“Remote learning” was a complete joke. My fourth grader is a Hermoine Granger type, very self directed, and even she would just stare out the window during Zoom school. She lost a whole year in reading.
Luckily, we send her to private school. It reopened more quickly than public schools in many areas nearby (Fairfax VA and Montgomery MD). And once we were back in person, she got 1 on 1 reading instruction every morning until she caught back up. My wife sometimes resisted the expense of private school (we both went to public) but the pandemic totally confirmed why it was worth the money.
> I am...glad you were able to afford expensive private schooling to shield your kid from the effects of the deadly pandemic that led to more than a million deaths in the US?
I'm another poster who did the same thing and I'm also very glad.
> Ultimately I don't understand why so many parents keep taking potshots at remote learning a couple of years afterwards.
Because, as documented in tfa, it was a disaster in terms of learning outcomes.
> If you were able to throw pots of money at the problem, good for you.
Meanwhile, poor parents who weren't, their kids suffered learning losses.
> Can someone explain to me the logic that thinks test scores for young children at specific should keep going up?
I was sympathetic to this line of argument until I looked up what good scores are generally held to be. This is a situation where the national averages are around a third proficient. Clearly a lot of room for growth. If we were in the 80s or 60s, sure, why not. We'd probably maxed things out and demaning additional gains might be squeezing blood from a stone. But ~30% proficient? We can probably do better.
> Meanwhile, poor parents who weren't, their kids suffered learning losses.
Not even poor parents. The suburbs I mentioned (Fairfax and Montgomery) are among the most affluent in the country. Their schools were closed for two years or almost two years.
> ...the most affluent in the country. Their schools were closed for two years or almost two years.
Yes, to deal with a highly contagious virus that mysteriously seems to keep being absent from the conversation.
Schools are notoriously bad about hygiene. Currently, RSV, which is completely unrelated to Covid is spreading; and stretching some children's hospitals to their limits [1].
I know that public health and education are probably two different ideas in your mind, and the narrative of incompetent people in charge of your child's education is much easier to throw around; but I invite you and other commenters to consider the case that maybe they might just be related.
You've made a lot of arguments itt:
1. Closures, all two years of them, were fully justified from a public health perspective.
2. Learning losses weren't all that bad.
3. The tests are arbitrary anyways.
On point 1, it would be helpful to look at the public health outcomes of districts that closed for two years vs. those that didn't. I don't know the answer on that one, although I do know my kid's private school was open for much of that time without anyone being hospitalized.
On point 2, we "only" went back to 2003 levels. "Only" 20 years worth of losses doesn't convince me.
On point 3: Yes? Tests are to a certain extent arbitrary. But these ones show a clear bad trend. You could ask the children to paint pictures of clowns as a test and if the number went down it would probably be a bad sign. These tests are less arbitrary than that, and lower reading scores in particular are correlated with a higher high school drop out rate.
You could argue that "bad things happened but it was worth it." But you can't reasonably argue that "nothing bad happened and the tests are all bunk and also it was totally worth it."
> But you can't reasonably argue that "nothing bad happened and the tests are all bunk and also it was totally worth it."
What I am arguing elsewhere in the thread is probably more along these lines:
- Something bad happened due to a once-in-a-lifetime event. Education probably did suffer, quite badly due to this once-in-a-lifetime event.
- It is hard to definitively say that specific problems happened due to specific causes in the cause of such an event
- So, if you try to bolster your preconceived notions about public schools with poorly-controlled data like a 2% dip in some standardized test scores, I'm going to point that out. If you say stuff like "Well, the data points out...", you have to be able to defend the data.
And yet nearly every single kid got Covid anyway. So the intended goal of the school shutdowns failed.
You can't just consider the intention of a policy, but whether it worked.
One might say "well we had no idea it wouldn't work," but that isn't true. Public health officials had no rational reason to expect closing schools for 1-2 years would prevent kids from getting such a contagious disease. It was only rationalized as a short term measure that stretched to years.
> And yet nearly every single kid got Covid anyway. So the intended goal of the school shutdowns failed.
Proof please? Most schools reopened "properly" in our area after kids could get their vaccines, and all the adults in the school were vaccinated.
So I don't think 100% of the kids got Covid, and certainly the intended goal of the shutdowns, which was not to prevent the kids from getting Covid, but to prevent them from being carriers for the disease to a much larger percentage of the population failed.
