17 ms·

School Closures during the 1918 Flu Pandemic

76 points by optimalsolver 5y ago

encryptluks2 5y ago
This was during a time were unpriveleged kids didn't even go to school and child labor was the norm. Gotta love papers like this that attempt to prove something from a 100 years ago when it is really impossible to prove anything with that many variables and limited information, unless you already have a goal in mind and then it is just bias confirmation.
- philliphaydon 5y ago
  The level of education required to do anything was also much lower. Even 20 years ago you could get a job programming without a degree but now you a PHD just to get past HR. Times have changed.
  - a_t48 5y ago
    Dang, I guess I should quit then, they shouldn't have let me in the door...
    - philliphaydon 5y ago
      It was a generalisation. But it’s true some places bin your cv if you don’t have a degree even if you’ve got heaps of experience.
  - FanaHOVA 5y ago
    The bias towards accreditation was much higher 20 years ago than it is today.
- wyattpeak 5y ago
  While it's true that there are differences, I think one lesson we should learn from history is that that virtually every group thinks they're especially unusual and that lessons don't apply to them, and simultaneously that they're usually not so unique as they think, and the lessons usually do apply to them. School was less common at that time, but plenty of people went to school, and if there was a marked dropoff in employablility even in just that group, it should absolutely be visible.
  - moonchrome 5y ago
    > and if there was a marked dropoff in employablility even in just that group, it should absolutely be visible. Based on statistics and records from over a 100 years ago in an industrial economy ?
    - wyattpeak 5y ago
      Yes. It's 1920, not 1620. Here's a page from a 1920 census: https://raogk.org/census-record/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2019/10/1920-United-States-Federal-Census-for-Griggs-County-North-Dakota.jpg https://raogk.org/census-record/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2... Here's a tax return form from the same year: http://www.taxhistory.org/thp/1040forms.nsf/WebByYear/1920/$file/1040_1920.pdf http://www.taxhistory.org/thp/1040forms.nsf/WebByYear/1920/$...
      - jefftk 5y ago
        The tax return says it is only for people making at least $5k, which would be $70k today.
        wyattpeak 5y ago
        If you want the actual data sources used by the paper, read the paper. I'm not trying to replicate an academic's source-finding, that would take months. I'm trying to quickly demonstrate that the US was a thoroughly bureaucratic nation by 1920, not some kind of backwater where we have to guess and infer demographics.
- rcpt 5y ago
  Do you have a better model for school closures vs. career outlook? I'm hugely skeptical of our education system today with all the standardized and focus-busting largely irrelevant curriculums. Also the sleep deprivation can't be any good. Personally kids have thrived away from the classroom but maybe we're unusual.
  - ajsnigrutin 5y ago
    Yep, kids don't have time to be kids anymore, even compared to generations 20, 30 years ago (back then, when school was over (1pm, maybe 2pm max), you were done with school, and did kid stuff.... now, with parents pushing their kids into extracurricular activities and all that stuff, their lives suck a lot more. On the other hand, imagine being a first grader, unable to write or read, just coming from kindergarten, where most of the time was play-time, and due to something, you can't comprehend, you're put infront of a laptop with Zoom turned on, and your parents in a huge financial crisis suddently.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- jorblumesea 5y ago
  It's not even that, it's that education wasn't as important back then. Most people didn't even graduate high school. College definitely wasn't a thing for most. So who cares if you miss half a year, you're going to go work in the shipyards or factory.
- kerneloftruth 5y ago
  TFA is choosing and fitting facts to support a narrative.
  - GiorgioG 5y ago
StanislavPetrov 5y ago
>The situation in 1918 was starkly different from today: (1) schools closed in 1918 for many fewer days on average, (2) the 1918 virus was much deadlier to young adults and children, boosting absenteeism even in schools that stayed open, and (3) the lack of effective remote learning platforms in 1918 may have reduced the scope for school closures to increase socioeconomic inequality. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w28246/w28246.pdf https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w28246/w282...
- irrational 5y ago
  Are you considering remote learning to be closing down?
  - throwawayboise 5y ago
    Effectively, yes. Remote learning is a poor substitute for in-person instruction particularly in the primary grades.
    - irrational 5y ago
      That isn't what teachers I have talked to have said. Though, it depends on the student. Every teacher has told me that there are certain students that were doing terrible in in-person school, but came alive and excelled beyond all expectations during remote learning. One teacher related that she saw one of the students after in-person schooling started again and that student had reverted to failing at everything. In-person is good for some people, remote is good for some people. The problem is we want a solution that fits everyone and don't want to acknowledge that different people have different needs.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
_-david-_ 5y ago
Of course it had no impact on careers. Very few jobs back then required an education. Many jobs didn't even require reading.
- thaumasiotes 5y ago
  Still true today.
  - Robotbeat 5y ago
    What job doesn't require reading?
    - thaumasiotes 5y ago
      Retail. Waitress. Athlete. Barber. Prostitute. It's not a short list.
      - Robotbeat 5y ago
