Comment by phil21
5 months ago
> Killing truly progressive programs for the purpose of virtue signaling is a loss for society
It's not just a loss for society. It's society-killing.
Taking resources away from those who move society forward and spending them on those who are unlikely to "pay it back" is a way your culture dies. Conquerers in the past used this strategy to win massive empires for themselves. It's a ridiculous self-own.
This is perhaps the sole political topic I will die on a hill for.
> spending them on those who are unlikely to "pay it back"
If only. The school system is actually terrible at helping the most disadvantaged and marginalized students. These students would benefit the most from highly structured and directed instructional approaches that often have the pupils memorizing their "lesson" essentially word-for-word and getting prompt, immediate feedback on every question they answer[0] - but teachers who have come out from a proper Education department hate these approaches simply because they're regarded as "demeaning" for the job and unbecoming of a "professional" educator.
Mind you, these approaches are still quite valued in "Special" education, which is sort of regarded as a universe of its own. But obviously we would rather not have to label every student who happens to be merely disadvantaged or marginalized as "Special" as a requirement for them to get an education that fully engages them, especially when addressing their weakest points!
Modern "Progressive" education hurts both gifted and disadvantaged students for very similar reasons - but it actually hurts the latter a lot more.
[0] As an important point, the merit of this kind of education is by no means exclusive to disadvantaged students! In fact, even Abraham Lincoln was famously educated at a "blab school" (called that because the pupils would loudly "blab" their lesson back at the teacher) that was based on exactly that approach.
Can you please provide some evidence that this kind of scripted and recitation-heavy instruction is beneficial compared to other approaches?
I've only seen pretty limited, pretty confounded evidence for it. A lot of studies I've seen are studies of students in charter programs, but these studies tend to ignore pretty big selection effects (e.g. comparing students to the general student population, when studies have found that students entered into charter lotteries who are not selected do about as well as those who get to go to the charter school).
I definitely use recitation in my classroom where there's a body of knowledge, but I typically reserve it for situations where it's clear that there's less need for deeper critical thinking or application of concepts.
As we look forward, it seems like there's a lot less value in having a broad body of knowledge and much more usefulness in being able to fluidly apply concepts in comparison to 19th century practice. Further, blab schools were really pretty demanding of attention span and cooperation and relied pretty heavily on corporal punishment to make them work.
I have pretty limited, indirect tools to get students to put in high effort. There's the gradebook and their general desire to do well, which isn't a terribly effective mechanism even though I am teaching an affluent, motivated group... and there's whatever social pressures I can foster in the classroom to encourage students to value performance.
> deeper critical thinking or application of concepts.
These things come after one has the basics down pat. Modern "Progressive" education rejects this point altogether. It's whole approach is entirely founded on putting the cart before the horse.
> Further, blab schools were really pretty demanding of attention span
Attention span is a function of engagement. As it turns out, hearing the lesson and blabbing it back until one has memorized it fully is a pretty engaging and even "gamified" activity, especially wrt. the most marginalized and disadvantaged students for whom other drivers of high effort mighy be not nearly as effective, as you hint at.
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> Can you please provide some evidence that this kind of scripted and recitation-heavy instruction is beneficial compared to other approaches?
Singapore/Hong Kong/Japan/Taiwan/Macau dominating the PISA
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As an adult, I've taught myself five programming languages, I read 20+ books a year, and while in school I was reading at a college level by the fourth or fifth grade.
However, because I have ADD/ADHD, I was shunted into the special education program, and told point blank in high school that I was not 'college material', I was not allowed to take advanced math.
I did in fairness have a great deal of trouble doing a lot of the busywork that school presents to you - because I saw little point in it, I knew the material, I'd read the book, I could write about it and often passed tests on it with flying colors.
If I'd been given an opportunity to do more engaging learning, and less information regurgitation style learning, I wonder where I would be. Like an introduction to computer programming class, would have completely changed the trajectory of my life - yes I'm a working engineer today, but it took me a long time to work my way up from a low wage service job.
ADHD is not at all well accommodated in public schools. I could never finish most homework as a child, because it was too boring and repetitive(I got it in 1-2 repetitions, but they made us do 20). My ADHD was severe, but I still got put in G&T classes because of my IQ tests, but that didn’t help much. GT classes were an hour or two in a different classroom doing silly “creative” projects, but then it was right back to normal classes where we were in the same room as students that had to sound out words in their paragraph of the class reading in the same amount of time many of us had read ahead a dozen pages. I never completed most homework and had poor grades putting me almost in the bottom half of my class. Everything changed when I got to AP and other advanced classes. They were more interesting and I easily rose to the top of them while nearly failing the boring standard classes. If it weren’t for AP classes followed by more interesting college classes I’d be a janitor or something. Us neurodivergent smart folks can be absolutely crippled by being stuck in boring regular classes. Having a mental difference/disability makes us hard to understand and accommodate. We can be both special needs and gifted/talented at the same time.
