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Feb 2, 2023Liked by Ives Parr

I enjoyed this and have saved it in my homeschooling folder for further reflection on the education I wish to give my sons... Eric hoel is another writer whose thoughts I am reflecting on

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Great article

>Estimating the returns to elementary through early high school would be difficult, seeing as it is compulsory.

I estimated 97.8% of the man-hours in high school are wasted based on curriculum and occupation data.

Check out my book on this, pretty relevant to your post: https://josephbronski.substack.com/p/an-empirical-introduction-to-youth-eb9

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First, on your article: I read part, but don't have time to read the whole. Perhaps in the future, narrow the scope and determine "what education is", since this in itself, I think is too broad for the times we live in. For example, I learned how to peel potatoes with a sharp knife when I was eight years old. My dad was snaring rabbits for grandma to cook when he was eight and was working in a mine at 14. I taught myself some piano and foreign language skills as an adult. (Which begs the question: Why do some children lose their natural desire to learn? Probably governmental junky schools. If they were an ACTUAL business, they'd be out of business.) Thank goodness I was able to homeschool my children with the assistance of educators and outside groups designed to teach team building skills. Time for the world to focus on "building desire" for the right things and learning will follow in course. Children are born with the desire to help, to work, to learn and to love and care. The education system (public) props itself up like "the god of knowledge", but knowledge, when stripped bare of wisdom and reason is a klipot-- an empty shell, which is what human beings are fast becoming when they lack spirituality and connection. Thank-you for writing on this important topic! My husband and I are like broken records on the subject and so appreciate to know that others are "thinking hard" on this.

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I agree, however there's a difference between education and schooling. You can educate yourself without going to school, and most of what a school does is not education, but rather enforce values such as punctuality and conformity.

Some of your suggestions are already implemented in countries like Finland, which has one of the best (if not the best) educational system in the world.

It's true that most of schooling is useless, I believe this is even more obvious in my profession: information technology. Because we deal with huge amounts of information, and not just that, but information about how to process information, we are extremely aware that there's just too much information it's pointless to try to learn it, and in fact that's why we created wikipedia.org and stackoverflow.com (all programmers use it to answer questions).

We programmers don't bother remembering most stuff, we just look it up. I've written answers to Stack Overflow of tasks I've done many times, and I keep going back and looking my own answers rather than remembering them.

If there was any value in schooling, I would start with logic and reasoning, perhaps even programming. But the problem is that people don't even agree on what's the best way to teach logic, not even what logic systems are better.

So it's a failed project from the start, because to understand the value of logic, you have to be a logical person, which probably you either are from birth, or you aren't.

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Feb 3, 2023·edited Feb 3, 2023

>Unfortunately, it appears that education is increasing IQ but not increasing general cognitive ability (Lasker & Kirkegaard, 2022; Hu, 2022; Kirkegaard, 2022). This is reflected in the fact that not all g-loaded test items see improvement. It is as if you purchased my cheat sheet and became good at the test but noticeably saw no improvement on certain items, namely the ones not on the cheat sheet.

Seems like a bad argument. You claim that education represents an effort to "game the test". But if so, why would it increase IQ? Very few schools give lessons in how to pass an IQ test!

"Does generalize" vs "doesn't generalize" seems like a false dichotomy. It sounds like education generalizes to some degree, but not to the point of increasing "general cognitive ability". Call it an increase in "general scholarly ability" or something like that. Increasing "general scholarly ability" could still be a huge deal. Lots of important intellectual tasks probably depend on "general scholarly ability" in addition to "general cognitive ability".

BTW, I made the argument above due to my knowledge of causal graphs, which is itself something I learned in an educational context. Does my knowledge of causal graphs cause me to score higher on an IQ test? Probably not. But it does make me a better thinker and scholar.