        All of those (POSSIBLY not the last) require reading. Rules. Numbers. Need to be licensed to be a barber. And in every instance, if you’re operating legally (etc) you need to read contracts, etc, to make sure you’re not getting shafted. Also need to read to collect and file taxes. Outsourcing reading is sometimes possible, but it will usually cost you a lot more and will make it much easier to be exploited.
fluxem 5y ago
And 10 years later the great depression happened.
- NamTaf 5y ago
  Are you implying that these two things are somehow possibly related?
  - vnchr 5y ago
    It does seem like a confounding factor. Everyone was equally poor compared to everyone else during an unrelated economic depression? i think that would overwhelm any impact of the school closures.
    - imilk 5y ago
      Thanks for the regular reminder that non-programming related threads on Hacker News are filled with completely uninformed comments and are best left unclicked.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - motoxpro 5y ago
        Translated: We can't say that "everyone was equally poor" or even that it hit everyone the same. We also can't say that "poor" has 1-1 relationship with educational outcomes (I know it does have an effect). We can also control for things, i.e. my school was closed, yours wasn't 2 blocks way, the Great Depression hit our area the same, I had a worse/better outcome than you did.
fsociety999 5y ago
Perhaps the most important part of the entire paper is the final sentence: > While our findings may be more applicable in some modern circumstances than others (e.g., when a virus is particularly deadly for younger adults and children or when remote learning opportunities are limited), our paper cautions against over-extrapolating from the 1918-19 pandemic when making decisions about optimal policies during the COVID-19 pandemic. It is unfortunately not going to stop many people or politicians or media outlets from citing this paper as a justification for (or to defend) COVID-19 policies.
- tootie 5y ago
  It never works that way. This one study is never going to be directly and perfectly applicable to other scenarios. It is a valuable data point. If it had shown the opposite conclusion it would bode very poorly for the current situation.
- whimsicalism 5y ago
  > It is unfortunately not going to stop many people or politicians or media outlets from citing this paper as a justification for (or to defend) COVID-19 policies. You seem to be reading that as saying that you should do no extrapolation whatsoever, when really what they are saying is that you should do cautious extrapolation.
- noduerme 5y ago
  - yostrovs 5y ago
    Surely a study that didn't discuss masks wouldn't change opinions on masking.
    - noduerme 5y ago
      I'd have said anti-school-closure parents, but we're already well past that point.
rafaelero 5y ago
Not surprising, since formal education doesn't seem to be correlated with job performance when you remove the selection bias.
pyuser583 5y ago
I read an article about how Harvard dealt with the Spanish flu. Because of WWI, the student body was a heavily militarized ROTC detachment. They basically ordered the cadets to their barracks and sheltered it out.
- vulcan01 5y ago
  An article expanding on this comment: https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2020/06/how-harvard-handled-the-1918-flu-pandemic https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2020/06/how-harvard-handled-...
cxf12 5y ago
The World Bank and the UN have a polar opposite view. https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2021/12/06/learning-losses-from-covid-19-could-cost-this-generation-of-students-close-to-17-trillion-in-lifetime-earnings https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2021/12/06/l...
thematrixturtle 5y ago
You'd imagine World War 1 had a pretty significant impact on basically everything though.
- CodeWriter23 5y ago
  …followed a decade later by The Great Depression.
glofish 5y ago
Let's look at the abstract: > We find that the closures had no detectable impact on children's school attendance in 1920, nor on their educational attainment and adult labor market outcomes in 1940. Really ... they are trying to explain labor market attainments in 1940 - for the generation that lived through World War I, the Great Depression, sampling it in a period right in the middle of World War II. Yet the authors feel fully qualified to assess the effects of school closings of 1918 after being confounded by all of the above.
closeparen 5y ago
School is a pretty fucking awful thing to do to a human being, particularly to a child, worst of all to a bright or curious child. Everything rests on it being “for their own good.” And that seemed plausible. But if we really think we can cut two years of it with no ill effects, then the existence of those years in the “normal” plan is a moral emergency.
- tagoregrtst 5y ago
  The only thing worse than school is not being around kids your age. Also, as far as I can tell, “school sucks” is very much an Anglo thing. I went to primary school in English, in continental Europe, and in Latin America. The latter two were great, but my school in an English speaking country was awful, basically social Darwinism, and well described by Waters, Orwell and Hollywood.
  - jsiaajdsdaa 5y ago
    Spent my whole child life being tormented by school bullies. Did drugs and alcohol in college. Studied history so as to not fail. Graduated, began programming on my own time, 9 years later I'm making $300,000 a year as a programmer. Only people I talk to are my wife, my mom, and a few people on Discord about 3d graphics. I can safely tell you that human interaction in the sense of "make 300 friends at school so that you aren't considered a freak or loner!" was never necessary, and in fact was an active burden.
    - starik36 5y ago
      This might be the most "programmer" post I've seen on the site today.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - jsiaajdsdaa 5y ago