The CDC reported 75% of kids had it after Omicron, and that is likely under-counting since many kids are asymptomatic. My kids have had it twice but don't show up in the official numbers since they didn't even go to the doctor for an official diagnosis.
School closures were not justified (at least publicly) as just reducing spread to others. Most areas had bars and restaurants open with schools closed. If it was just about reducing overall spread--that is a pretty unjustifiable stance to take.
The point of closing schools was not to prevent kids from getting COVID. The point was to help slow them from spreading it to more vulnerable, older family members at home. I'm eternally grateful that out of all the businesses and institutions (most of whom utterly failed to strictly adhere to closures), our local public school district did not screw around at all and implemented remote learning. It might very well have saved my (or my partner's) life--we'll never know. You can mitigate delayed school progress. You can't mitigate death.
Fairfax County schools were closed for 1 year. (March 2020 - March 2021). They should have opened earlier (and we sent our daughter to a private school for the 2020-2021 year for the same reason), and I resent that I now have to pay attention to school board elections to vote out everyone who was on it. But it wasn't two years.
March 2021 was just when a vaccine was coming out. The schools in my area reopened as soon as the teachers could get vaccinated and protect themselves. Some of them were high-risk for various reasons.
> I resent that I now have to pay attention to school board elections to vote out everyone who was on it.
Voting out everyone on a school board because they implemented what were reasonable public health-based restrictions at the time to avoid the virulent contagious disease is a good way to get anti-science people on your school board. Even if it feels satisfying to you to vote them out in the short term, it is...not what you might want in the long term.
It's not a pot-shot to say that remote learning is ineffective for children. If an environment tailored for education isn't effective, how could a home environment filled with distractions sans any full-time adult motivation be considered an upgrade?
Plus, once-in-a-100-years or not, a substantial portion of a generation of kids spent their formative years in a world that enforced physical separation, covered faces and general agoraphobia for a world bearing an unseen, airborne and contagious horror (with a fatality rate between 0.001 and 0.003 for ages 0-19, established since late 2020[1]). Children born during the pandemic have already demonstrated decreased IQs, and that's just in the short-term. We're probably going to see an upward trend in childhood neuroses and maladaptive social behavior in the years to come.
> It's not a pot-shot to say that remote learning is ineffective for children
It's not remote learning that is being discussed here, it's remote learning during a pandemic. That's what repeatedly keeps being ignored. We have never had a proper experiment with remote and in-person learning side-by-side when, you know, there weren't headlines about the number of deaths in the paper every day.
> Plus, once-in-a-100-years or not, a substantial portion of a generation of kids spent their formative years in a world that enforced physical separation, covered faces and general agoraphobia for a world bearing an unseen, airborne and contagious horror (with a fatality rate between 0.001 and 0.003 for ages 0-19, established since late 2020[1]). Children born during the pandemic have already demonstrated decreased IQs, and that's just in the short-term. We're probably going to see an upward trend in childhood neuroses and maladaptive social behavior in the years to come.
Yeah, this is all fair and should be discussed – I just don't understand why a 2% decrease in average scores during a pandemic is considered the gold standard of evidence for it.
I have no strong feelings either way but presumably the students need to be taught be teachers who are going to have a much higher fatality rate than the .001 number.
Was the comment you're responding to heavily edited? Either we're reading quite different texts, or you're severely straw-manning their point of view.
> I am...glad you were able to afford expensive private schooling to shield your kid from the effects of the deadly pandemic that led to more than a million deaths in the US?
Protecting your children from external risks is one of the most essential qualities of a parent, yes. I'm not sure what you're trying to convey here.
> Ultimately I don't understand why so many parents keep taking potshots at remote learning a couple of years afterwards. If you were able to throw a ton of money at the problem, good for you. Meanwhile, children and adults were both greatly affected by the pandemic and many were worried about, you know, being alive tomorrow. People lost their families.
Yes, precisely. This is an important issue that the parent commenter was raising: "Remote learning was a complete joke." The well-off are able to shield their children from this, but the average person isn't. Are you suggesting that it should be taboo to discuss how this will widen the class divide?
> Trivializing the knock-on effect of this once-in-100-years thing over some standardized test scores that are back to 2003 levels [1] makes no sense to me.
