Such an important topic. You’re a saint for volunteering in special needs schools.
Any advice on finding an aristocratic tutor? I’m looking for one for my daughter who has high functioning autism and thinks 9th grade is a disgusting waste of her valuable time...
The only real exposure I've had to the concept so far is in Erik Hoel's essays, starting with https://erikhoel.substack.com/p/why-we-stopped-making-einsteins. It talks more about the hypothesis that aristocratic tutoring is better than industrial education, but it also has some examples of companies/orgs that are trying to enable that kind of model. The Collins Institute https://collinsinstitute.org/ was one I remember, but there were others referenced in the articles and the comments sections.
Free education for all should definitely be implemented everywhere. In Malaysia, public schooling for primary and secondary education is mostly free, even the textbooks are borrowed and passed down year to year (as long as there isn’t an overhaul of the curriculum) but on the other hand, it’s compulsory for us to take part in extracurricular activities. My school made it compulsory to join 3, a “uniform unit” (Scouts, Red Cross, etc.), a sport and a club (which can range from orchestra to language clubs) which made it difficult to also complete homework because you’d essentially be spending the entire day at school. Being active in extracurriculars is unfortunately important if you want to get into public university here (which is also free) because a system is implemented where each intake can only have a certain percentage of minority ethnicity, basically reverse affirmative action, so besides having straight A’s, you also need to have extracurricular achievements to get into public university (if you’re from a minority race).
That's really interesting, I had no idea that was the structure of the Malaysian public school system. Not sure how accurate of a comparison, but seems reminiscent of the infamous systems of discrimination for US institutions until the 60s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_quota
This is great! Touches on a lot of the important structural and bureaucratic issues that suck the life out of teachers. It also addresses why students may not succeed. And I love free food idea. It is not a personal failing if a parent can’t (or doesn’t have the capacity to) provide food every day for their children to go to school with. And it’s really a shame that it’s an avoidable barrier for learning. “Do me a solid and give my kid an apple.”
Also of note is education whenever. We are so tied to the notion of education for a purpose and that becoming more educated is useless because you can’t DO anything with it. There is no useless information.
12!!!!! As a middle/highschool education student who dropped out because I realized I was afraid of children (but still very interested in education), a lot of these points are things I've thought about before, but I never thought about removing extracurriculars. I could see how this idea would upset a lot of people but I agree that having sports be connected with school makes for a lot of inequity. I do think sports can be really good for children though, and I could see teams and other extracurricular groups making use of school spaces and equipment in order for them to be more accessible to students. But I definitely agree that athletes shouldn't be excused from classes, coaches shouldn't be allowed to be shitty teachers, and money that goes to schools shouldn't be available to sports facilities and equipment when schools can't even provide basic educational materials.
Exactly, I agree that sports are incredibly beneficial for children, and I think school facilities could perhaps enable them, but sports introduce a whole slew of auxiliary goals that don't really line up with the goals of education.
“Free for everyone, including the teachers”- Such a huge problem. At the start of the school year, several of my friends/acquaintances take to social media to advertise their class “wish lists”. These lists detail the most basic supplies necessary to provide an education according to the curriculum that teachers are expected to frame their lessons around. It truly shocked me to see one of my friends, an elementary school teacher, having to ask her social circles to purchase markers for her classroom. Had her friends not felt charitable enough to donate, most of these items would have been bought by the teacher who, as you mention, is already earning an unfair salary.
As for removing sports from schools, this one is a tough one for me. I think you are absolutely right, favoritism occurs around sports, but if we are to remove them from our schools external club teams have to be more affordable. The U.S. operates on a pay-to-play model for most sports. For some, participating in an organized sport can only be made possible through their school. Soccer, one of the cheapest sports you can play, costs about $1,500 a year for club team registration. This doesn't account for tournament costs, nor cost of equipment. Anyway, I completely digress... but yes, I agree there is absolutely special treatment of athletes, but organized sports would not be affordable for all if we removed them from our schools.
Teachers having to buy their own supplies is infuriating to me. I think most people don't realize this, or misunderstand it. It's one thing for a teacher to go above and beyond with their own resources. That's normal in most professions; a manager wants to throw a surprise celebration for their team using their own money, or an office pooling personal funds to get a gift for a coworker. But that's not how it is at all for teachers. They go to school, learn very specific skills and techniques on how best to do their job, and then don't have the funds to meet the baseline requirements in a bunch of cases. English teachers having to buy books for students to read. Even more basic essentials, like your friend's example with not having markers. If we don't expect firefighters to buy trucks or police officers to buy guns, why do we expect teachers to buy pencils?