        But I am a productive and responsible member of society and I have a good relationship with those who matter to me. I also volunteer my time online to those less fortunate. Why did I need to be hazed for 18 years?
wyager 5y ago
If this paper is applicable today, perhaps we should reconsider whether mandatory schooling should be eliminated or reduced. After all, if it has no impact on educational or career attainment, what is its purpose except an overpriced babysitting program? If that's all it is, we can at least be honest about that and save some money.
_8j50 5y ago
Modern schooling and corporate structure are largely influenced by industrial era england and to an extent germany. We do a lot of needless things just because there is a recurring expectation of results in exchange for effort. Actual value has nothing to do with it. The careers, values and goals of society as a whole have changed but we still have elementary and high schools and the college. Different classes of careers for different classes of education. Similar career growth structure and managerial structure and so on. I am not saying most education is useless. Just that it might be ill-optimized. Early education should focus on basic reasoning and developing skills that allow the student to research, absorb and implement information. Middle education should focus on exposure to various fields and aspects of contemporary adult life. Late and undrergrad education should focus on a specific career trajectory. I don't see why a Bachelors degree in an optimized education path cannot be obtained before the age of 18 for most people. It shouldn't matter whether or not a 5th grader is good at algebra or chemistry but that they have had enough exposure to make an informed decision about it later on. But they should also be exposed to farming, military life, software development, etc...
chasd00 5y ago
How is 1918 education and career attainment even remotely comparable to 2020? Show me the relationship between knowledge/information and career in 1918 vs today. I can’t think of a bigger difference between that time period and now.
tagoregrtst 5y ago
Its not my kids career that Im worried about, its her mental well being. There might have been no school, but I doubt the kids didn’t go out and play with their little gangs.
- JimboOmega 5y ago
  Yeah, in 1918 the sort of car centric sprawl that is ubiquitous now would be unheard of. It's doubtful that removing school would have removed social interaction the same way it does now. Especially when the alternative is social media.
- r0fl 5y ago
  Exactly! There are numerous studies stating to limit screen time for kids because it’s not good for them, but now it’s okay for the same kids to be on zoom calls 8 hours a day! Zoom school is one of the worst things to happen to kids since the beginning of computers.
  - troupe 5y ago
    I have two kids who take classes from an online school. All the classes are taught in a virtual classroom and have been for years. It is an incredibly rich academic experience. Most teachers have their PhD in their fields and there is pretty much zero class behavior issues. I've of course heard horror stories of schools that have no idea what they are doing trying to use zoom, but there are places that are really good at it and give the kids an incredible academic experience.
    - seneca 5y ago
      Not to discount your experience, it is a useful data point showing it can work, but almost any learning scheme that begins with willing PhDs teaching a group of well-behaved children (with parents that care enough to put them in a special school) is incredibly more likely to succeed. These are the sorts of people who could be left in a cave with some rocks and would likely come out more informed. You can't extrapolate from that to the general public. Maybe that's obvious to you, but it's a factor that seems to be routinely ignored when discussing educational outcomes.
lrei 5y ago
Must've been quite the statistical masterpiece to disentangle it from the World Wars and the Great Depression. Off course extrapolating conclusions from early 20th century education and career progression to the 21st will be an even greater achievement.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- analog31 5y ago
  In addition, I think it would be very hard to separate the effect of school closures from the effect of kids losing their parents to the flu. Those things might have traded against one another: More school closures, fewer parents catching the flu from their kids and dying or being incapacitated for a long time.
nostromo 5y ago
Read "The Case Against Education." It uses lots of data to show that education is largely useless after primary education is complete (arithmetic, reading, writing, etc.). https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691174655/the-case-against-education https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691174655/th...
- soared 5y ago
  Are you able to summarize? From the intro on that page it sounds like education is pretty useful in building and identifying valuable workers.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
sloan 5y ago
I enjoyed school quite a lot, though admittedly the environments of my high school and college were quite special. It was basically an undergraduate experience in terms of intellectual rigor, and the group of classmates I had around me genuinely cared for and looked after each other. A majority of our teachers were wonderful mentors who treated us with high expectations but respect and support. Then college (at a tech school) was basically grad school level in terms of expecting students to participate in research and make original intellectual contributions. I think my experience shouldn’t be so rare and special as many young people would enjoy and benefit from it as well. Undoubtedly there are other awesome options that don’t involve as much formal schooling. There should be options available as one size doesn’t fit all.