The instructional approaches I mentioned in the parent comment are not based on pointless 'busywork'. In fact, quick feedback to the pupil is considered an essential feature, which helps cope with the all-too-easily distracted "monkey mind" that's typically associated with ADHD.
This sounds thoroughly unappealing to gifted students though? I mean, repetition is _a_ tool in the toolset.
Respectfully I'm not seeing how your point is surprising at all. Are you just saying that when we do spend money on disadvantaged (whatever word is correct for "opposite of gifted") it isn't effective?
I'm just saying that when the institutional schooling system seems to "spend money on the disadvantaged" it's merely pretending to help the disadvantaged and marginalized, while actively rejecting the approaches that, at least as judged by readily available evidence, would likely help these students the most, and probably close at least some of the gap in outcomes.
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> Taking resources away from those who move society forward and spending them on those who are unlikely to "pay it back" is a way your culture dies.
What does this even mean?
To me, the measure of a healthy society is how that society treats those that are "unlikely to pay it back". The most unhealthy societies treat unwanted humans as disposable refuse. For example, I don't think we'd call the culture/society of the 1900s US particularly healthy. Yet that was probably the peak of the US keeping resources in the hands of "those who move society forward" the robber barons and monopolists. We didn't think anything of working to death unwanted 5 year olds that were unlikely to make a positive impact on society.
As for "dying culture" that to me is a very different thing from society. Societies can have multiple cultures present and healthy societies tolerate multiple cultures.
> Conquerers in the past used this strategy to win massive empires for themselves.
Which conquerers? I can think of no historical example where a conquerer somehow convinced a target to take care of their needy so they could conquer.
> This is perhaps the sole political topic I will die on a hill for.
I'm really interested in the foundation of these beliefs. What are the specific historical examples you are thinking of when you make these statements? Or is it mostly current events that you consider?
>To me, the measure of a healthy society is how that society treats those that are "unlikely to pay it back". The most unhealthy societies treat unwanted humans as disposable refuse.
Sure, but don't try to get people who can't hack college into college at the expense of those who can.
When I was growing up decades ago, we had a gifted program and a special education program. The gifted program was an attempt to expose gifted students to more complex thinking, while the special education program was an attempt to give student who struggle with normal education special attention to allow them to learn as best they can. It worked well.
In the 80's, the education system was the product of 200+ years of figuring out how to do it. For some reason, we decided it was wrong and introduce new methods of education that don't seem to be doing as well.
>The most unhealthy societies treat unwanted humans as disposable refuse.
This seems like hyperbole. I don't think the US treats any children as disposable refuse, no matter how dissatisfied you are with the current system, I'm certain that isn't the intent.
> This seems like hyperbole.
It's not, there are multiple historical examples of societies, including the US, that place a low value on human life.
Heck, you'll even find comments in this thread talking about how important it is to cut funding to the useless eaters... errr undeserving masses.
Current US society isn't that bad, however, there is a significant population of people that see no problems with things like child labor and completely privatizing education (and everything else for that matter).
> I don't think the US treats any children as disposable refuse, no matter how dissatisfied you are with the current system, I'm certain that isn't the intent.
I never said the current US policies treat kids that way. I do, however, see some disturbing rhetoric throughout this thread about how we spend to much time/money/effort on individuals the commenters deem as worthless.
> > Conquerers in the past used this strategy to win massive empires for themselves.
> Which conquerers? I can think of no historical example where a conquerer somehow convinced a target to take care of their needy so they could conquer.
I think the idea is that conqourers force their conquest economies to fit their needs, which is often not good for the conqoured. E.g. they might try to shutdown industries which build local wealth over ones that are more extractive.
Not exactly the same, but Basil II of eastern Rome had his enemy soldiers blinded after a decisive victory and sent back to Bulgaria to be a burden.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Kleidion
You can't imagine interpreting the parent comment for its clear face value -- that supporting outlier high achievers helps everyone in society?
The inventor of a vaccine or a microchip or a sculpture doesn't hoard the invention for themself.
Meanwhile, societies like USSR and Communist China, that persecuted their geniuses, collapsed their previously great societies.
Even at the most blood-thirsty periods USSR had programs for gifted youth, math clubs at school, and even dedicated highly selective schools. They also had cheap entertaining pop-sci books. The schools would fail the students who don't pass the tests.