The sports issue is much more nuanced. Sports and education are tightly coupled in the US, for historic reasons that I don't really understand but that are abundantly clear. We're pretty much the only country that takes school-sports seriously: https://www.quora.com/Do-other-countries-take-high-school-sports-as-seriously-as-America. Everyone else has decoupled sports from school. This might be just due to the quirks of what sports became popular in the US, e.g. American football is expensive to play, and requires a lot of infrastructure, while soccer is cheap and easy to play and pretty much ubiquitous worldwide (there's probably a correct historical answer here but I don't know it). But regardless, the reality is that youth and college level sports are ingrained, at an overall detriment to education from what I can tell.
I totally agree that there are benefits to sports, especially for kids. Organized sports build communities, college sports provide a path for many young people to attend college they otherwise couldn't, and there's probably something to be said for school spirit and the benefits of shared communal identity. And I agree that separate from schools, lots of sports wouldn't be affordable. But what if we just took the budget from schools, and gave it to the local government and said "this money is to facilitate youth sports"? I think we'd get most of the benefits. except for collegiate sports, but we really should just have a minors league or junior league because (especially for football) it's a huge commercial operation at this point and is completely at odds with education goals for colleges. Although, cynically, it also is an enrollment driver, and since universities themselves are incredibly commercialized, I suppose non-education goals are aligned (more sports == more money for schools via tuition). But in the cases of sports before college, I think community/city level sports programs provided by the government (possibly using existing school sports infrastructure) would be the way to go in my mind.
Thank you Austin. You remind me of myself 45 years ago and even now I agree with so much of what you have thoughtfully articulated here. I'm looking forward to hearing more from you... maybe around the Substack Fireplace (Great idea! Cannot wait).
There is a new sheriff in town and I think we need to deal with him/her/they/it first. 'Equity.' It flows off the tongue and out of the writings of all the cool cats, or at least the ones who are looking to make radical change in their own image. They used the word equity for the very reason, that it is not definable (its situational) and that fluid-nature allows those in power to change the rules as they see fit, when they see fit.
If we are okay with systemic inequality of opportunity and if we are okay with eliminating the progress we have made (directed and organic) with respecting individuals then jump in and be a pawn of the powerful elite and trust them with your liberty. (That's how gaining equity works—encourage others to make up the rules and then live by them and try to keep up as they change.) Maybe it will work—this time.
When we look toward educational systems, they all should have utopian ideals, but let's make certain they don’t end up creating a generation of bullies swinging equity as a cudgel.
Also, you should join the Protopian mailing list over at https://austinjames.substack.com/ -- I'd love for you to be a part of the conversation in the future!
Hey Finlay, thanks for the kind words. I think you’re right that ‘equity’ is a loaded term, and often ambiguous. I tried to keep some of the ideas here narrowed to the concept of ‘equality of opportunity’, basically leveling the playing field for everyone, and accounting for second order considerations, like the fact that if a student goes to school hungry, it doesn’t matter if she’s not being discriminated against in admissions, etc., she’s on unequal footing in reality.
I think the idea of uniform equity is largely a dystopian one, as a society built around ‘freedom and equality’ we’ll always have to grapple with the fact that individuals are different. I think a potential start for the ed system is to de-stigmatize and expand development paths that don’t include higher education. In tech there’s been what I see as a positive development of what are basically vocational schools for programmers, teaching specific skills and catering to different learning styles. But it’s definitely not the norm, and only one small thing we could be doing differently in this area.
I don't really know anything about the history of phonics as a teaching tool, or how it might affect boys specifically. What are the key points in your mind?