76 points by optimalsolver 5y ago

This was during a time were unpriveleged kids didn't even go to school and child labor was the norm. Gotta love papers like this that attempt to prove something from a 100 years ago when it is really impossible to prove anything with that many variables and limited information, unless you already have a goal in mind and then it is just bias confirmation.

philliphaydon 5y ago
The level of education required to do anything was also much lower. Even 20 years ago you could get a job programming without a degree but now you a PHD just to get past HR. Times have changed.
- a_t48 5y ago
  Dang, I guess I should quit then, they shouldn't have let me in the door...
  - philliphaydon 5y ago
    It was a generalisation. But it’s true some places bin your cv if you don’t have a degree even if you’ve got heaps of experience.
- FanaHOVA 5y ago
  The bias towards accreditation was much higher 20 years ago than it is today.
wyattpeak 5y ago
While it's true that there are differences, I think one lesson we should learn from history is that that virtually every group thinks they're especially unusual and that lessons don't apply to them, and simultaneously that they're usually not so unique as they think, and the lessons usually do apply to them. School was less common at that time, but plenty of people went to school, and if there was a marked dropoff in employablility even in just that group, it should absolutely be visible.
- moonchrome 5y ago
  > and if there was a marked dropoff in employablility even in just that group, it should absolutely be visible. Based on statistics and records from over a 100 years ago in an industrial economy ?
  - wyattpeak 5y ago
    Yes. It's 1920, not 1620. Here's a page from a 1920 census: https://raogk.org/census-record/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2019/10/1920-United-States-Federal-Census-for-Griggs-County-North-Dakota.jpg https://raogk.org/census-record/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2... Here's a tax return form from the same year: http://www.taxhistory.org/thp/1040forms.nsf/WebByYear/1920/$file/1040_1920.pdf http://www.taxhistory.org/thp/1040forms.nsf/WebByYear/1920/$...
    - jefftk 5y ago
      The tax return says it is only for people making at least $5k, which would be $70k today.
      - wyattpeak 5y ago
        If you want the actual data sources used by the paper, read the paper. I'm not trying to replicate an academic's source-finding, that would take months. I'm trying to quickly demonstrate that the US was a thoroughly bureaucratic nation by 1920, not some kind of backwater where we have to guess and infer demographics.
rcpt 5y ago
Do you have a better model for school closures vs. career outlook? I'm hugely skeptical of our education system today with all the standardized and focus-busting largely irrelevant curriculums. Also the sleep deprivation can't be any good. Personally kids have thrived away from the classroom but maybe we're unusual.
- ajsnigrutin 5y ago
  Yep, kids don't have time to be kids anymore, even compared to generations 20, 30 years ago (back then, when school was over (1pm, maybe 2pm max), you were done with school, and did kid stuff.... now, with parents pushing their kids into extracurricular activities and all that stuff, their lives suck a lot more. On the other hand, imagine being a first grader, unable to write or read, just coming from kindergarten, where most of the time was play-time, and due to something, you can't comprehend, you're put infront of a laptop with Zoom turned on, and your parents in a huge financial crisis suddently.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
jorblumesea 5y ago
It's not even that, it's that education wasn't as important back then. Most people didn't even graduate high school. College definitely wasn't a thing for most. So who cares if you miss half a year, you're going to go work in the shipyards or factory.
kerneloftruth 5y ago
TFA is choosing and fitting facts to support a narrative.
- GiorgioG 5y ago