In what sense was the parent commenter "trivializing" the pandemic? Would you agree that your comment trivializes the concerns that less-affluent parents might have that their children will be at a marketplace disadvantage compared to two decades of graduates preceding them?
> Protecting your children from external risks is one of the most essential qualities of a parent, yes. I'm not sure what you're trying to convey here.
I perceived the parent as bragging that their expensive private school was better than the public schools that other people send their kids to, by claiming that the option available to regular people was "a joke". There was no mention of anything like "I wish this was an option for everyone".
> Yes, precisely. This is an important issue that the parent commenter was raising: "Remote learning was a complete joke." The well-off are able to shield their children from this, but the average person isn't. Are you suggesting that it should be taboo to discuss how this will widen the class divide?
Not at all, class divides are important to investigate! But you should have proper evidence and data. I am suggesting that the "evidence" here (a 2% decrease in standardized test scores that are not well-controlled) is not particularly significant compared to the evidence that Covid was a deadly public disease which necessitated school closures and remote learning.
> In what sense was the parent commenter "trivializing" the pandemic?
By saying that "remote learning was a joke". To me, this is like saying "earthquake-related evacuations were a joke, because normal kids' scores dropped 2% during the earthquake. Oh, and mine didn't, because I had a private plane!".
> ...their children will be at a marketplace disadvantage compared to two decades of graduates preceding them?
My comment is simply saying that you don't have data to suggest anything of the sort; so you should stop simply insisting that they are true and calling reasonable public health procedures "a joke" as a result.
No, the parent comment was using their private school's reopening policy as an illustrative critique of public school reopening policies. It's fair to criticize public school policies with respect to the pandemic.
We are currently living in a time when many people feel the need to dispute that rigorous education can have any meaningful impact on a child's abilities.
Every chance to record and shares true facts, we should.
> Every chance to record and shares true facts, we should.
Sure, but it seems to me that we should do so in a controlled and rigorous fashion. A few questions:
- Are we sure that the tests are exactly the same difficulty each year? If not, what is the falloff?
- Who decides the difficulty?
- How do we think about tradeoffs between grasping concepts correctly versus doing test prep?
- Do the increased test scores from 2003 to 2020 actually translate into meaningfully better further education or quality of life on average?
If you are making confident statements about "test scores dropped and this is bad for children", you should know the answers to all these questions.
I feel like most parents handwave this sort of stuff away when it comes to children's test scores and always assume that it's perfect – but would start asking this kind of stuff very quickly, for example, if they were asked to, say, do a similar test as adults to determine what their bonus for last year should be.
> We are currently living in a time when many people feel the need to dispute that rigorous education can have any meaningful impact on a child's abilities.
That doesn't sound right to me. My perception is that the value of a rigorous education is actually nearly universally valued, but how/whether children should have access to that education equitably is quite disputed.
Thoughts on the current backlash against the SAT/ACT/other standardized college entrance exams?
The liberal refrain is "High-scorers just had rich parents to hire them a tutor!", as if the tutor's instruction didn't actually uplift the children and make them stronger.
Standardized test scores are correlated with race, but schools want to admit a more diverse set of students. If they consider test scores and still try for more diversity, it looks a lot like discrimination against groups with high scorers, like Asians. I think the SCOTUS has agreed to take a case against Harvard pertaining to this.
My own institution did not require standardized tests for a couple of years, mostly because of Covid, and it's been a bit of a mess. Test scores turn out to be good for placement in math classes.
Thomas Sowell has a point on this, affirmative action allows in students that cannot reasonably do the work and it results in higher failure rates for students that got in with affirmative action.
His point is that they got in and feel like a failure when they could have gone to a different school and done just fine and not felt that way. And that, as such, affirmative action was actually having a negative effect on minorities.
I see how that could happen, and probably has. But, for example, I can also see how the top x black applicants to Harvard would be capable of doing very well at Harvard even if those applicants are not in the top 4.6% of SAT scorers who apply to Harvard. (where x is maybe 14% of entering class size to be proportional to US population, and 4.6% is I think the Harvard acceptance rate.)
Anyhow, it's a tough problem and I don't know the right answer and don't envy anyone having to set admission policies.
I can guarantee you that SAT tutoring is not uplifting anyone. They teach very specifically to the test, it's an extremely inefficient way to try to develop intellectually.