However, the scientists and engineers had a rather low salary, often lower than blue-collar workers'.
The equality of outcome can take many forms.
Calling pre-revolution Russian society "great" sounds like a bit of a stretch, mostly due to quality (and freedom) of life for biggest group of it - farmers.
You are equating "persecuting genius" with "supporting those from low-opportunity backgrounds". Classic mistake, especially considering that those kids could become """geniuses""" too if they had a chance to even try. Giving a decent shot at those from disadvantaged households will ironically probably do more towards improving the number of high achievers than allocating too many resources to the children of the rich, which is what we're doing now.
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Russia was a backward, underdeveloped nation that couldn’t even beat Germany’s B team, and then collapsed into civil war. 25 years later, the USSR beat Germany’s A team and effectively conquered half of Europe, holding it for nearly half a century.
China before the Communists got pillaged by a succession of outside powers, culminating in basically a failed state that barely had a national government. China after the Communists became prosperous and strong, with the world’s second largest economy and no prospect of being invaded.
I’m no fan of Communism and I think a better system of government could have taken these countries farther, but “collapsed their previously great societies” makes no sense.
No, I cannot because that is fundamentally not what the parent comment said or the framing that they used.
> Meanwhile, societies like USSR and Communist China, that persecuted their geniuses, collapsed their previously great societies.
I'm sorry, but that is not how either the USSR or China have operated. If anything, they hyper applied the notion cultivating geniuses. Education in both China and formerly the USSR is hyper competitive with multiple levels of weeding out the less desirables to try and cultivate the genius class.
The problem with both is that your level of academic achievement dictated what jobs you were suited for with little wiggle room.
Now, that isn't to say, particularly under Mao, that there wasn't a purging of intellectuals. It is to say that later forms of the USSR and China have the education systems that prioritize funding genius.
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> Meanwhile, societies like USSR and Communist China, that persecuted their geniuses, collapsed their previously great societies.
China is doing fine. In fact they're probably going to eclipse the US soon in terms of scientific output.
USSR fell for the trap of trusting the West and consequently they suffered a lot in the 90s.
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> The inventor of a vaccine or a microchip or a sculpture doesn't hoard the invention for themself
The built-in assumption is that those outlier high achievers & inventors were gifted students. Is there any evidence for this prior?
As a devil's advocate, my counterpoint is that "grit" was more important than raw intelligence, if so, should society then prioritize grittiness over giftedness?
A few months ago, there was a rebroadcast of an interview about the physician who developed roughly half the vaccines given to children in the US to this day. He seemed to be an unremarkable student, and persistence seems to have been the key quality that led to his successes, not a sequence of brilliant revelations.
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These inventions are inevitable and don’t take talented and gifted people to do. It takes people undistracted by poverty and suffering.
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What is good for a society and what feels just are often disparate things.
But it is not unjust on a human scale that some people are born with lower potential than others. It’s just an unfortunate fact of life.
What is just then?
To whom is it just to invest 2x the resources into a person that will never likely tinder a significant benefit to society?
To whom is it just to -not- invest in people who are particularly likely to bring benefits to society?
We know that the vast majority of significant advances in engineering and science are brought to life by people that are significantly above average capability in their fundamental capabilities, gifts that were evident even before they entered school.
We know that significant advances are unlikely to be contributed by people for whom day to day life is a significant cognitive challenge.
This comes down to the harm / benefit of investing 2x the effort into one person.
The best likely case scenario for the bright student is that they go on to create something remarkable and useful. Advancements in technology and science are responsible for millions of lives saved every year, and billions of lives saving trillions of man hours they would have spent in tedious, exhausting work. This then translates into higher investment in children, creating a virtuous cycle of benefit.
The best likely case for the dim bulb is not so different than the no-intervention path, but with a slightly better quality of life. The best argument is probably that it might make a difference in how he approaches parental responsibilities, since his social crowd is likely to be of slightly better character.
I would say it is unjust to the many to focus your resources on the least productive in society, unless the reason for their lower potentiality is something that is inherently fixable (IE lack of education). If the problem is endemic to the individual themselves, it makes little difference or sense to invest a disproportionate effort in their education.
OTOH if you have a student that can absorb information at double or triple the normal rate, it makes sense to fast track them to a level of education that they can produce benefits to their society. To let them languish in a classroom developing a disdain for their teachers, whom the often know more than, only creates habits and preconceptions that guide them into dubious but interesting activities and away from the paths that might lead them to greatly benefit society at large.
Either way it’s kind of a shit sandwich though, so who knows.
Anecdotally for me, G/T was great for my eventual development, and probably moved me farther away from a life of high achieving white collar crime, which seemed like a worthwhile goal when I was 9.
