Freddie deBoer is exasperated with anti-hereditarians who talk as though Blank-Slatism is some reviled niche perspective, when in fact the blank slate represents the bipartisan and cross-ideological assumption that has dominated debate in education policy since before he was born:
Perhaps the reason I am so regularly exasperated with people like Hoel or Eric Turkheimer or any number of others in this conversation is because I have been marinated in the ed policy world for a long, long time, and in that world there is no debate at all: every child is capable of any academic outcome. There is no limit to what education can do. Go to your average charter school conference and the idea that individual students have any inherent or intrinsic academic tendency isn’t just unpopular, it will get you shouted out of the room. Try being a public school teacher of a 25th percentile student, telling his parents that it’s not realistic to hope to turn him into a 90th percentile student, and see how that goes for you professionally. Even if you can get people to concede that our goal shouldn’t be equality of educational outcomes, or even that students perhaps don’t all have perfectly equal potentials, such concessions will remain in the realm of the vague and the general.
(When I ask people if they think we should try to establish summative educational equality of outcomes, they say of course not, that’s a straw man, we just want every child to reach their full potential. When I ask if they think it would be alright if, say, 15% of students were a full standard deviation or more below the mean, they say that’s outrageous, we should never condone that level of failure! And it’s like, guys….)
The two most important American educational bills in the 21st century have been No Child Left Behind (bipartisan, signed by a Republican president) and the Every Student Succeeds Act (bipartisan, signed by a Democratic president). Those names are not coincidental or empty; they express exactly what the politicians who drafted them believed was possible. They reflect a cross-ideological and remarkably durable assumption in our education politics that all students can be pushed through the college-to-affluence pipeline. I wish people on the genetics research side of this debate would stop talking as though there’s some rigid hereditarian consensus when, in the ed policy world, there is in fact the exact opposite.
I made this very point once at a staff meeting about increasing the mastery rate of our student scores on a particular assessment. If the test were to reflect actual ability and/or knowledge of it’s takers, then, if the test were actually any good, the test scores should follow a normal distribution, meaning a larger percentage than were presently failing should actually be failing, particularly for public schools.
We were, in fact, mathematically speaking, already over-performing. Alternatively, the test was poorly scaled. Either way, the discussion was a waste of time. It was a instructive experience, since it didn’t seem to bother anyone and, as a consequence, I never really made any further meaningful comments on the topic.
The education system is not about education. It’s a money laundering scheme for people in the education industry that only ever accidentally ends up educating anyone, usually because of some particular teacher’s efforts despite the organizational motives and actions they operate under actively foiling their good-faith efforts; this itself is also a rarity.
“School” was born as a scam and will die as a scam. The solution is as breathtakingly simple as it is straightforward: teach the bright young boys who would have been in America circa 1750 as the bright young boys in America circa 1750 were taught in America circa 1750. Naturally, this is accompanied by the metaphorical and literal razing to the ground of the assets of the current system, including property, plant, equipment, faculty, and staff, and salting of the earth where once they stood that nothing may grow for generations hence. Amen.
There are real world consequences to blank-statism. Our STEM programs appear to be degraded. Russia, China, North Korea, and possibly Iran have fielded hypersonic weapons, and Russia has used them in combat. The US does not have any such weapons, and their development appears to have stalled.
Then there are the naval fiascos, Zumwalt, LCS Constellation, Ford, Columbia…
The Air Force’s replacement for the Minuteman is stalled. All the old silos and bunkers, which were supposed to be reused, will have to be replaced. And then there is the F35. The first couple of hundred cannot be upgraded to current standards, and will be scrapped. Can they fly in the rain? They are not stealthy inbound due to external stores under wing, but they are outbound.
The Army can’t replace its self-propelled 155’s, build a radar-guided anti-air self defense gun (confused by helicopter rotors), build a medium tank (Booker), or grasp the concept of an assault rifle (viz. M-7). The Quartermaster would reissue Springfield ‘03’s, if it had them.
All this is engineering. Difficult, advanced technology. Our enemies train up engineers who can do this work. We can’t.
Let’s let civilian engineering rest for now. Where are our consumer electronics, steel factories, nuclear power stations, robot factories, high speed trains, automated ports, new ISS, …?
Public Education and the school system are a greater and more pernicious idol, a more fattened and delicious sacred cow, than any other in our society. It is my dream to see it slaughtered and eaten, I can only imagine how well marbled it must be. This is impressive in a culture already rife with so many pagan deities that it puts a millennia old schizophrenic religion like Hinduism to shame.
The only members of the pantheon I can REMOTELY think of that come close to it’s sacrosanctity are the Holocaust Idol (and subsequent hated of the Hitler devil), the Vaccine Idol (whose temples are currently being invaded and exorcised by Imperial fiat), and MAYBE the, “I’m not Racist,” Idol – though this one has taken quite a drubbing lately, with a large influx of subtle converts away from it’s worship.
Every demon must be cast out.
Well…
Same old thing. Where delusion rules, there’s a border beyond which concessions to reality or even making sense fade out.
Phileas Frogg says:
That’s another odd theology.
Consider that the results of a test which is completely random may follow a normal distribution (throwing a few dice, for example).
Eventually, yes. It’s an atavism of sectarian under-carpet battles. All surviving sects either own it and perpetuate it naturally, or are resistant to it. Once it’s not a part of serious contest —
Once it’s not a functional organ any more, it gets repurposed or goes vestigial. In this case, it became an excretion mechanism and then just safe (in short term) tumor fodder. «Who cannot do, go and teach».
Phileas Frogg says:
Well, if it’s a prerequisite for the entire power structure…
Generally, sanctified parts of medicine. It neatly combines an actual dependency and ex cathedra theocratic authority. So the questions like “which area of human activity gave birth to the concept of quackery” are indecent.
It’s the same idol. Human Neurological Uniformity, or Inner Light — the ultimate divine equality of Quaker theology. Of which every hu-mon creature is supposed to have exactly 1.000 unit. Anything that makes such assertions look absurd must be either sacrilegious to notice, buried under back-and-forth gobbledygook or destroyed.
Jim says:
That’s more or less what Sisyphus does for millennia. But then his stone rolls down the very same slope again, because why wouldn’t it?
T. Beholder,
Ok. What’s your point?
Phileas Frogg says:
The point is that sure, a sacred cow usually is obvious and contain lots of fat. Slaughtering and frying one can be fun. But its owners and lackeys guard it zealously. Even after it does not yield much milk. Which is why it’s a sacred cow to begin with. So when one of those gets slaughtered, someone is having a victory feast already.
Such things take place during the anti-recovery stage at the earliest.
T. Beholder:
With each generation, a race, a culture, a group of any kind must renew its mandate to survive and thrive in the eternal struggle that is the great knife fight of life. Such is the law of nature.
Jim says:
This requires passing actual challenges, rather than repeating failures with slight variations.
A sacred cow is not a wild buffalo or even a milk cow, it has mandates to survive and thrive rubber-stamped by its owner, who does not demand actual performance. Thus it perishes with said owner, unless taken as a trophy by whoever takes over its pasture.
T. Beholder:
We know what the American teaching convention circa 1750 produced, and we know what the American teaching convention circa 2025 is producing. Software nerds would call this something like a “catastrophic software performance regression”. Having identified the error, the logical next step is to revert to the previously working configuration, and proceed accordingly. And not a moment too soon!
Jim says:
I see as its former vital function a way to use State in the cold war of sects, and the little footnote about legislators not establishing religion be damned.
Once it won (the Catholics obviously cannot take the ground back from Mainstream Protestant sects), its purpose ended thus of course slide into vestigial status began.
Harvard is more complex, jumping between two functions: from a theological institution to supposedly scientific and back.
It’s a conflation due to passive voice abstractions and skipped assumptions. An error is only meaningful in not being a “correct” state of the system! Which in turn requires the context of purpose. The purpose does not exist in vacuum. An interested party owning the thing defines its purpose.
Once those who controlled state sponsored schools and used them for purpose of competing with the Catholics; they are gone.
Then other interested parties reused this system as a foundation for higher education, for purpose of competing with the other powers in arms races; they are gone too.
Now the interested parties who own this thing are those who made it into cancerous mess you observe and obviously continue down the same road. The only reasonable conclusion is that it serves their purpose.
Thus, whatever it does is no “error”. We can only guess what would be. As a guess, if either a large chunk of those bogus jobs gets chopped off or state schools become a cradle of successful opposition, this will probably be deemed a failure.
Oh… you’re a believer in the Yarvin Whig Theory of History.
https://i.ibb.co/PvDHjR7Z/nuts.jpg