5 ms·

It's important to remember that the Finns implemented their new system for moral, rather than competitive reasons. Their resulting academic performance was a pl

by ender7 15y ago

It's important to remember that the Finns implemented their new system for moral, rather than competitive reasons. Their resulting academic performance was a pleasant side-effect. This is a critical distinction that even this article seems to gloss over. I went to the best private high school in my state. Before that, I attended an elementary school whose tuition cost more than many people pay for a college education. My parents were by no means rich, but were willing to spend a significant portion of their yearly income on the education of their only child. I have also worked in schools of the other kind. The ones with metal detectors. The ones where the administration's main preoccupation is not which college their students will get into, but whether their students will graduate high school at all. Arguments that competition between schools and school systems is necessary in order to maintain academic quality do not impress me. The quality of a child's education should not be determined by how much money a parent is willing to or is capable of paying. I am quite willing to let children to be buffeted by the inequalities of capitalism in every other aspect of their lives (except, perhaps, healthcare), but our current system is not only ineffective and inefficient, it is immoral.

wnewman 15y ago
You write, in comparing "our" (presumably US) system to the Finns that our system is not only ineffective and inefficient, it is immoral. Are you saying that non-internationalist socialism is inherently moral while individual property rights and exchange are not? That morally speaking someone's education should not be determined by who their parents are, but should be determined by the nation to which their parents are subject? Would you like to give a hint why? The notion that individual economic rights are void while national economic rights are valid is delicious for people whose most valuable asset is their inherited citizenship or their power in nationalist institutions, so over the last century or so enormous effort has been expended in trying to justify this notion. However, the state of the art in such moral justifications does not impress me. Is there a particular justification that you are not embarrassed to be associated with? The old internationalist socialism was screwed up in various vital ways, but at least I can understand how an idealist could be attracted to it. In this particular policy question, I can see how an idealist would attracted to the idea of opening an educational program to everyone in the world. But you seem to see clear moral superiority in a system which is open only to those who inherited Finnish citizenship. As socialist ideas spread in practical politics, internationalist ideas were almost completely abandoned. (See e.g. how large transfer payments within nations are compared to how large foreign aid is, or how interested people are in Gini coefficients within nations compared to globally.) This doesn't stop modern noninternationalist socialists from regularly appealing to the old internationalist rhetoric for justification, but that's dishonest. (It's also circumstantial evidence for how weak the moral arguments for noninternalist socialism are, or more precisely, how the ones which aren't hopelessly weak tend to be strong enough to "justify" various of the horrors of the twentieth century, or various older nastiness like heriditary aristocracy or slavery. Classical liberalism and universalist socialism differ in whether "positive rights" and equality of outcome are better than ordinary negative rights and equality under the law, but justifications for both tend to appeal to a general idea of equal rights of all humans. To justify noninternationalist socialism of the usual heritable citizenship sort, you have to break that and find a way to justify hereditary privilege.) Note also that essentially all those moral arguments for national economic rights are subject to various classic moral questions against how to get individual economic rights quite right. E.g., it is a classic difficult question how to assign individual property rights initially in a morally satisfying way. This question doesn't get any easier when it comes to assigning property rights to individual noninternalist socialist nations in a morally satisfying way. (And to it is added the new question of how individual people are to be assigned to such nations in a morally satisfying way.) There are defensible practical justifications for the conclusion that individual people shouldn't have individual economic rights but that individual nations should, in particular the observation that strongly collectivist nations punched above their weight in some of the wars of the 20th century. (There are also arguments based on the supposed inefficiency of a free market, but those have fared so poorly in reality that most people no longer advance them, at least without couching them in calculated vagueness or doublespeak.) But you seem to be appealing not to some empirical practical justification, but to some abstract moral justification, and I am unable to guess which you might have in mind.
- ams6110 15y ago
  You seem to know what you are trying to say, but I'm having a terrible time wading through your prose. Can you boil this down bit?
  - seagreen 15y ago
    Hey ams6110, I'll take a shot at summarizing his argument because I find it interesting. Ender7 has claimed that a child's education shouldn't vary by his or her parents' wealth, but should be provided by society. Wnewman's point is basically that when Ender7 says "society" he really means the specific nation that child belongs to. But by Ender7's logic this still isn't fair, because some nations are poorer than others. So unless Ender7 is willing to argue that it's immoral for some societies to provide better education for their children that others, than Ender7 is being inconsistant.
    - srbloom 15y ago
      Though it's a good point I don't think it's valid counter-argument to the moral imperative "we should provide good education to our nation's children." Globalism may be around the corner, but until then, "our" nation's society is the one "we" are responsible for.
- ender7 15y ago
  My use of the word "immoral" was meant to be within the context of a single society, not with the world at large. My argument is that current US society has created a de-facto class system where a significant percentage of the population is forced to go to schools that are so bad that they're barely better than not going to school at all. Here, "forced" means that one's parents either can't afford to send you to a good private school or move to a location with good public schools, or is unwilling to do so. Students at these schools are, through no fault of their own, largely disenfranchised from participating in society in anything but a menial manner. The ideal image of the guy who didn't even go to high school but went on to found a corporate empire is fading - the people who are founding the empires nowadays tend to have had at least a little college schooling, much less a high school diploma. Meanwhile, the positions of wealth and respect in our society are reserved for the relatively small portion of society who get a good education (exception: professional athletes & music stars). I classify this system as immoral, as it involves one part of a society preying upon another part, and then using its advantage to ensure continued advantage in the future. I would not shed a single tear if such groups lost the economic right to continue doing so. More practically, however, it's hard to spend any amount of time in an average public high school (yes, there are some very good ones, but I'm talking about the average here) and not come to the conclusion that something is very, very wrong with the education system in this country. The sad fact is that a really bad school can seriously damage the rest of a child's life. Some few might escape the damage and go on to do great things, but most will carry the mark until they die, working in a series of soulless shitty jobs that they neither enjoy nor respect.
oelewapperke 15y ago
What is immoral is those studies, and the data they're supposedly based on. As to why Finland does so good ... good question. However the notion that kids explore science if given the chance is, sadly, false. It's been debunked so many times it isn't funny, and there's no reasonable doubt. Maybe it's simply the average temperature and the general boringness of the country. Entire school systems are based on the "creativity" idea. Here's the rub : with the exception of one ... they're all doing horrible (not exactly, they either turn out only truly bad students, or they turn out very few very good students, and a large bunch of very bad students to do with it). Taking the exception and drawing the conclusion you want to draw is blatantly dishonest. What makes students in Hong Kong so good isn't really the cramming and the long hours. They're part of it, but the main thing is : in Hong Kong, you study well, and you might make it. Don't make it and you end up without protection in poverty and misery. It's the threat, and the credibility of the threat, over a long time that makes the difference. Unlike your "foster kids' creativity" idea, this idea has been shown to work consistently across the globe in many studies. One thing that makes a large difference between kids performance is the rich-poor gap. The bigger the gap, the better the average student. It works better if the best students are pretty much guaranteed good jobs. Several researchers have been caught outright falsifying results to get the ideologically correct result : that letting kids do whatever they want makes them better students. Sadly, it does not. This idea gets enormous political support, sadly it's false.
scott_s 15y ago
I think it's unfair to say the article glosses over this point. It's the theme of a section that starts with the sentence: Since the 1980s, the main driver of Finnish education policy has been the idea that every child should have exactly the same opportunity to learn, regardless of family background, income, or geographic location.
swasheck 15y ago
"This is a critical distinction that even this article seems to gloss over." It actually seemed heavily emphasized, just with few words. Perhaps that's the point. Competition is so ingrained into the "American" psyche that we can't conceive of something that is not fueled by competition.