phonics was the modern approach to reading from the 1950s until the 1990s. It involves teaching the brain to decode phonemes (sound-symbol combinations), which, in English, requires memorizing hundred and hundreds of confusing phonemes (and how they shift inside of words). My son is dyslexic, so we watched him fail in 1st grade and pounced. I'm an anthropologist with linguistic training so I knew he was using words every day verbally that he couldn't decode on the page. The secret with these kids (who represent probably 15-20% of all students) is to drill them incessantly as a scientific practice. Ouor child went to a specialit skill that uses phonics and a intensive drilling class format with no more than 8 kids. What modern scientists have discovered - Sally Shavitz MD - is that the human brain did not evolve to learn how to read. So, a specific area in the back of the brain is used to store phonemes as they get learned. Dyslexic kids literally have a problem in this brain region. For neurotypical learners like me, reading is naturally acquired using the normal brain region. So, phonics over-delivers. It's tedious and boring. But, for dyslexic kids it is absolutely essential because they have to make use of a different brain region to overcome the deficit they have. In the 1990s, Whole Language took over most district curriculums in the U.S. Invented spelling. Just memorize whole words. Get them to evolve faster toward literary reading. This is OK for the 80% but the 20% got f*fked. So, America went from a reading protocol that accidentally worked for the bottom 20% and over-delivered for the majority to one that threw the 20% under the bus. It's so infuriating that I could spend all day screaming from my rooftop. We went from a system that included dyslexic to an explosion of kids who can't learn to read, fail in school, wind up failing in life. Boys generally overindex for dyslexia for genetic reasons not fully understood, so this entire problem has been under-reported and ignored. I suspect the 100% female teaching staff dealing with boys who can't read is a huge part of the problem. it's part of the tragedy of boys and men in this country which originated in the academic research of one professor (who fomented the Whole Language revolution). Read a brilliant take-down on her work in the New Yorker - https://bit.ly/3P7k4yH
Fascinating, I had no idea there was such a schism in reading education, that New Yorker article is very interesting. Now that I think about it, it seems like my elementary schools used whole language curriculum as described, but at home my parents supplemented with phonics. It seems from the article though that things are swinging back in the direction of phonics? At least for dyslexic and special needs students specifically in New York?
I was one of those boys (NY state). It was very rough on me until 11th grade. Late bloomer, but made up for it. Needless to say, my three kids did phonics...
You know, those struggles were part of what made me who I am. My cohort of blue collar lower middle class friends probably had it better than 98% of the worlds population. So who am I to complain? Never went hungry, got lots of freedom, fresh air, and only was held back once.
I appreciate the breadth of these ideas and the introductory thoughts for their implementation. I do think a necessary addition this fireside ramble is how, specifically, countries that already provide some of these services finance these noble ideas, and how, generally, you (we) imagine a capitalist world in which anyone would get behind diverting funds away from the institutions that have been disproportionally financed since time immemorial.
Those humans in positions of power tend to do everything to remain in those positions, and in addition to brainstorming these very valuable potentialities for a utopian ideal, imagining how we might remove those people from those pedestals without significant violence and/or monetary shifting seems like a sure fire way to head towards dystopia.
These are all amazing ideas, but the main question remains the question of money in a capitalist system. I am an adjunct at the Sorbonne. The pay is shite. Classes are massive. And most students are paying a few hundred a year, if that. Personally speaking, it’s hard for me to imagine a world where they pay nothing and I get paid more.
In the U.S. our healthcare spend is almost double that of Western Europe and Japan and we get worse health outcomes and lower life expectancy. Bringing healthcare expenditures in line with those countries would free trillions of dollars for other investments, including education.
The U.S. spends more on defense than every other country in the world, and more than most combined. Another ripe place for reallocation.
Sometimes the easiest answers are in fact the best. Despite my relative ignorance when it comes to budget allocation, I have a feeling that cutting 10%, 20% of the American War Budget would solve so many damn problems. So to bring this full circle to the Utopian Ideal we all dream of--how do you convince a nation built upon isolationism, arms dealing and warmongering to stop making its ka$$? This is a question that escapes me entirely.
As a pessimist and cynic, I'm not optimistic we'll do away with warmongering anytime soon. That said, in both healthcare and defense graft and bloat are rampant. The U.S. could materially reduce defense spending without losing its perch as a global hegemon. Also, appropriately taxing these companies - meaning, making them pay the actual corporate tax rate - would automatically reallocate the money from the shareholder class to the government. Then we'd need more progressive policies and politicians to drive investment in education. Not easy, but not impossible. The money is there.
We're on the same wavelength, I'm a consummately cynical existentialist, and more like a nihilist when it comes to politics. I believe the numbers are there, but I don't believe the humanity is there when it comes to structures of power and wealth. The rich stay rich because they don't pay taxes, and this applies to people who are rich according to my minimum wage lifestyle ... more money, more greed, or at least more self-interest. It seems to be a match made in heaven. The USA has proven, time and again, that it produces more self-interested / careerist / selfishly ambitious / "I want to be famous" people than any other country in the world. It's part of our cultural DNA. Even here on Substack, we all Dream of Guest Features and Endless Comments and Likes. Woof. We should be talking about this over a whiskey--Scottish whiskey. Bourbon is for the birds.
Thanks for all of these thoughtful responses. Part of my dubious stance may also come from the fact that I'm currently re-watching Season 4 of The Wire. I mean damn. It's so beautifully written and tragic and one of the great questions of our age. I am sitting pretty complaining about being an adjunct in Paris. Thinking of the teachers in the USA dealing with teaching-for-exams, charter schools, etc. is a whole different story. Thanks for waking my brain up in the morning.