Showing me that other people understood and valued my intellect was a huge factor in deciding to try to do something admirable with my life.
It also was largely a waste of money paying for me to launch mice to half a mile in spectacularly unsafe sounding rockets from the school track. The astronaut survival rate was not great.
> invest 2x the resources into a person that will never likely tinder a significant benefit to society?
So you would rather have the cleaning lady, the garbage collector, the truck driver,... not got proper read/write/calculate/economics... education and increase their chances of ending on the side where they fall for addiction instead?
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> Taking resources away from those who move society forward
And those people do not even have to be geniuses or top students. Our society moves forward on the back of millions of ordinary people, yet those ordinary people, me included, would benefit most from a rigorous education system.
lol, when people talk about these things they’re talking about the Lowell High kids that want to go to Yale, not normal people like me. Let’s be real here.
No, I'm talking about regular kids who grow up in hard circumstances that just need an opportunity for a better life.
This can mean a jump from working class to middle class and nothing more. That is absolutely driving society forward.
Not offering a means out of "the shit" for these kids is a way to hold them down into the circumstances they were born into and nothing more.
Zero kids I'm thinking of who went through these programs went to Yale or any other ivy. Most have great lives 20 years later, off the backs of that early opportunity for achievement.
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I'm not. All I want is that students get trained rigorously. The last thing I want is as what NYT used to report: a straight-A student who dreamed to be a scientist couldn't even pass the placement test of a city college. That shows how irresponsible our school systems became.
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I have been deeply amused that some recent studies found the signal that best correlated with innovation in a society wasn't upward mobility, but rather _downward_ mobility.
The less rich people are allowed to buy success for their mediocre offspring, the better off society is.
Is that why Elon Musk's mom went on TV to explain just how much of a genius he is? It would be laughable if it wasn't so sad.
There's a lot of strong words thrown around regarding this topic. You need a little of both. Consider a re-framing:
Rather than trying to focus on the less-achieving third (half, tenth, etc) with the goal of bootstrapping entire groups (for your definition) via equality of outcome, it would make sense to put into place opportunities for gifted students and high achievers without regard for where they live or come from.
It would also make sense to put aside some extra resources for those we know can achieve but are held back by specifically addressable hurdles like money or parents or etc.
If you only focus on churning out the most A-students possible without attempting to help those up to the level they can achieve, you end up with a serious nepotism / generational wealth issue where opportunities are hoarded by a different class of not-gonna-pay-it-back'ers. Legacy admissions, etc.
There are some who immediately consider this socialism, but I think it fits squarely in the definition of equality of opportunity.
> it would make sense to put into place opportunities for gifted students and high achievers without regard for where they live or come from.
Quite obviously. That's what's being strip-mined at the moment.
I, and my peer group from "back home" would have had zero chances in life without these programs. We were not well off, and my peers did not come from families that had anything more than strong parenting - almost none had parents who had gone to college. They were tracked into gifted and talented programs at an early age by a school system that identified their highly capable students and resources were given to remove them from the "regular" track.
These programs have been removed since. It's holding those that need the most help back, while in no way hurting the people intended. The kids who have the ultra-parents with unlimited resources are going to private schools to begin with.
> If you only focus on churning out the most A-students possible without attempting to help those up to the level they can achieve, you end up with a serious nepotism / generational wealth issue where opportunities are hoarded by a different class of not-gonna-pay-it-back'ers. Legacy admissions, etc.
Short of extremely well-off suburbs (and neighborhoods in a handful of cities I suppose) this was never a thing in the public school system. Those generational wealth students don't touch the public school system at all. They are not relevant to the discussion and never have been.
> equality of opportunity
Correct. Equality of opportunity is what matters. The folks removing any gifted and talented programs, advocating for killing off magnet schools, etc. are the ones removing said opportunity in favor of equal outcomes. It's dragging everyone down to an extremely low bar and pretending they did something good.
Without inner city public school programs oriented towards the G&T crowd I would not be where I am today because my parents were working class at best. They were good parents, but they simply did not have resources to keep up with the "legacy" crowd. All they could do was try to get me into the "right" public schools and hope I'd be given a chance. This worked. Those programs are now gone - and anyone who grew up where I did in the same circumstances is more or less shit out of luck.
This is outright evil. Strong language and emotion be damned. It's deserved in this case.
Generally I agree with you.
The part where I disagree is the 'why' and the 'who'. There are a number of very strong forces (aka lobbying groups, aka decisions like 'no child left behind') doing their best to destroy the public school system. By making this conversation about gifted vs not gifted, we are again distracted and pitted against ourselves.