by ender7 15y ago

wnewman 15y ago

You write, in comparing "our" (presumably US) system to the Finns that our system is not only ineffective and inefficient, it is immoral. Are you saying that non-internationalist socialism is inherently moral while individual property rights and exchange are not? That morally speaking someone's education should not be determined by who their parents are, but should be determined by the nation to which their parents are subject? Would you like to give a hint why? The notion that individual economic rights are void while national economic rights are valid is delicious for people whose most valuable asset is their inherited citizenship or their power in nationalist institutions, so over the last century or so enormous effort has been expended in trying to justify this notion. However, the state of the art in such moral justifications does not impress me. Is there a particular justification that you are not embarrassed to be associated with? The old internationalist socialism was screwed up in various vital ways, but at least I can understand how an idealist could be attracted to it. In this particular policy question, I can see how an idealist would attracted to the idea of opening an educational program to everyone in the world. But you seem to see clear moral superiority in a system which is open only to those who inherited Finnish citizenship. As socialist ideas spread in practical politics, internationalist ideas were almost completely abandoned. (See e.g. how large transfer payments within nations are compared to how large foreign aid is, or how interested people are in Gini coefficients within nations compared to globally.) This doesn't stop modern noninternationalist socialists from regularly appealing to the old internationalist rhetoric for justification, but that's dishonest. (It's also circumstantial evidence for how weak the moral arguments for noninternalist socialism are, or more precisely, how the ones which aren't hopelessly weak tend to be strong enough to "justify" various of the horrors of the twentieth century, or various older nastiness like heriditary aristocracy or slavery. Classical liberalism and universalist socialism differ in whether "positive rights" and equality of outcome are better than ordinary negative rights and equality under the law, but justifications for both tend to appeal to a general idea of equal rights of all humans. To justify noninternationalist socialism of the usual heritable citizenship sort, you have to break that and find a way to justify hereditary privilege.) Note also that essentially all those moral arguments for national economic rights are subject to various classic moral questions against how to get individual economic rights quite right. E.g., it is a classic difficult question how to assign individual property rights initially in a morally satisfying way. This question doesn't get any easier when it comes to assigning property rights to individual noninternalist socialist nations in a morally satisfying way. (And to it is added the new question of how individual people are to be assigned to such nations in a morally satisfying way.) There are defensible practical justifications for the conclusion that individual people shouldn't have individual economic rights but that individual nations should, in particular the observation that strongly collectivist nations punched above their weight in some of the wars of the 20th century. (There are also arguments based on the supposed inefficiency of a free market, but those have fared so poorly in reality that most people no longer advance them, at least without couching them in calculated vagueness or doublespeak.) But you seem to be appealing not to some empirical practical justification, but to some abstract moral justification, and I am unable to guess which you might have in mind.

ams6110 15y ago
You seem to know what you are trying to say, but I'm having a terrible time wading through your prose. Can you boil this down bit?
- seagreen 15y ago
  Hey ams6110, I'll take a shot at summarizing his argument because I find it interesting. Ender7 has claimed that a child's education shouldn't vary by his or her parents' wealth, but should be provided by society. Wnewman's point is basically that when Ender7 says "society" he really means the specific nation that child belongs to. But by Ender7's logic this still isn't fair, because some nations are poorer than others. So unless Ender7 is willing to argue that it's immoral for some societies to provide better education for their children that others, than Ender7 is being inconsistant.
  - srbloom 15y ago
    Though it's a good point I don't think it's valid counter-argument to the moral imperative "we should provide good education to our nation's children." Globalism may be around the corner, but until then, "our" nation's society is the one "we" are responsible for.
ender7 15y ago
My use of the word "immoral" was meant to be within the context of a single society, not with the world at large. My argument is that current US society has created a de-facto class system where a significant percentage of the population is forced to go to schools that are so bad that they're barely better than not going to school at all. Here, "forced" means that one's parents either can't afford to send you to a good private school or move to a location with good public schools, or is unwilling to do so. Students at these schools are, through no fault of their own, largely disenfranchised from participating in society in anything but a menial manner. The ideal image of the guy who didn't even go to high school but went on to found a corporate empire is fading - the people who are founding the empires nowadays tend to have had at least a little college schooling, much less a high school diploma. Meanwhile, the positions of wealth and respect in our society are reserved for the relatively small portion of society who get a good education (exception: professional athletes & music stars). I classify this system as immoral, as it involves one part of a society preying upon another part, and then using its advantage to ensure continued advantage in the future. I would not shed a single tear if such groups lost the economic right to continue doing so. More practically, however, it's hard to spend any amount of time in an average public high school (yes, there are some very good ones, but I'm talking about the average here) and not come to the conclusion that something is very, very wrong with the education system in this country. The sad fact is that a really bad school can seriously damage the rest of a child's life. Some few might escape the damage and go on to do great things, but most will carry the mark until they die, working in a series of soulless shitty jobs that they neither enjoy nor respect.

oelewapperke 15y ago

What is immoral is those studies, and the data they're supposedly based on. As to why Finland does so good ... good question. However the notion that kids explore science if given the chance is, sadly, false. It's been debunked so many times it isn't funny, and there's no reasonable doubt. Maybe it's simply the average temperature and the general boringness of the country. Entire school systems are based on the "creativity" idea. Here's the rub : with the exception of one ... they're all doing horrible (not exactly, they either turn out only truly bad students, or they turn out very few very good students, and a large bunch of very bad students to do with it). Taking the exception and drawing the conclusion you want to draw is blatantly dishonest. What makes students in Hong Kong so good isn't really the cramming and the long hours. They're part of it, but the main thing is : in Hong Kong, you study well, and you might make it. Don't make it and you end up without protection in poverty and misery. It's the threat, and the credibility of the threat, over a long time that makes the difference. Unlike your "foster kids' creativity" idea, this idea has been shown to work consistently across the globe in many studies. One thing that makes a large difference between kids performance is the rich-poor gap. The bigger the gap, the better the average student. It works better if the best students are pretty much guaranteed good jobs. Several researchers have been caught outright falsifying results to get the ideologically correct result : that letting kids do whatever they want makes them better students. Sadly, it does not. This idea gets enormous political support, sadly it's false.

scott_s 15y ago

I think it's unfair to say the article glosses over this point. It's the theme of a section that starts with the sentence: Since the 1980s, the main driver of Finnish education policy has been the idea that every child should have exactly the same opportunity to learn, regardless of family background, income, or geographic location.

swasheck 15y ago

"This is a critical distinction that even this article seems to gloss over." It actually seemed heavily emphasized, just with few words. Perhaps that's the point. Competition is so ingrained into the "American" psyche that we can't conceive of something that is not fueled by competition.