One of the best seasons of TV ever. Inequity compounds when you create inequitable conditions (e.g., structural racism) and then tie funding for education (e.g., property taxes) to those conditions.
Hey Samuél. I agree with you, the status quo tries to keep itself entrenched. It sounds like France might have a similar failure mode as the US around adjunct/visiting professors, namely that they're overworked and underpaid and relied upon to fill the gaps created by not having more tenure track professors. I think this probably deserves separate treatment from the main post, because it was mostly around pre-university education. A funny and cogent article from the Crimson recently: https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2022/11/29/anderson-bureaucratic-bloat-harvard/
Holy hell. "For every academic employee there are approximately 1.45 administrators. When only considering faculty, this ratio jumps to 3.09." This makes sense in France, too. At Paris 3: Sorbonne, I have spoken to a dozen people over the years about various administrative bull shits. What a world. And yet--and this is the real shameful rub, ain't it?--I am a prime example of someone who still teaches at the Sorbonne, 30% because I enjoy it, and 70% because I can seem impressive on a resumé. What a circus we live in. At least we all know we're clowns, right? ...
So often we think if we spend more, we will get more (or better). When we go public sector, we lose market forces. Any need for excellence or efficiencies (and a culture of successful outcomes) soon goes away and we end up with highly paid union officials and administrators, while true educators get little. In a true utopia, Samuél would be well paid and those who only want to indoctrinate children would be looking for jobs.
According to The Nordic Theory of Everything, teachers are paid $60,000 on average, with schooling free, and a tax rate of 30%. One of the reasons why they say this is possible is because so many fewer administrators are required to make the education system run. There’s a whole chapter about it that’s worth reading, but I know that other countries have other monetary priorities that cut the wedge devoted to education so much smaller. So it’s definitely not an easy cut and paste model!!
Maybe, but there are states where the teachers unions are very weak (Florida for example). If unions ended up being a blocker, there’s a world where these changes started happening at the state level first, then spreading. We already have significantly different school systems by state.
Well I may be feeling a bit curmudgeonly this morning, but I have no patience for this kind of Utopianism. It would also be nice if we could all spout wings and fly! We’re dealing with imperfect humans and imperfect systems. Let’s take reality into account at minimum.
I like your idea of free university education - especially for teachers. It could incentivize people to choose education like the GI Bill incentivizes people to choose the military.
As you know, I agree with most of your other points. I am curious about your idea of teachers owning the educational material. Like your idea of free education, this concept already exists on a limited basis. Implementing it on a larger scale would be interesting.
GI bill is a great corollary. As a government social service, education should be taking advantage of other government domains when creating incentive structures. The GI bill is a good example, and offering public school teachers free further education at public universities would hit on two points in the article, more teacher training and life-long learning in general.
As far as teachers owning their own materials and syllabi, I think it's crucial, but maybe needs to be done differently for different subjects. I think there's something to be said for the idea that we should find the highest quality material possible on a given subject, and have teachers save time and not re-implement the wheel again and again, but right now the opposite is happening in my mind: most school curricula are built by companies for profit, optimized to push schools to buy new content every year, and to buy as much supplementary material as the school budget can handle. The content isn't made by teachers who have good intuitions for what the material should cover, but instead corporate content writers. Platforms like TeachersPayTeachers (curriculum content that teachers can buy from other teachers) is an interesting alternative system, I don't know that it's perfect but definitely seems better to me than the current corporate-educational content setup.
Thank you for sharing this! I’ve considered home schooling as well, but I really don’t know if I have it in me... and I worry my daughter needs the forced practice of socialization that regular school requires of kids, because I don’t have any friends with kids her age, so she’d be like an island if she left school. Though maybe that forced socializing isn’t the best...
Such an important topic. You’re a saint for volunteering in special needs schools.
Any advice on finding an aristocratic tutor? I’m looking for one for my daughter who has high functioning autism and thinks 9th grade is a disgusting waste of her valuable time...
The only real exposure I've had to the concept so far is in Erik Hoel's essays, starting with https://erikhoel.substack.com/p/why-we-stopped-making-einsteins. It talks more about the hypothesis that aristocratic tutoring is better than industrial education, but it also has some examples of companies/orgs that are trying to enable that kind of model. The Collins Institute https://collinsinstitute.org/ was one I remember, but there were others referenced in the articles and the comments sections.