I think the anti-SAT argument is indeed misguided though. As it stands, the SAT is actually the best way for a poor kid from a bad school district to stand out - you can't take the grades at face value, and academic extracurriculars are substantially more expensive.
Despite the handwringing and poopooing from "liberals" there isa correlation between test performance and performance in college. Why would you send a student with sub 1000 SATs to Harvard when they likely won't be able to pass a single course?
Why would you? Because you want them to get the most rigorous education possible I presume. I'm not saying it's a good idea, but it doesn't seem like anyone in the scenario doubts the value of education.
That makes sense, but I was under the impression that some(many?) of the most elite colleges had actually done away with the SAT requirements. I wonder if it has affected their graduation rate?
Absent test scores all you have is GPA which can be gamed and is impossible to compare against other applicants and extracurriculars which will be dominated by wealthy kids with engaged parents. so that smart kid from a poor family in West Virginia has no way to show they can compete with the kid from Greenwich on the Lacrosse, Sailing and Model UN teams.
Schools were open in most of the world, even during the pandemic. So that's not shielding their children from the effects of a deadly pandemic; it's shielding them from a uniquely bad policy that was completely self-inflicted and unjustified.
My province had a curfew (another bad idea, to be fair), and even then we still kept schools open (after the first 2 months of the pandemic, and that was longer than a lot of other places). Keeping them closed for more than a year had nothing to do with keeping people alive, or we would have seen massive differences between children death rates in the US vs. the rest of the world.
> Schools were open in most of the world, even during the pandemic.
Uhh, citation needed?
At least in terms of population, the two biggest countries in the world with a population greater than the US are China and India. I know for a fact (having family there) that schools in India were closed for longer than the US.
Perhaps in China things were better, but they also have totalitarian control over all your movements. Would you accept you and your whole family being monitored at all times as the cost of having your kid in school?
A citation for what? And even if it wasn't most of the world, can you show me anything that indicates a lower mortality rate in the US for kids/teachers due to schools being open? It should be easy to prove since it is a pretty specific subpopulation.
In any case, Western Europe and Canada did not close schools for more than a year and also didn't monitor everyone's movements like china did. And I assume it wasn't because of careless disregard for students and teachers. So that kind of invalidates your original point; closing schools for years is not a normal, necessary consequence of a pandemic. It was a policy decision that has not yielded any results, even if political rhetoric makes it hard to admit (in the US)
> A citation for what? And even if it wasn't most of the world...
Your response immediately after the question indicates that you understood what the citation request was for. I was asking for a citation that schools in most of the world were open during Covid.
> Western Europe and Canada did not close schools...
So now we are down to a minority of the world population, incidentally in a political environment very different from the US, where basic pandemic precautions like masks and later vaccines were highly politicized.
> closing schools for years is not a normal, necessary consequence of a pandemic.
Just like frustrated commenters in the rest of the threads, you are continually moving goalposts to prove your preconceived point.
The reality is that there is no normal consequence of a pandemic, and yes, the US is completely different from the rest of the world in terms of how stuff works here. And no, schools were not "closed", teachers worked in the midst of a pandemic to try to deliver remote education with minimal training about how to do it. It is unsurprising that some problems would result.
As a parent living in Canada, the reopening of schools felt completely like a "we gave up on kids" (the vaccine took a long time to get to under 5).
Combined with the poor testing practices, we felt really unsupported. Not to mention, from pure observation of my family, I suspect we are some of the major carriers for viruses: children get it at school, bring it at home, then we spread to other adults.
Sure, but teachers weren't dying in droves either. I'd like to know if there are any statistics showing a higher teacher mortality rate outside of the US due to schools not closing.
You don't have to pay for expensive private lessons. You can homeschool, especially if your job has been put on furlough due to said deadly pandemic. (Of course paper-pushing kinds of jobs could easily be done 100% remotely, but many jobs aren't like that.)
"I am...glad you were able to afford expensive private schooling to shield your kid from the effects of the ~~deadly pandemic that led to more than a million deaths in the US?"~~ misguided public policies that are even more unreasonable than already-not-so-reasonable, much shorter school closures in e.g. Europe, and are correlated with power of local public sector unions much more than the local severity of the pandemic impact.
These are the trade-offs. They need to be reckoned with. The death toll from the pandemic is only the beginning of the fallout and as one of the only countries to keep schools closed as long as we did, we now have to deal with that. And to dimiss it outright as being trivial is to cast aside the most vulnerable who were NOT able to afford private school.
> as one of the only countries to keep schools closed as long as we did
This is poorly-informed repetition, typically caused by news cycles about Sweden, a country with a population comparable to Ohio.
At least in terms of population, the two biggest countries in the world with a population greater than the US are China and India. I know for a fact (having family there) that schools in India were closed for longer than the US. Chinese schools are still closing sporadically [1], so presumably they were doing so during the thick of the pandemic as well.
If you are that worried about get your kids the education to enable critical thinking, it is probably wise to implement some yourself when discussing these issues.
Although I think your point that our only company in regard to school closures is China and India doesn’t frame us in the best light in terms of pandemic response.
Also, I seem to have upset you with my comment. It was poorly phrased and I do apologize for that. I don’t think that you are 100% wrong in your argument and I appreciate your position.
There are a lot of reasons for continued irritation here. First, you phrase this as being about something that was temporary. That's partly true. But there's no going back to 2019 -- everyone has seen remote work now, and they have opinions.
Many administrators are looking at the numbers and saying, gee, if we could send kids home for X days a week, we could free up facilities and reduce costs and liabilities, and engage support staff from a wider geographical area. The missing piece here of course is that instead of kids seeing their friends and learning in a classroom, they're trapped in video chat purgatory. These effects simply do not enter the conversation unless measured into quantities that schools actually feel pressured by. Hence why test scores are an attractive subject here.
Another reason is that the conversation about schools centered heavily on "well, people are dying." That's true -- people died, and continue to die. In many regions, this was used as a blank check to dismiss a lot of very serious issues in risk management. Closing the schools was not some sort of ethically-unambiguous decision. It was a substantial transfer of risk -- COVID deaths and other long-term consequences affected everyone, but the disease impact slanted VERY heavily towards older people and away from children[1]. This is a highly relevant, highly significant fact in the risk management of COVID in schools that, in my opinion, was frequently lost sight of. These closures represented a substantial generational transfer of risk from older people to younger, in which we somewhat extended life expectancy and reduced ongoing loss of health for a substantial number of older people, in exchange for severely degrading education and socialization of kids for 1-2 years. We should expect criticism of pandemic-era policies for as long as the effects remain relevant -- which will be for decades.
Now, why do people WANT to take potshots at schools in the first place, if these policies have now ended in most districts? I can't speak for everyone who does so, but I can point to one thing I see a lot: we're fed up with the system. There are a LOT of people for whom this is not working. These problems existed long before COVID, but distance learning and other COVID policy has turned out to be a lightning rod because it allows a lot of families with very diverse frustrations to pinpoint a specific issue that upsets all of them. It's not JUST the distance learning -- it's the entire way districts relate to families and the manner in which they feel trapped and without a voice.
When the topic of school comes up on HN, there’s always a few people who believe that the school environment is in fact detrimental to children and everybody would be better off home-schooled with remote learning to fill the gaps.
Does this result provide enough evidence to the contrary, or was the pandemic too much of a special circumstance?
I know a lot of homeschoolers who are now adults. They tend to think independently, work hard, and are... fine. One of them worked for NASA before choosing to be a stay-at-home mom. One is a pediatrician. One is an electrical engineer. The rest are similar-- well-adjusted, successful adults. They're all fine, if a bit socially awkward.
I think the socialization thing is probably the biggest drawback to homeschooling. It also probably depends entirely on the personality of the kids. Some kids thrive in huge group environments. Some don't. I guess it would also depend on how good and available your parent is, but most homeschoolers have very engaged parents from what I've seen.
Are you sure you are not self-selecting? Are those people represent a random set of homeschooled adults or just the ones who were successful despite it?
Also, who is homeschooling in the set up of two working parents? Or we are going to pretend this work does not exist as we do with other household chores?
I'm sure I'm self-selecting. It's a total anecdote and not worth much other than to point out that home schooling isn't an obvious failure to be written off as the OP seemed to be indicating by his / her tone.
It might not be for everyone-- I'm not homeschooling my kids-- but I've seen it work, and I hope it's an option that remains legal.
Home school families organize frequent socialization opportunities, and they are likely far better than school-based.