Furthermore, your post misses an important point: Average IQ might not matter much for national prosperity. It may be the case that what matters is the IQ of the top 5% of the population. The top 5% will be over-represented in key administrative roles and in innovation clusters that drive economic growth. See https://www.institutostrom.org/en/2018/09/09/hive-mind-how-your-nations-iq-matters-so-much-more-than-your-own-interview-with-garett-jones/

So instead of discussing the impact of education on the population as a whole, perhaps we should be focused on the impact of education on the so-called "cognitive elite". I think there are a number of reasons to believe this impact is positive. In the absence of education, it seems likely to me that much of the "cognitive elite" would fail to acquire the belief that scholarship is important, get nerd sniped by computer games, and fail to develop self-discipline. Our education system teaches the "cognitive elite" to be snooty nerds who think that ability to solve tricky calculus problems is what's important in life, because they're surrounded by peers who can't solve those problems, and their ability to solve those problems makes them feel special. Without an education system, those same nerds would just be an unusually talented bicycle mechanic in an African peasant village, letting their potential go to waste.

I think the education of the cognitive elite matters a lot, because scholarship is a force multiplier on general cognitive ability. (By "force multiplier", I mean if your general cognitive ability is low, scholarship won't help much, but if it is high, scholarship can help a lot.) A few thousand years ago, humans had similar biological potential and general cognitive ability, but ancient civilizations weren't able to do cool stuff like modern civilizations -- essentially, because their wise men were focused on divining the will of the gods from sheep entrails instead of arguing about causal graphs.

Suppose we did a study in Ancient Greece which found that being tutored by Aristotle had no effect on the lives of 99% of Athenians. It seems like whatever Aristotle has to teach us cannot help Athenians with everyday tasks like farming and shopkeeping. We conclude that Aristotle is a fraud and learning from him is a waste of time. Then Alexander the Great gets tutored by Aristotle and conquers a huge fraction of the known world.

So overall my argument is something like: A country whose bureaucrats are familiar with e.g. causal graphs will make better policy than a country whose bureaucrats don't understand causal graphs. And education is a way to increase the fraction of bureaucrats who understand causal graphs. If we abandoned our commitment to education, none of our bureaucrats will understand causal graphs, and that will cause them to make bad policy, which will have bad downstream effects. I don't think this argument is refuted by your analysis.

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Terrible to throw these kids in with people who are not their parents, relatives, or those their parents socialize with, when they could be in the mines instead.

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A lot of human happiness is based on our relative position. Our status. This will do nothing to help with this. Nothing can, except, maybe, selecting for people who don't care about status. Not sure what that would look like or if it's even possible.

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“Bryan Caplan discusses a fair amount of polling of adult knowledge in his book The Case Against Education. He found that many adults polled in the General Social Survey were ignorant of fundamental scientific facts.”

This is a problem with the education system. The US should do better. My bet is other countries do.

An educated man is a knowledge man. If someone doesn’t know the capital of the US, or the protagonists of WWI, and he starts to give me his opinion on the war in Ukraine or climate change, i would not him that seriously.

The US clearly does need to educate people better, however.

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There are many wasteful things in real life: advertising, cosmetics, fashion, tobacco industry, religious rituals, football etc.

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Look at the very detailed study done by the Brookings Institute in 2019 where they revisited the data and concluded that Head Start does work. Also look at the Project Follow through research by Cathy Watkins at behavior.org that demonstrates instructional effectiveness. Learn and get informed before you express opinions that are ill informed!

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I beg to differ with you. Attaining equality in quality of education is doable. The fact is that we now have a significant divide - schools that teach wealthy and middle class children and schools that teach the poor. The poor are behind at the time that they get to school (environmental, financial, family composition and parenting etc.)and are provided with an education that is considered an equalizer. This is indeed a fallacy. The gap when a poor child gets to school is so large that public schools never help the catch up process.. Like Princess Kate advocated recently - early childhood education for the disadvantaged is where it is at in order to get the disadvantaged child ready to engage in the learning that schools provide. We have a major problem with equal opportunities and not equality as it is usually applied. Look at our upcoming Substack posting on Prosocial Behavior: Weaving the Culture titled What Contributes to the Growing Opportunity Gap in the U.S - The Unguided Evolving Concentric Circles of Influence - Families, Schools and Community. We need effective early childhood education from birth to 5 for those who need them, and it should be free. LBJ was right on with his Great Society and Head Start as well as Project Follow Through. That was the intent, eradicate poverty. Lei's do it. Francisco Perez

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