Yes! Someone from that post actually messaged me, offering tutoring, but then they didn’t get back to me after I explained the ASD-1. 😢
Free education for all should definitely be implemented everywhere. In Malaysia, public schooling for primary and secondary education is mostly free, even the textbooks are borrowed and passed down year to year (as long as there isn’t an overhaul of the curriculum) but on the other hand, it’s compulsory for us to take part in extracurricular activities. My school made it compulsory to join 3, a “uniform unit” (Scouts, Red Cross, etc.), a sport and a club (which can range from orchestra to language clubs) which made it difficult to also complete homework because you’d essentially be spending the entire day at school. Being active in extracurriculars is unfortunately important if you want to get into public university here (which is also free) because a system is implemented where each intake can only have a certain percentage of minority ethnicity, basically reverse affirmative action, so besides having straight A’s, you also need to have extracurricular achievements to get into public university (if you’re from a minority race).
That's really interesting, I had no idea that was the structure of the Malaysian public school system. Not sure how accurate of a comparison, but seems reminiscent of the infamous systems of discrimination for US institutions until the 60s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_quota
Found an article: https://www.channelnewsasia.com/commentary/racial-quota-pre-university-malaysia-education-matriculation-868296
My memory was the quota was 80:20 (20% for minorities) but apparently it’s 90:10.
This is great! Touches on a lot of the important structural and bureaucratic issues that suck the life out of teachers. It also addresses why students may not succeed. And I love free food idea. It is not a personal failing if a parent can’t (or doesn’t have the capacity to) provide food every day for their children to go to school with. And it’s really a shame that it’s an avoidable barrier for learning. “Do me a solid and give my kid an apple.”
Also of note is education whenever. We are so tied to the notion of education for a purpose and that becoming more educated is useless because you can’t DO anything with it. There is no useless information.
12!!!!! As a middle/highschool education student who dropped out because I realized I was afraid of children (but still very interested in education), a lot of these points are things I've thought about before, but I never thought about removing extracurriculars. I could see how this idea would upset a lot of people but I agree that having sports be connected with school makes for a lot of inequity. I do think sports can be really good for children though, and I could see teams and other extracurricular groups making use of school spaces and equipment in order for them to be more accessible to students. But I definitely agree that athletes shouldn't be excused from classes, coaches shouldn't be allowed to be shitty teachers, and money that goes to schools shouldn't be available to sports facilities and equipment when schools can't even provide basic educational materials.
Exactly, I agree that sports are incredibly beneficial for children, and I think school facilities could perhaps enable them, but sports introduce a whole slew of auxiliary goals that don't really line up with the goals of education.
“Free for everyone, including the teachers”- Such a huge problem. At the start of the school year, several of my friends/acquaintances take to social media to advertise their class “wish lists”. These lists detail the most basic supplies necessary to provide an education according to the curriculum that teachers are expected to frame their lessons around. It truly shocked me to see one of my friends, an elementary school teacher, having to ask her social circles to purchase markers for her classroom. Had her friends not felt charitable enough to donate, most of these items would have been bought by the teacher who, as you mention, is already earning an unfair salary.
As for removing sports from schools, this one is a tough one for me. I think you are absolutely right, favoritism occurs around sports, but if we are to remove them from our schools external club teams have to be more affordable. The U.S. operates on a pay-to-play model for most sports. For some, participating in an organized sport can only be made possible through their school. Soccer, one of the cheapest sports you can play, costs about $1,500 a year for club team registration. This doesn't account for tournament costs, nor cost of equipment. Anyway, I completely digress... but yes, I agree there is absolutely special treatment of athletes, but organized sports would not be affordable for all if we removed them from our schools.
https://time.com/4913284/kids-sports-cost/
Teachers having to buy their own supplies is infuriating to me. I think most people don't realize this, or misunderstand it. It's one thing for a teacher to go above and beyond with their own resources. That's normal in most professions; a manager wants to throw a surprise celebration for their team using their own money, or an office pooling personal funds to get a gift for a coworker. But that's not how it is at all for teachers. They go to school, learn very specific skills and techniques on how best to do their job, and then don't have the funds to meet the baseline requirements in a bunch of cases. English teachers having to buy books for students to read. Even more basic essentials, like your friend's example with not having markers. If we don't expect firefighters to buy trucks or police officers to buy guns, why do we expect teachers to buy pencils?
The sports issue is much more nuanced. Sports and education are tightly coupled in the US, for historic reasons that I don't really understand but that are abundantly clear. We're pretty much the only country that takes school-sports seriously: https://www.quora.com/Do-other-countries-take-high-school-sports-as-seriously-as-America. Everyone else has decoupled sports from school. This might be just due to the quirks of what sports became popular in the US, e.g. American football is expensive to play, and requires a lot of infrastructure, while soccer is cheap and easy to play and pretty much ubiquitous worldwide (there's probably a correct historical answer here but I don't know it). But regardless, the reality is that youth and college level sports are ingrained, at an overall detriment to education from what I can tell.
I totally agree that there are benefits to sports, especially for kids. Organized sports build communities, college sports provide a path for many young people to attend college they otherwise couldn't, and there's probably something to be said for school spirit and the benefits of shared communal identity. And I agree that separate from schools, lots of sports wouldn't be affordable. But what if we just took the budget from schools, and gave it to the local government and said "this money is to facilitate youth sports"? I think we'd get most of the benefits. except for collegiate sports, but we really should just have a minors league or junior league because (especially for football) it's a huge commercial operation at this point and is completely at odds with education goals for colleges. Although, cynically, it also is an enrollment driver, and since universities themselves are incredibly commercialized, I suppose non-education goals are aligned (more sports == more money for schools via tuition). But in the cases of sports before college, I think community/city level sports programs provided by the government (possibly using existing school sports infrastructure) would be the way to go in my mind.
We essentially treat schools and education like “brands.”
Are you talking specifically about college/university level?
Yeah!
Yeah for sure, using college education as a signal rather than having education for the sake of education is a shortcoming of the current system.
Thank you Austin. You remind me of myself 45 years ago and even now I agree with so much of what you have thoughtfully articulated here. I'm looking forward to hearing more from you... maybe around the Substack Fireplace (Great idea! Cannot wait).
There is a new sheriff in town and I think we need to deal with him/her/they/it first. 'Equity.' It flows off the tongue and out of the writings of all the cool cats, or at least the ones who are looking to make radical change in their own image. They used the word equity for the very reason, that it is not definable (its situational) and that fluid-nature allows those in power to change the rules as they see fit, when they see fit.
If we are okay with systemic inequality of opportunity and if we are okay with eliminating the progress we have made (directed and organic) with respecting individuals then jump in and be a pawn of the powerful elite and trust them with your liberty. (That's how gaining equity works—encourage others to make up the rules and then live by them and try to keep up as they change.) Maybe it will work—this time.
When we look toward educational systems, they all should have utopian ideals, but let's make certain they don’t end up creating a generation of bullies swinging equity as a cudgel.
Also, you should join the Protopian mailing list over at https://austinjames.substack.com/ -- I'd love for you to be a part of the conversation in the future!
Hey Finlay, thanks for the kind words. I think you’re right that ‘equity’ is a loaded term, and often ambiguous. I tried to keep some of the ideas here narrowed to the concept of ‘equality of opportunity’, basically leveling the playing field for everyone, and accounting for second order considerations, like the fact that if a student goes to school hungry, it doesn’t matter if she’s not being discriminated against in admissions, etc., she’s on unequal footing in reality.
I think the idea of uniform equity is largely a dystopian one, as a society built around ‘freedom and equality’ we’ll always have to grapple with the fact that individuals are different. I think a potential start for the ed system is to de-stigmatize and expand development paths that don’t include higher education. In tech there’s been what I see as a positive development of what are basically vocational schools for programmers, teaching specific skills and catering to different learning styles. But it’s definitely not the norm, and only one small thing we could be doing differently in this area.
we need to outlaw whole language and bring back phonics so our learning disabled children, especially boys, can learn to read again.
I don't really know anything about the history of phonics as a teaching tool, or how it might affect boys specifically. What are the key points in your mind?
phonics was the modern approach to reading from the 1950s until the 1990s. It involves teaching the brain to decode phonemes (sound-symbol combinations), which, in English, requires memorizing hundred and hundreds of confusing phonemes (and how they shift inside of words). My son is dyslexic, so we watched him fail in 1st grade and pounced. I'm an anthropologist with linguistic training so I knew he was using words every day verbally that he couldn't decode on the page. The secret with these kids (who represent probably 15-20% of all students) is to drill them incessantly as a scientific practice. Ouor child went to a specialit skill that uses phonics and a intensive drilling class format with no more than 8 kids. What modern scientists have discovered - Sally Shavitz MD - is that the human brain did not evolve to learn how to read. So, a specific area in the back of the brain is used to store phonemes as they get learned. Dyslexic kids literally have a problem in this brain region. For neurotypical learners like me, reading is naturally acquired using the normal brain region. So, phonics over-delivers. It's tedious and boring. But, for dyslexic kids it is absolutely essential because they have to make use of a different brain region to overcome the deficit they have. In the 1990s, Whole Language took over most district curriculums in the U.S. Invented spelling. Just memorize whole words. Get them to evolve faster toward literary reading. This is OK for the 80% but the 20% got f*fked. So, America went from a reading protocol that accidentally worked for the bottom 20% and over-delivered for the majority to one that threw the 20% under the bus. It's so infuriating that I could spend all day screaming from my rooftop. We went from a system that included dyslexic to an explosion of kids who can't learn to read, fail in school, wind up failing in life. Boys generally overindex for dyslexia for genetic reasons not fully understood, so this entire problem has been under-reported and ignored. I suspect the 100% female teaching staff dealing with boys who can't read is a huge part of the problem. it's part of the tragedy of boys and men in this country which originated in the academic research of one professor (who fomented the Whole Language revolution). Read a brilliant take-down on her work in the New Yorker - https://bit.ly/3P7k4yH
Fascinating, I had no idea there was such a schism in reading education, that New Yorker article is very interesting. Now that I think about it, it seems like my elementary schools used whole language curriculum as described, but at home my parents supplemented with phonics. It seems from the article though that things are swinging back in the direction of phonics? At least for dyslexic and special needs students specifically in New York?
Yes, but only in progressive school districts...Washington State where we were had horrible legacy of underserving all special needs children...
I was one of those boys (NY state). It was very rough on me until 11th grade. Late bloomer, but made up for it. Needless to say, my three kids did phonics...
Sorry you went through this absurd national experiment...
You know, those struggles were part of what made me who I am. My cohort of blue collar lower middle class friends probably had it better than 98% of the worlds population. So who am I to complain? Never went hungry, got lots of freedom, fresh air, and only was held back once.
I appreciate the breadth of these ideas and the introductory thoughts for their implementation. I do think a necessary addition this fireside ramble is how, specifically, countries that already provide some of these services finance these noble ideas, and how, generally, you (we) imagine a capitalist world in which anyone would get behind diverting funds away from the institutions that have been disproportionally financed since time immemorial.
Those humans in positions of power tend to do everything to remain in those positions, and in addition to brainstorming these very valuable potentialities for a utopian ideal, imagining how we might remove those people from those pedestals without significant violence and/or monetary shifting seems like a sure fire way to head towards dystopia.
These are all amazing ideas, but the main question remains the question of money in a capitalist system. I am an adjunct at the Sorbonne. The pay is shite. Classes are massive. And most students are paying a few hundred a year, if that. Personally speaking, it’s hard for me to imagine a world where they pay nothing and I get paid more.
In the U.S. our healthcare spend is almost double that of Western Europe and Japan and we get worse health outcomes and lower life expectancy. Bringing healthcare expenditures in line with those countries would free trillions of dollars for other investments, including education.
The U.S. spends more on defense than every other country in the world, and more than most combined. Another ripe place for reallocation.
Sometimes the easiest answers are in fact the best. Despite my relative ignorance when it comes to budget allocation, I have a feeling that cutting 10%, 20% of the American War Budget would solve so many damn problems. So to bring this full circle to the Utopian Ideal we all dream of--how do you convince a nation built upon isolationism, arms dealing and warmongering to stop making its ka$$? This is a question that escapes me entirely.
As a pessimist and cynic, I'm not optimistic we'll do away with warmongering anytime soon. That said, in both healthcare and defense graft and bloat are rampant. The U.S. could materially reduce defense spending without losing its perch as a global hegemon. Also, appropriately taxing these companies - meaning, making them pay the actual corporate tax rate - would automatically reallocate the money from the shareholder class to the government. Then we'd need more progressive policies and politicians to drive investment in education. Not easy, but not impossible. The money is there.
We're on the same wavelength, I'm a consummately cynical existentialist, and more like a nihilist when it comes to politics. I believe the numbers are there, but I don't believe the humanity is there when it comes to structures of power and wealth. The rich stay rich because they don't pay taxes, and this applies to people who are rich according to my minimum wage lifestyle ... more money, more greed, or at least more self-interest. It seems to be a match made in heaven. The USA has proven, time and again, that it produces more self-interested / careerist / selfishly ambitious / "I want to be famous" people than any other country in the world. It's part of our cultural DNA. Even here on Substack, we all Dream of Guest Features and Endless Comments and Likes. Woof. We should be talking about this over a whiskey--Scottish whiskey. Bourbon is for the birds.
All too true. I'll take you up on that whiskey some time.
Thanks for all of these thoughtful responses. Part of my dubious stance may also come from the fact that I'm currently re-watching Season 4 of The Wire. I mean damn. It's so beautifully written and tragic and one of the great questions of our age. I am sitting pretty complaining about being an adjunct in Paris. Thinking of the teachers in the USA dealing with teaching-for-exams, charter schools, etc. is a whole different story. Thanks for waking my brain up in the morning.
One of the best seasons of TV ever. Inequity compounds when you create inequitable conditions (e.g., structural racism) and then tie funding for education (e.g., property taxes) to those conditions.
Hey Samuél. I agree with you, the status quo tries to keep itself entrenched. It sounds like France might have a similar failure mode as the US around adjunct/visiting professors, namely that they're overworked and underpaid and relied upon to fill the gaps created by not having more tenure track professors. I think this probably deserves separate treatment from the main post, because it was mostly around pre-university education. A funny and cogent article from the Crimson recently: https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2022/11/29/anderson-bureaucratic-bloat-harvard/
Holy hell. "For every academic employee there are approximately 1.45 administrators. When only considering faculty, this ratio jumps to 3.09." This makes sense in France, too. At Paris 3: Sorbonne, I have spoken to a dozen people over the years about various administrative bull shits. What a world. And yet--and this is the real shameful rub, ain't it?--I am a prime example of someone who still teaches at the Sorbonne, 30% because I enjoy it, and 70% because I can seem impressive on a resumé. What a circus we live in. At least we all know we're clowns, right? ...
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So often we think if we spend more, we will get more (or better). When we go public sector, we lose market forces. Any need for excellence or efficiencies (and a culture of successful outcomes) soon goes away and we end up with highly paid union officials and administrators, while true educators get little. In a true utopia, Samuél would be well paid and those who only want to indoctrinate children would be looking for jobs.
According to The Nordic Theory of Everything, teachers are paid $60,000 on average, with schooling free, and a tax rate of 30%. One of the reasons why they say this is possible is because so many fewer administrators are required to make the education system run. There’s a whole chapter about it that’s worth reading, but I know that other countries have other monetary priorities that cut the wedge devoted to education so much smaller. So it’s definitely not an easy cut and paste model!!
Okay. I got the message. I just bought The Nordic Theory of Everything. Looking forward to reading it.
Thank you for writing this Austin! There are certainly better education systems we can borrow from!
Thanks for having it here! I’m happy to be writing for this awesome community.
A worthy endeavor, I surmise the Teachers Union would stop MANY of these things.
Maybe, but there are states where the teachers unions are very weak (Florida for example). If unions ended up being a blocker, there’s a world where these changes started happening at the state level first, then spreading. We already have significantly different school systems by state.
Well I may be feeling a bit curmudgeonly this morning, but I have no patience for this kind of Utopianism. It would also be nice if we could all spout wings and fly! We’re dealing with imperfect humans and imperfect systems. Let’s take reality into account at minimum.
Which parts do you see as totally implausible?
There are already countries in the world that use this model for education. Austin is merely borrowing from them!
I like your idea of free university education - especially for teachers. It could incentivize people to choose education like the GI Bill incentivizes people to choose the military.
As you know, I agree with most of your other points. I am curious about your idea of teachers owning the educational material. Like your idea of free education, this concept already exists on a limited basis. Implementing it on a larger scale would be interesting.
GI bill is a great corollary. As a government social service, education should be taking advantage of other government domains when creating incentive structures. The GI bill is a good example, and offering public school teachers free further education at public universities would hit on two points in the article, more teacher training and life-long learning in general.
As far as teachers owning their own materials and syllabi, I think it's crucial, but maybe needs to be done differently for different subjects. I think there's something to be said for the idea that we should find the highest quality material possible on a given subject, and have teachers save time and not re-implement the wheel again and again, but right now the opposite is happening in my mind: most school curricula are built by companies for profit, optimized to push schools to buy new content every year, and to buy as much supplementary material as the school budget can handle. The content isn't made by teachers who have good intuitions for what the material should cover, but instead corporate content writers. Platforms like TeachersPayTeachers (curriculum content that teachers can buy from other teachers) is an interesting alternative system, I don't know that it's perfect but definitely seems better to me than the current corporate-educational content setup.
Thank you for sharing this! I’ve considered home schooling as well, but I really don’t know if I have it in me... and I worry my daughter needs the forced practice of socialization that regular school requires of kids, because I don’t have any friends with kids her age, so she’d be like an island if she left school. Though maybe that forced socializing isn’t the best...