proper graduate education.
lordnacho 5y ago
This is basically right. Quite a lot of education is a waste, it's window-dressing actual learning. For instance, you might have spent some time getting exam prep advice: read the instructions, skip questions that are hard and come back later, try to memorize this or that formula / molecule / map / argument, if it's multiple choice strike out obviously wrong answers, look for hints to part 2 in part 1, if you can't figure out the integral guess that it's 0 or 1 (LOL a lot of high school integrals are elegant). You have to spend real time learning this kind of sharpening exercise in order to do exams, or you will get less than what you should get, given what you actually understand about a subject. There's no value to this time. You'll never need to remember how to reverse a linked list, because in real life when it comes up, you will just find it in a browser. Similarly with most things that require a precise answer, the effort in sharpening the answer is way more than what might reasonably be worthwhile in a real-life setting. Eg. I needed a Bessel function at one point in my career. Could I write down its form from having seen it at uni? No, of course not. Did I spend time doing just that at uni? Yes. The real damage is we end up not educating people. We give them a bunch of answers to memorize and never test them on how the question is important. Did anyone ever examine you on why complex numbers are a big deal? Or what the big gap between classical and quantum physics was? I bet you only had exam questions about how to do the calculations and derivations. Get a number or a formula, that's easy to test. Whether this formula makes sense to use, that's hard. The part about education being positional is also important. There's quite a lot of jobs that could be done by someone with no degree at all, including mine. My first boss in the City still has no degree, and didn't need it despite options trading having a reputation for being mathematical. All that's happened is nobody wants to not go to uni, and nobody wants to hire a non-degree holder to trade options anymore, because both groups think that going to uni signals that you're smart. Neither group actually thinks you need any of the actual skills you learn in uni, though.
- totetsu 5y ago
  never had to do any of that stuff to get my arts degree. never found writing essays a waste of time. Just saying..
  - lordnacho 5y ago
mmarq 5y ago
It seems as if the author is convinced that in the German system children are assigned to different high schools based on their skills/intelligence/talent/whatever. But the fact is that you will hardly find an upper class kid in a hauptschule and similarly poor immigrant kids are underrepresented in gymnasiums (and even middle class kids with foreign parents have been historically underrepresented). Maybe the point should be guaranteeing that all jobs pay enough to live a decent life. Germany is much better than the UK on this, which is probably the reason why the education rat race is less of a problem there.
- choeger 5y ago
  The thing is that upper/middle class parents value education more than lower class parents (on average). Unless you take the kids completely away from their parents (horrible thought, was somewhat tried in the GDR), the former kind of parents will find a way to give their kids valuable lessons, even if it is just sitting on the sofa and reading a book. I recently met a woman that brought her son to the first day of school. Not only did all her manners signal "lower class" when she talked to the teachers, but also she explicitly mentioned that she thought the kid would not fare well in math. I also saw the boy and he did indeed not behave like the brightest, but who knows what lies under the surface? That mother basically made it very hard, if not impossible, for her kid to ever reach higher education. She won't search for tutors, even if she would not need to pay it. She will be content with bad results. It's really sad to see, but I think there really is no way to fix this inside the school system.
  - jkhdigital 5y ago
    > The thing is that upper/middle class parents value education more than lower class parents (on average). I don’t know if I’d agree with this. It might be true in some contemporary societies but I don’t think it is universal. But I do agree with your other point, which is that culture will always dominate other factors in determining how much education parents seek for their children.
    - nerdponx 5y ago
twic 5y ago
> Germany’s custom of placing children on different tracks at age ten or 11 also invites an interesting thought experiment. What if the gaokao (and similar tests) were held earlier in a pupil’s career? Shame this guy's never heard of the eleven plus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleven-plus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleven-plus
- richardjdare 5y ago
  I failed my 11 plus and ended up at a high school where they didn't even tell us about university. At school, I found bullying and sadistic teachers completely overwhelmed the educational aspects; my only goal was to get through each day without being hassled. The only circumstances where I would consider supporting streaming would be if it was continuous, and people could move between streams at any point in their education. Putting all emphasis on a single test, taken on a single day at age 11 is like something out of the hunger games. I still recall breaking down in tears when my headmaster called out "Time's up!" at the end of my 11 plus. I knew I hadn't done very well. Now I am a professional programmer (the only non-graduate in the company), shipped video games on my own, and have had writing published, so obviously the education system's estimate of my abilities was far from accurate.
  - yung_steezy 5y ago
    My partner is from Essex and I thought she was kidding when she said she did the Eleven Plus. We learnt about it in high school history class in Scotland! The module was on the foundations of the British Welfare state and it was discussed as a barbaric practice from the past.
  - twic 5y ago
    There's a reason it has long been abandoned by all but the most backwards counties!
ilammy 5y ago
I wonder if the same logic could be transferred to other parts of the economy. Mutual disarmament for the amount of “growth”, for the amount of consumption, for the working hours, etc. I feel that people would be much more eager to cut back on some things if they knew that they would not be outcompeted into dirt if they did so.
- sokoloff 5y ago
  It’s a society-wide prisoners’ dilemma, but I think most of the proposed cures are worse than the disease. I don’t want to rule out the possibility for someone to decide to work harder/achieve more if they want or to try to compress their working life into 10 instead of 40 years.
tibbetts 5y ago
It bothers me that this article from the economist fails to recognize the deleterious impact that lack of antitrust enforcement has had on life outcomes and thus on the educational arms race. The article mentions that competitive goods like housing and social status drive the push for education. Before the last 50 years of industrial consolidation there were more opportunities to succeed in more cities, creating a greater range of available competitor goods in those places. Now everyone has to be competing globally for status and to a great extent for housing (as people consolidate into a few cities) and career opportunities (as fewer companies mean fewer paths to high achievement). It’s a nice idea to discourage unpleasant competition among Hugh school students. But fixing other parts of the economy could help address demand for this activity, and improve aggregate outcomes in many other ways.
ZeroGravitas 5y ago
I feel this is one of the obscure benefits of a universal income and/or reducing wealth inequality. Once you accept that every human deserves a basic level of economic comfort, you need to structure society to actually harness their talents. If you can make your child's life easier by waving a wand and making everyone in your society dumber and/or worse educated, then that would be a terrible temptation, and that's basically what we have now. Imagine a world where the simplest way to your kids and grandkids being healthy and wealthy was to maximize the human potential of the population. This is the promise of meritocracy, but we seem to already have hit the limits of that, with everyone jockeying to keep other people's kids out of the good schools. Why don't we just build another good school? Oh, because it's not about what they learn, or how much they could learn, it's about dividing the population into winners and losers.
xondono 5y ago
For anyone interested in following some of the themes of this article, I always recommend Bryan Caplan’s The Case Against Education.
naveen99 5y ago
If everyone could run a 4 minute mile, would they force feed everyone French fries all day…

45 points by jkuria 5y ago

https://archive.is/jQNxo https://archive.is/jQNxo

Holding university entrance exams earlier seems like a recipe for disaster that would hurt disadvantaged students the most. This may be just my experience, but the older you get, the more time you get to catch up with students from better families. Coming from a working class background, I only started to study actively in high school (the culture I grew up in discouraged and actively mocked boys who read books or liked maths) which means that had the entrance exam be held at the beginning of high school, I would not have done as well as I did at the ned of high school. The problem with building a meritocratic system is that everyone wants capable kids from poor backgrounds to raise to the top, but the elite doesn't want their average kids to fall down in society to their expected rank. One of the jobs of the elite schools is to prop us these average kids and to make them seem smart to outsiders: anyone who has studied in an "elite" university has a story about the rich kids who spend their days partying, intending to only pass the easiest classes in the school because that's all they need - their parents have already arranged an entry-level job for them.

summm 5y ago
That culture is everywhere in schools, not limited to poor people, also in middle class. These kids are suffering, and thus culture needs to be fought. Instead teachers and society are lazy and say "lol whatever boys will be boys, let's just let this kids suffer and waste more time until they are grown ups and then maybe the bullies catch up academically" Is that what you are proposing?
inglor_cz 5y ago
There isn't much meritocracy in the system, at least as far as I can see. In Czech we have a saying "the wolf has eaten, but the goat remained whole" for situations like that. The American elite wants to be seen as anti-racist, which means elevating at least some kids from the ghettos to the Ivy Leagues etc. At the same time, the American elite is still mostly white and does not want to jeopardize future of their own offspring, and many of those offspring are indeed average. It seems to me that the current way to square those two interests is to raise tuition really high, combine it with legacy admissions (even an average kid of rich parents will be able to thread the needle there) and raise higher admission obstacles for Asians who would otherwise qualify in high numbers on knowledge alone.
- watwut 5y ago
  The from ghetto don't go to Ivy League. These are middle and upper class blacks studying there. Like really, not every educated black rose from ghetto.
- fallingknife 5y ago
  Yes exactly. And also dumb down public schools by not teaching advanced classes and getting rid of magnet schools like the Democrats are doing in multiple states. While of course still teaching those classes at the private schools that upper middle class and above can afford. Gotta keep those smart poor people in their place.
  - pclmulqdq 5y ago
    This is fairly new. Magnet schools and accelerated classes for smart poor people used to be something that we considered good, because we want at least a few smart people getting educated. Now that "smart poor people" generally means "people of asian descent," we're changing course and getting rid of all of those programs.
  - okaram 5y ago
    Do you have a ref for any state that is eliminating magnets? I hadn't heard ...
    - fallingknife 5y ago
      https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/18/nyregion/nyc-schools-admissions-segregation.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/18/nyregion/nyc-schools-admi...
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
- tomp 5y ago
  A disproportionate percentage of the US elite is also Jewish. Yet they, as a society, seem to have mostly overcome the tensions that have plagued Jews and white non-Jews in Europe for a very long time. What makes you think that the US "melting pot" culture cannot overcome other obstacles (currently IMO mostly exemplified with the rising Asian "elite")
parineum 5y ago
>The problem with building a meritocratic system is that everyone wants capable kids from poor backgrounds to raise to the top, but the elite doesn't want their average kids to fall down in society to their expected rank. I disagree with the second half of this. I think it simply creates an arm race that the wealthy win. A rich family looks at what it takes to get their kid into Harvard and they do what they can, no matter the cost. A poor family simply can't compete on an otherwise equal footing. Even if we socialize all the advantages that the rich currently have, they simply do even more in response. The real problem with a meritocratic system is that rich people from good schools with private tutors actually get a better education, that's what all the hubub is about. Poverty leads to worse education and worse educated people are less prepared for the more difficult course load of college. Through no fault of their own, they are less ideal candidates. That's the injustice. It's cognitive dissonance to simultaneously recognize that injustice but not recognize that poor students are actually substantially less prepared for college at 18.
- crusty 5y ago
  This just doesn't fit the evidence. I've wanted Freakonomics or similar to cover this for a decade but haven't really seen/heard seen anything... If getting into top (TOP!) universities correlated with education/aptitude alone, the wealthy would pay more to get thier kids educated but the best teachers. But they don't do this, they pay to dollar for their children to get educated by the "best" schools. But what makes them the best schools is their ability to get more kids into better universities. If education were the critical component of these schools, they'd pay premium rates for the best teachers, but often the teacher salaries at these private schools are lower than those at the public schools they compete with in the area. That suggests that it isn't the education provided by the teachers that's the most important component of these schools. There's a whole stew of other factors that these schools rely on to get kids into top placements that had nothing to do with actual education.
  - fallingknife 5y ago
    You are only considering salary and not overall quality of life. As one of my teachers at private school said, "you get paid a little less, but you don't have to worry about being robbed by your students in the parking lot."

zozbot234 5y ago

The article misidentifies education as a zero-sum positional good, whereas what's often zero sum is credentialing, and often a rather peculiar kind of credential that doesn't reflect much real-world usefulness. Reduce the impact of these credentials, and people will feel less of a need to wastefully compete for them.

rewq4321 5y ago

Underwhelming conclusion to the article IMO: > What if the gaokao (and similar tests) were held earlier in a pupil’s career? If these exams truly test the knowledge required for university, they must be held just before university starts. But if such tests mostly serve as filters, sifting better students from worse, they need not be held so late. An aptitude test at 16 years of age, say, will probably generate a similar ranking as one held two years later. The tests would remain stressful. But an earlier gaokao would save families a year or two of costly cramming, shortening “the obstacle course”, as Hirsch put it, without much changing the results. Such tests will always have high stakes. But they need not require such high effort. I was somewhat "late" in terms of some aspects of my development, and so there's a chance I'd have been put on a particular track simply because my peers were more biologically mature. I won't pretend to know the solution here (though I'm interested in the research around "mastery-based" learning), but I do know that sometimes a system is in a deeper local optima than you expect, and making small changes like the one suggested here isn't enough to get it out. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastery_learning#:~:text=Mastery%20learning%20is%20a%20set,they%20are%20given%20enough%20time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastery_learning#:~:text=Maste....

baybal2 5y ago

One big problem across the developed world, which was later replicated in Asia is that high school exams morphed into university entry exams. A person can have god knows how much more educational, and work experience in between high school+few years in instutute, and a proper graduate education.

lordnacho 5y ago

This is basically right. Quite a lot of education is a waste, it's window-dressing actual learning. For instance, you might have spent some time getting exam prep advice: read the instructions, skip questions that are hard and come back later, try to memorize this or that formula / molecule / map / argument, if it's multiple choice strike out obviously wrong answers, look for hints to part 2 in part 1, if you can't figure out the integral guess that it's 0 or 1 (LOL a lot of high school integrals are elegant). You have to spend real time learning this kind of sharpening exercise in order to do exams, or you will get less than what you should get, given what you actually understand about a subject. There's no value to this time. You'll never need to remember how to reverse a linked list, because in real life when it comes up, you will just find it in a browser. Similarly with most things that require a precise answer, the effort in sharpening the answer is way more than what might reasonably be worthwhile in a real-life setting. Eg. I needed a Bessel function at one point in my career. Could I write down its form from having seen it at uni? No, of course not. Did I spend time doing just that at uni? Yes. The real damage is we end up not educating people. We give them a bunch of answers to memorize and never test them on how the question is important. Did anyone ever examine you on why complex numbers are a big deal? Or what the big gap between classical and quantum physics was? I bet you only had exam questions about how to do the calculations and derivations. Get a number or a formula, that's easy to test. Whether this formula makes sense to use, that's hard. The part about education being positional is also important. There's quite a lot of jobs that could be done by someone with no degree at all, including mine. My first boss in the City still has no degree, and didn't need it despite options trading having a reputation for being mathematical. All that's happened is nobody wants to not go to uni, and nobody wants to hire a non-degree holder to trade options anymore, because both groups think that going to uni signals that you're smart. Neither group actually thinks you need any of the actual skills you learn in uni, though.

totetsu 5y ago
never had to do any of that stuff to get my arts degree. never found writing essays a waste of time. Just saying..
- lordnacho 5y ago

mmarq 5y ago

It seems as if the author is convinced that in the German system children are assigned to different high schools based on their skills/intelligence/talent/whatever. But the fact is that you will hardly find an upper class kid in a hauptschule and similarly poor immigrant kids are underrepresented in gymnasiums (and even middle class kids with foreign parents have been historically underrepresented). Maybe the point should be guaranteeing that all jobs pay enough to live a decent life. Germany is much better than the UK on this, which is probably the reason why the education rat race is less of a problem there.

choeger 5y ago
The thing is that upper/middle class parents value education more than lower class parents (on average). Unless you take the kids completely away from their parents (horrible thought, was somewhat tried in the GDR), the former kind of parents will find a way to give their kids valuable lessons, even if it is just sitting on the sofa and reading a book. I recently met a woman that brought her son to the first day of school. Not only did all her manners signal "lower class" when she talked to the teachers, but also she explicitly mentioned that she thought the kid would not fare well in math. I also saw the boy and he did indeed not behave like the brightest, but who knows what lies under the surface? That mother basically made it very hard, if not impossible, for her kid to ever reach higher education. She won't search for tutors, even if she would not need to pay it. She will be content with bad results. It's really sad to see, but I think there really is no way to fix this inside the school system.
- jkhdigital 5y ago
  > The thing is that upper/middle class parents value education more than lower class parents (on average). I don’t know if I’d agree with this. It might be true in some contemporary societies but I don’t think it is universal. But I do agree with your other point, which is that culture will always dominate other factors in determining how much education parents seek for their children.
  - nerdponx 5y ago

twic 5y ago

> Germany’s custom of placing children on different tracks at age ten or 11 also invites an interesting thought experiment. What if the gaokao (and similar tests) were held earlier in a pupil’s career? Shame this guy's never heard of the eleven plus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleven-plus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleven-plus

richardjdare 5y ago
I failed my 11 plus and ended up at a high school where they didn't even tell us about university. At school, I found bullying and sadistic teachers completely overwhelmed the educational aspects; my only goal was to get through each day without being hassled. The only circumstances where I would consider supporting streaming would be if it was continuous, and people could move between streams at any point in their education. Putting all emphasis on a single test, taken on a single day at age 11 is like something out of the hunger games. I still recall breaking down in tears when my headmaster called out "Time's up!" at the end of my 11 plus. I knew I hadn't done very well. Now I am a professional programmer (the only non-graduate in the company), shipped video games on my own, and have had writing published, so obviously the education system's estimate of my abilities was far from accurate.
- yung_steezy 5y ago
  My partner is from Essex and I thought she was kidding when she said she did the Eleven Plus. We learnt about it in high school history class in Scotland! The module was on the foundations of the British Welfare state and it was discussed as a barbaric practice from the past.
- twic 5y ago
  There's a reason it has long been abandoned by all but the most backwards counties!

ilammy 5y ago

I wonder if the same logic could be transferred to other parts of the economy. Mutual disarmament for the amount of “growth”, for the amount of consumption, for the working hours, etc. I feel that people would be much more eager to cut back on some things if they knew that they would not be outcompeted into dirt if they did so.

sokoloff 5y ago
It’s a society-wide prisoners’ dilemma, but I think most of the proposed cures are worse than the disease. I don’t want to rule out the possibility for someone to decide to work harder/achieve more if they want or to try to compress their working life into 10 instead of 40 years.

tibbetts 5y ago

It bothers me that this article from the economist fails to recognize the deleterious impact that lack of antitrust enforcement has had on life outcomes and thus on the educational arms race. The article mentions that competitive goods like housing and social status drive the push for education. Before the last 50 years of industrial consolidation there were more opportunities to succeed in more cities, creating a greater range of available competitor goods in those places. Now everyone has to be competing globally for status and to a great extent for housing (as people consolidate into a few cities) and career opportunities (as fewer companies mean fewer paths to high achievement). It’s a nice idea to discourage unpleasant competition among Hugh school students. But fixing other parts of the economy could help address demand for this activity, and improve aggregate outcomes in many other ways.

ZeroGravitas 5y ago

I feel this is one of the obscure benefits of a universal income and/or reducing wealth inequality. Once you accept that every human deserves a basic level of economic comfort, you need to structure society to actually harness their talents. If you can make your child's life easier by waving a wand and making everyone in your society dumber and/or worse educated, then that would be a terrible temptation, and that's basically what we have now. Imagine a world where the simplest way to your kids and grandkids being healthy and wealthy was to maximize the human potential of the population. This is the promise of meritocracy, but we seem to already have hit the limits of that, with everyone jockeying to keep other people's kids out of the good schools. Why don't we just build another good school? Oh, because it's not about what they learn, or how much they could learn, it's about dividing the population into winners and losers.

xondono 5y ago

For anyone interested in following some of the themes of this article, I always recommend Bryan Caplan’s The Case Against Education.

naveen99 5y ago

If everyone could run a 4 minute mile, would they force feed everyone French fries all day…