Public schools should be well funded and funded in an egalitarian manner that doesn't replicate residential aggregation of race or money. It should be funded for kids who need remedial help, help appropriate for their age, and help because they're advanced. It should be funded so that people who move from one group to the next, and you can and do move from one group to another, are supported
IMO the goal of the lobbying and shit policy is to make private school the default option for those who can afford it and those who can barely afford it. Public school will be left to the masses, and will be defunded leaving a populous more easily controlled, with less social mobility.
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> I, and my peer group from "back home" would have had zero chances in life without these programs. We were not well off, and my peers did not come from families that had anything more than strong parenting - almost none had parents who had gone to college. They were tracked into gifted and talented programs at an early age by a school system that identified their highly capable students and resources were given to remove them from the "regular" track.
You know by the way people (Gary Tan, etc) talk about it the only students that matter are the first generation Asian kids who didn’t grow up rich. As another first generation Asian kid that didn’t grow up rich but had the privilege of educated parents but didn’t achieve anything that you’d consider “moving society forward” what should happen to everyone else?
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> There are some who immediately consider this socialism, but I think it fits squarely in the definition of equality of opportunity.
Indeed. Wealth creates opportunities. When we have large disparities in wealth, we don't have equality of opportunity. A depressing amount of talk about "equality of opportunity" seems to focus on things like "when you reach age 18, you have the 'opportunity' to get into the same college as someone else" rather than "when you are born, your family's material resources are comparable to everyone else's". The thing is that that essentially requires some measure of equality of outcomes for the previous generation.
There is always a massive shortage of gifted students, original thinkers, and neuro-divergents. We need 10x as much, and we need to take care of each one. This society is starving for fresh ideas. We do not lack for effort anymore, we lack for creative and pragmatic thinkers. Without them we will continue to turn on each other, because without them, it truly is a zero sum game.
>Conquerers in the past used this strategy to win massive empires for themselves.
I didn't have history in school, could you expand on this part? This sounds very interesting.
> Conquerers in the past used this strategy to win massive empires for themselves
Can you list which conquerers? I'm curious as to what you're referring to here
Disagreed. Public school should target the broadest possible audience. Gifted pupils are rarely held back in school and special needs people need additional effort.
Of course you cannot really teach them together in the same environment, it is not the task of gifted students to drag everyone with them, it is on teachers to provide necessities. But as long as school doesn't hold them back, they will be fine.
> Taking resources away from those who move society forward
Do gifted students move society forward ?
Where is society moving to ?
Generally yes.
Bill Gates will eliminate polio for mankind within his lifetime. He has at least 140IQ.
I believe most successful people have high IQ. Perhaps not as high as 140, but probably more than people in general realize. That Gates have 140 does not surprise me at all.
There are so many confounding factors are at play that you're ignoring and attributing the achievement to high IQ (and that only).
The Guinea Worm is on the verge if eradication, mostly on the back of the multi-decade efforts of Jimmy Carter. I don't what his IQ is, but I'll assume it's below 140 and above whatever is the ballpark minimum required to enroll as a Navy Nuke.
I posit that you don't need to be a genius to eradicate a disease, just drive, a platform and the right resources and/or connections
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If you looked at my resume you wouldn’t think I’m “moving society forward” - I went to a public undergrad with a 50% accept rate.
What do you think should happen to people like me?
The fact you have a professional resume to point to likely means you are moving society forward. HN seems to have a weirdly high bar for this, and perhaps a very low understanding of just how bad "general" classes at inner city schools are.
This would imply a greater focus must be made to ensure they have a chance at success yes?
I'm exceedingly skeptical that there's a low bar for "moving society forward" if the bar is "being in a gifted and talented program or equivalent". But if society is made up of a small set of overmen burdened by pulling the undermen across the finish line I absolutely would be an underman.
You don't seem to have the right perspective to talk about things at scale like this. Taking that personally is unfathomable.
Why is it unfathomable?
You are totally over romanticizing institutional learning. It’s worth abolishing and starting over.
A bold stance given your username.
Institutional learning has been around globally in a wide variety of forms. What is so heavily romanticized in your opinion
The romantic notion that geniuses need an institution to coddle them and that by the grace of some government or non-profit organization then are humans capable of higher order thinking. The institutions are the tools for getting larger investments to allow for smart people to do their great work, not to create the people through education. Education systems today are fundamentally broken and reinforce feedback loops of poverty and dependency. It’s a prisoners dilemma. Case in point TAG programs are gamed often by wealthier families which makes the selection process incredibly unscientific and useless.
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They want the culture to die. Then from the rubble they will build their brave new socialist utopia. Except as any student of history knows, what we actually get is Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot...