School Isn't Just Knowledge-maxing
We live in a society
I’m 52 years old— 53 in a few weeks— and I realized a little while ago that I long since passed the point where more than half my life has been spent in and around elite higher education. I went off to college at 18, then straight into grad school, then a post-doc, and then my current job. Even if you only count the liberal-arts-college bits that’s 27 years (four undergrad, 23 as faculty); in seven-ish years I’ll have spent more than half my life as a professor at a small liberal arts college.
This leads me to write a lot about various issues around elite academia, because I’ve spent so much time entrenched in this world. And thanks to that long experience, it’s easy to find bits of social-media #discourse that annoy me in a way that leads to me writing about it.
I also have a pretty long history with public K-12 education. Obviously, as a student, back when mammals were still expanding into ecological niches recently vacated by dinosaurs. But more recently as a parent, and also as the child of a family of educators: my father, two of his siblings, and his sister-in-law all taught in public schools in Broome County, NY, and my mother worked for an educational resources consortium in the area. A bunch of my generation also work in schools as either teachers or counselors.
This history colors my perceptions of public education a lot, in complicated ways. I end up generally agreeing with threads like this one about the need to actually enforce rules and policies on disruptive students, and also this pitch for more interventions to challenge stronger students. At the same time, though, I get annoyed by a lot of stuff that my background might lead you to suspect I’d be on board with. None more so than the claim that “Public school is just glorified babysitting” because it’s not strictly optimized around maximizing the rate at which the top students learn advanced topics.
And, look, I am not without sympathy for this view, because God knows, I spent a huge amount of time bored silly in classes that were moving slower than I’d’ve liked. The school had an accelerated math track that basically skipped a whole class of us ahead a year, and I skipped a year of English in middle school (went straight from 7th grade to 9th). My schedule was shuffled around significantly to let me take both French and Latin instead of just one, and even with the extra language, I still spent a good deal of time not feeling especially challenged by school work.
At the same time, though, I don’t actually believe that my life would’ve been significantly improved by more radical intervention— skipping a full grade ahead, or withdrawing from public school entirely to get a more rapid education by some other means. (There were not great options for this given where we were, anyway— not a lot of elite private schools in Central New York…) At the end of the day, there’s more to school than just knowledge-maxing: the goal isn’t to produce graduates who know as many Things as possible, but to produce adults who can function well in modern society.
With the benefit of hindsight, I can candidly say that even the limited amount of academic acceleration I had access to as a kid led to a tendency to be a smug dickhead. (I still fight against this and don’t always win.) I obviously have a high opinion of my own intellect— I’m writing this on a Substack, Q E frickin’ D— but back then I had an absolute certainty that I was the smartest student in the building, and pretty high confidence that I was better than some fraction of the teachers, too. (This was not a high bar to clear in some cases…) A higher level of ego boost easily could’ve made me a completely insufferable little shit.
In a lot of ways, the best thing school did for me was forcing me to engage with non-academic stuff that I wasn’t good at. Sports, to some degree, but also navigating social situations with people my own age. I had a couple of unpleasant years in middle school, but a decent portion of the blame there falls on me— again with the benefit of hindsight, I definitely did a poor job of hiding my opinion that I was better than a lot of my classmates. That never goes well, and probably shouldn’t. I got better at both pieces of that through high school— a less inflated opinion of myself and a little more social polish— and things got better for me.
These were important lessons because, after all, it’s not just school that’s optimized to the skills and interests of the median citizen— it’s pretty much everything in society. If you’re going to function as an independent adult who’s not an insufferable prick, you need to be able to cope with people who process things at a different speed than you do. Part of the process of learning that is being in school with other students from a wide cross-section of ability levels.
This is, of course, the piece of the school function that is often dismissed as “just babysitting.” Or even worse— a lot of participants in the #discourse will mutter darkly about how the actual purpose of public school is “forcing students to become compliant sheep” or the like. My gut reaction to this is strongly negative, because it makes me think that the person talking that way is probably an insufferable prick who thinks they’re above petty rules and social niceties. Someone who thinks they’re sufficiently special and important that everything should be optimized to their personal preferences and organized for their convenience. Which is always a bit of a there-but-for-the-grace-of-God moment for me.
This ties into one of the weirder bits of social-media nonsense from the past weekend, which revolved around this screenshot from Katalin Karikó’s book:
This immediately polarized into a fight between people who read this and said “This is an outrageous imposition on a scientific genius” and those who read it and said “Yeah, that’s what being a member of society is.” I am not without sympathy for the view that there’s a lot of time-wasting horseshit involved in academia— did I mention that I’m a department chair?— but probably end up closer to the latter position than the former, for reasons of statistics. That is, while you can maybe make a case that Karikó specifically is sufficiently brilliant and her work so significant that exceptions should’ve been made to normal processes (I haven’t read her book beyond that screenshot, so can’t really say), the number of people who think they’re at that level of genius is at least a couple orders of magnitude larger than those who even arguably (let alone actually) are.
And, look, I am prone to cathartic ranting about various administrative impositions on my time. But that’s mostly just blowing off steam, because I will go on and complete even tasks that I regard as time-wasting horseshit. But the odds that any particular person complaining that they’re being oppressed by bureaucratic mediocrities “Harrison Bergeron” style actually is being oppressed are pretty slim, and not something we should base policy and procedure around. As I’ve gotten older, it’s become clear that there’s a correlation between “I am not interested in navigating institutional hierarchies” and “I am an asshole who demands special exemptions because I am So Important.” Not a perfect correlation, but strong enough that it’s pretty much my default assumption now when I encounter one of these people.
There’s also a question of goals and outcomes with this particular strain of anti-school rhetoric that I don’t entirely buy into. I don’t disagree that there are choices you could make that would allow talented students to get through calculus in middle school, but it’s not at all clear to me that this would be the key piece to cracking all of society’s problems. I don’t think the bottleneck keeping us from a unified theory of physics and infinite free energy is a lack of people who know enough math from a young enough age; I think that those are really hard problems and solving them is necessarily going to be a slow grind.
To some extent, this is another example of excessively online people being brain-poisoned by knowing a little bit about the history of 20th century science. The rapid explosion of knowledge from 1900-1950(ish), particularly in physics but also other natural sciences, is often credited to the efforts of a particular set of geniuses, and the relatively slow progress since is held up as a failure of the modern educational systems and modern institutions of science. This leads to the claim that if we just weren’t stifling the next Einstein/Feynman/whoever with our boringly regimented school system and/or rigid academic hierarchies, that exponential growth would’ve continued and we’d all be riding around in fusion-powered flying cars listening to updates about our faster-than-light interstellar probes.
I think that, ultimately, those years were an exceptional period for science and technology, and expecting that rate of growth to continue is unreasonable. I also think it’s a mistake to attribute that growth to the brilliance and creativity of a small set of exceptional individuals— it was mostly a function of that moment in time, with the development of both mathematical and experimental tools and techniques that enabled that explosion of knowledge. The revolutions of the early 20th century are, in some sense, just the rapid picking of a huge amount of low-hanging fruit.
(As a lifelong Liberal Arts Education guy, it’s also worth noting that a lot of those genius figures were not strictly knowledge-maxers, either, at least not in a narrow technically focused way. The works of the early quantum mechanics are full of literary and philosophical references, and a lot of them dabbled in various arts, etc., as expected of intellectuals of their era. They were very much products of the educational system of their day, later (self-)mythologizing aside. They were also generally socially adept— Dirac being a much-noted exception— and good at navigating (and in some cases international) institutional politics.)
I’m willing to trade a decrease in the rate of acquisition of specialized knowledge for an improved ability to function as a member of society, which necessarily involves operating within systems designed with the median member in mind. If that involves some boring days at school, so be it1— sneak in outside reading, draw elaborate marginal doodles, write insulting doggerel verse about disliked teachers, or any of the thousands of other non-disruptive techniques devised by generations of bored students. Dealing with boredom is as useful a life skill as any other, when it comes to functioning as an independent adult in modern society.
I’m not 100% certain this works, but I’ve been poking at it for long enough that I’m giving up and declaring this version of it Done. If you want to see whether I take another crack at this topic later, here’s a button:
And if you want to berate me for not nailing this argument, the comments will be open:
Please note that this endorsement of curricularly-induced boredom is not an endorsement of pathological social issues (physical or verbal bullying, etc.) that sometimes occur in the school environment. Those are absolutely unacceptable, and should be vigorously stomped out when they occur. (With the caveat that not every unpleasant social interaction is actually toxic or bullying…)
My experience was that the social skills and other intangibles we were supposed to somehow miraculously learn in K12 were never taught. Those with talent learned them, and treated the rest of us contemptuously. They were not, of course, "dicks"; they were behaving properly, unlike their victims.
Academic matters were taught - badly, but at least they were taught. That was where my talents lay, so almost every class was far too easy for me, but at least no one presumed that the "good" and "normal" children could learn mathematics, or history, or whatever, just by being given a chance to use them. (Well, except for the Nuffield method in British schools, which destroyed science education for a generation - fortunately I was not exposed to it, but I know people who were.)
I eventually applied my intellect to "soft skills", learning how to redirect victimization onto someone even weaker than me, among other valuable "life skills". (I'm a bit ashamed of that, but this was the behaviour being modeled by everyone except perhaps the outright bullies. Of course that's not what they called it ...)
Actually, I learned far more than that, helped out by my habit of reading. Reading gave me ideas, including the idea of experimenting. An early set of experiments taught me how to get teachers to ignore me in class, letting me read in peace. (Trial and error taught me what behaviour they most hated; so I did that whenever they prevented me from reading.)
Eventually I became "good at" various "soft skills", such as writing effective resumes, passing job interviews, and similar. Also "looking like a good middle class citizen" to various authority figures likely to treat such people better than anyone who looked "different" or poor. Now I'm presumed to have been one of the "socially skilled" even in those days - people I'd call "bullies or their "hangers on", except to the extent I've chosen an eccentric self-presentation. ...
As you can doubtless tell, I'm still angry about my K12 days. I empathize with those poor kids at e.g. Columbine who couldn't stick it out until graduation, and instead opted for murder-suicide. Perhaps fortunately, by the time I reached the age at which they broke, I was already doing a pretty good job of manipulating the staff into allowing my escape from the worst of the school environment. (I'd also figured out how to handle myself in a punch-up, leading to a reputation that almost eliminated actual physical attacks on me.)
I'm glad I never had children. I simply could not have borne to obey the law by submitting any child I cared about to compulsory public "education".
A very enjoyable read. Many things I agree with, but particularly re. the broad education and interests of those "genius figures", even Dirac, as I recall, for all his eccentricities. A narrow education is definitely not a better education.