StanislavPetrov 5y ago

>The situation in 1918 was starkly different from today: (1) schools closed in 1918 for many fewer days on average, (2) the 1918 virus was much deadlier to young adults and children, boosting absenteeism even in schools that stayed open, and (3) the lack of effective remote learning platforms in 1918 may have reduced the scope for school closures to increase socioeconomic inequality. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w28246/w28246.pdf https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w28246/w282...

irrational 5y ago
Are you considering remote learning to be closing down?
- throwawayboise 5y ago
  Effectively, yes. Remote learning is a poor substitute for in-person instruction particularly in the primary grades.
  - irrational 5y ago
    That isn't what teachers I have talked to have said. Though, it depends on the student. Every teacher has told me that there are certain students that were doing terrible in in-person school, but came alive and excelled beyond all expectations during remote learning. One teacher related that she saw one of the students after in-person schooling started again and that student had reverted to failing at everything. In-person is good for some people, remote is good for some people. The problem is we want a solution that fits everyone and don't want to acknowledge that different people have different needs.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

_-david-_ 5y ago

Of course it had no impact on careers. Very few jobs back then required an education. Many jobs didn't even require reading.

thaumasiotes 5y ago
Still true today.
- Robotbeat 5y ago
  What job doesn't require reading?
  - thaumasiotes 5y ago
    Retail. Waitress. Athlete. Barber. Prostitute. It's not a short list.
    - Robotbeat 5y ago
      All of those (POSSIBLY not the last) require reading. Rules. Numbers. Need to be licensed to be a barber. And in every instance, if you’re operating legally (etc) you need to read contracts, etc, to make sure you’re not getting shafted. Also need to read to collect and file taxes. Outsourcing reading is sometimes possible, but it will usually cost you a lot more and will make it much easier to be exploited.

fluxem 5y ago

And 10 years later the great depression happened.

NamTaf 5y ago
Are you implying that these two things are somehow possibly related?
- vnchr 5y ago
  It does seem like a confounding factor. Everyone was equally poor compared to everyone else during an unrelated economic depression? i think that would overwhelm any impact of the school closures.
  - imilk 5y ago
    Thanks for the regular reminder that non-programming related threads on Hacker News are filled with completely uninformed comments and are best left unclicked.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - motoxpro 5y ago
      Translated: We can't say that "everyone was equally poor" or even that it hit everyone the same. We also can't say that "poor" has 1-1 relationship with educational outcomes (I know it does have an effect). We can also control for things, i.e. my school was closed, yours wasn't 2 blocks way, the Great Depression hit our area the same, I had a worse/better outcome than you did.

fsociety999 5y ago

Perhaps the most important part of the entire paper is the final sentence: > While our findings may be more applicable in some modern circumstances than others (e.g., when a virus is particularly deadly for younger adults and children or when remote learning opportunities are limited), our paper cautions against over-extrapolating from the 1918-19 pandemic when making decisions about optimal policies during the COVID-19 pandemic. It is unfortunately not going to stop many people or politicians or media outlets from citing this paper as a justification for (or to defend) COVID-19 policies.

tootie 5y ago
It never works that way. This one study is never going to be directly and perfectly applicable to other scenarios. It is a valuable data point. If it had shown the opposite conclusion it would bode very poorly for the current situation.
whimsicalism 5y ago
> It is unfortunately not going to stop many people or politicians or media outlets from citing this paper as a justification for (or to defend) COVID-19 policies. You seem to be reading that as saying that you should do no extrapolation whatsoever, when really what they are saying is that you should do cautious extrapolation.
noduerme 5y ago
- yostrovs 5y ago
  Surely a study that didn't discuss masks wouldn't change opinions on masking.
  - noduerme 5y ago
    I'd have said anti-school-closure parents, but we're already well past that point.

rafaelero 5y ago

Not surprising, since formal education doesn't seem to be correlated with job performance when you remove the selection bias.

pyuser583 5y ago

I read an article about how Harvard dealt with the Spanish flu. Because of WWI, the student body was a heavily militarized ROTC detachment. They basically ordered the cadets to their barracks and sheltered it out.

vulcan01 5y ago
An article expanding on this comment: https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2020/06/how-harvard-handled-the-1918-flu-pandemic https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2020/06/how-harvard-handled-...

cxf12 5y ago

The World Bank and the UN have a polar opposite view. https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2021/12/06/learning-losses-from-covid-19-could-cost-this-generation-of-students-close-to-17-trillion-in-lifetime-earnings https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2021/12/06/l...

thematrixturtle 5y ago

You'd imagine World War 1 had a pretty significant impact on basically everything though.

CodeWriter23 5y ago
…followed a decade later by The Great Depression.

glofish 5y ago

Let's look at the abstract: > We find that the closures had no detectable impact on children's school attendance in 1920, nor on their educational attainment and adult labor market outcomes in 1940. Really ... they are trying to explain labor market attainments in 1940 - for the generation that lived through World War I, the Great Depression, sampling it in a period right in the middle of World War II. Yet the authors feel fully qualified to assess the effects of school closings of 1918 after being confounded by all of the above.

closeparen 5y ago

School is a pretty fucking awful thing to do to a human being, particularly to a child, worst of all to a bright or curious child. Everything rests on it being “for their own good.” And that seemed plausible. But if we really think we can cut two years of it with no ill effects, then the existence of those years in the “normal” plan is a moral emergency.

tagoregrtst 5y ago
The only thing worse than school is not being around kids your age. Also, as far as I can tell, “school sucks” is very much an Anglo thing. I went to primary school in English, in continental Europe, and in Latin America. The latter two were great, but my school in an English speaking country was awful, basically social Darwinism, and well described by Waters, Orwell and Hollywood.
- jsiaajdsdaa 5y ago
  Spent my whole child life being tormented by school bullies. Did drugs and alcohol in college. Studied history so as to not fail. Graduated, began programming on my own time, 9 years later I'm making $300,000 a year as a programmer. Only people I talk to are my wife, my mom, and a few people on Discord about 3d graphics. I can safely tell you that human interaction in the sense of "make 300 friends at school so that you aren't considered a freak or loner!" was never necessary, and in fact was an active burden.
  - starik36 5y ago
    This might be the most "programmer" post I've seen on the site today.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - jsiaajdsdaa 5y ago
      But I am a productive and responsible member of society and I have a good relationship with those who matter to me. I also volunteer my time online to those less fortunate. Why did I need to be hazed for 18 years?

wyager 5y ago

If this paper is applicable today, perhaps we should reconsider whether mandatory schooling should be eliminated or reduced. After all, if it has no impact on educational or career attainment, what is its purpose except an overpriced babysitting program? If that's all it is, we can at least be honest about that and save some money.

_8j50 5y ago

Modern schooling and corporate structure are largely influenced by industrial era england and to an extent germany. We do a lot of needless things just because there is a recurring expectation of results in exchange for effort. Actual value has nothing to do with it. The careers, values and goals of society as a whole have changed but we still have elementary and high schools and the college. Different classes of careers for different classes of education. Similar career growth structure and managerial structure and so on. I am not saying most education is useless. Just that it might be ill-optimized. Early education should focus on basic reasoning and developing skills that allow the student to research, absorb and implement information. Middle education should focus on exposure to various fields and aspects of contemporary adult life. Late and undrergrad education should focus on a specific career trajectory. I don't see why a Bachelors degree in an optimized education path cannot be obtained before the age of 18 for most people. It shouldn't matter whether or not a 5th grader is good at algebra or chemistry but that they have had enough exposure to make an informed decision about it later on. But they should also be exposed to farming, military life, software development, etc...

chasd00 5y ago

How is 1918 education and career attainment even remotely comparable to 2020? Show me the relationship between knowledge/information and career in 1918 vs today. I can’t think of a bigger difference between that time period and now.

tagoregrtst 5y ago

Its not my kids career that Im worried about, its her mental well being. There might have been no school, but I doubt the kids didn’t go out and play with their little gangs.

JimboOmega 5y ago
Yeah, in 1918 the sort of car centric sprawl that is ubiquitous now would be unheard of. It's doubtful that removing school would have removed social interaction the same way it does now. Especially when the alternative is social media.
r0fl 5y ago
Exactly! There are numerous studies stating to limit screen time for kids because it’s not good for them, but now it’s okay for the same kids to be on zoom calls 8 hours a day! Zoom school is one of the worst things to happen to kids since the beginning of computers.
- troupe 5y ago
  I have two kids who take classes from an online school. All the classes are taught in a virtual classroom and have been for years. It is an incredibly rich academic experience. Most teachers have their PhD in their fields and there is pretty much zero class behavior issues. I've of course heard horror stories of schools that have no idea what they are doing trying to use zoom, but there are places that are really good at it and give the kids an incredible academic experience.
  - seneca 5y ago
    Not to discount your experience, it is a useful data point showing it can work, but almost any learning scheme that begins with willing PhDs teaching a group of well-behaved children (with parents that care enough to put them in a special school) is incredibly more likely to succeed. These are the sorts of people who could be left in a cave with some rocks and would likely come out more informed. You can't extrapolate from that to the general public. Maybe that's obvious to you, but it's a factor that seems to be routinely ignored when discussing educational outcomes.

lrei 5y ago

Must've been quite the statistical masterpiece to disentangle it from the World Wars and the Great Depression. Off course extrapolating conclusions from early 20th century education and career progression to the 21st will be an even greater achievement.

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analog31 5y ago
In addition, I think it would be very hard to separate the effect of school closures from the effect of kids losing their parents to the flu. Those things might have traded against one another: More school closures, fewer parents catching the flu from their kids and dying or being incapacitated for a long time.

nostromo 5y ago

Read "The Case Against Education." It uses lots of data to show that education is largely useless after primary education is complete (arithmetic, reading, writing, etc.). https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691174655/the-case-against-education https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691174655/th...

soared 5y ago
Are you able to summarize? From the intro on that page it sounds like education is pretty useful in building and identifying valuable workers.
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sloan 5y ago

I enjoyed school quite a lot, though admittedly the environments of my high school and college were quite special. It was basically an undergraduate experience in terms of intellectual rigor, and the group of classmates I had around me genuinely cared for and looked after each other. A majority of our teachers were wonderful mentors who treated us with high expectations but respect and support. Then college (at a tech school) was basically grad school level in terms of expecting students to participate in research and make original intellectual contributions. I think my experience shouldn’t be so rare and special as many young people would enjoy and benefit from it as well. Undoubtedly there are other awesome options that don’t involve as much formal schooling. There should be options available as one size doesn’t fit all.