And anyway, unless you live in some sort of jerk-run school district, the public school system welcomes home school kids for band, athletics or any other after-school program.
This depends heavily on parent involvement, dedication, and education. Even in public school the outcomes are heavily dependent on parents. If your father is an engineer who helps you with your homework and wants you to go to university, you will do much better. Home school with parents who do not want to, don't have time, or are incapable of helping or teaching will not do much, and the child would be better off with a school teacher who is motivated and trained--- but, if parents are heavily involved and capable then they are a teacher with very high motivation and can give very personalized instruction suited to the temperament of the pupil. So it all depends.
If you have teachers coming to your mansion, all you have done is to build a personal private school. Completely out of reach to 98% of the population.
Well, that's my point, private tutors is effectively a private school. But the vast majority of families can't afford it (either cannot pay for a tutor or cannot afford not to have both parents working, when there are two parents).
"Private tutors" can be anything from an after-school karate class to visiting a piano teacher's house for an hour of instruction. It doesn't have to be solely for elite people.
The typical student:teacher ration is what, 25:1? 1:1 is a lot better (around 25x, probably) but this is all just on a spectrum.
I'd wager that 25 parents banding together to hire a tutor might outperform a typical classroom, if it was a biased sample towards people who care. I'd trust my parents and a group of like-minded parents to pick out a good educator better than the typical teacher, teachers aren't the sort of people I would recommend to teach children how to think.
There are group activities you can take part in that have nothing to do with school. Actually, you should take part in it anyway, but with private tutors you have much more time to spend with a peer group of your choice. Not sure how scouting works elsewhere, but in my country it is well organized, more or less well funded, teaches a lot of very useful skills, and most of all gathers kids who want to be there. You have to actually experience it to feel how huge is the difference in atmosphere in a group like this versus one where participants are forced to attend.
Private tutors are the best there is and you won't beat it. Whatever is lacking, can and should be supplemented. It doesn't even need to be a 1-1 with a tutor: 3-5 kids are still a manageable group. 25-1 or sometimes 35-1 is absolutely horrible and it shows in the results.
Remote learning without help and care (honestly, "supervision"? The heck? Are they your child or inmates serving time for the crime of being born?) is obviously even worse than going to school. So, to my eyes, the GP got it right with that quote.
> What about your children's social/well-being from not interacting with their peers?
I don't know. It seems like there's plenty of kids suffering at school precisely because they have to interact with other kids. Getting bullied at school is probably something almost everyone's experienced at some point.
Actually eradicating bullying is impossible (if you think you did it, you're not looking close enough) so best to consider it a necessary evil - it's better to experience it in a relatively controlled environment and learn to deal/defend yourself from it so that you are ready with adulthood. Bullying doesn't magically disappear in adulthood and not being prepared for it may make it significantly worse.
Also, the problem with bullying isn't bullying itself but that people are receptive to it and don't defend themselves (partly because school rules prohibit defense). If everyone stands their ground and defends themselves, bullying will disappear. Bullying only makes sense when the reward (whether psychopathic self-satisfaction or bolstering your social status) is worth more than the risk (which is usually nothing if the target doesn't defend themselves). If bullying is guaranteed to result in a punch in the face, it will change the risk/reward calculation dramatically and make 99% of it not worth it.
> Bullying doesn't magically disappear in adulthood and not being prepared for it may make it significantly worse.
What are you talking about? Were you ever actually bullied?
The only place where violence is tolerated is school. Post high school, if anyone physically bullied me, I’d just call the police, the person could end in jail or at least their career would be gone.
In school, you’re left to your own devices. Police don’t care, teachers can’t do anything because schooling is compulsory.
> people are receptive to it and don't defend themselves
Another delusional take. Why did she let him rape her, she should have just defended herself! Well, because I’m smaller, weaker, and there’s less of me (1 vs group of bullies). Taking it and hoping they leave is best option, not hitting back and provoking even more violence.
I think it’s best if you don’t contribute to this discussion any more to avoid embarrassing yourself further.
Even verbal abuse (I refuse to say bullying or violence), despite being incomparable to actual violence (IMO it’s inconsiderate to even make that comparison!) is much easier to deal with in adulthood.
You can literally just remove yourself from the situation! No such option for vast majority of school-age children (because schooling is compulsory).
I don't think that's bullying. I think he was simply offended by the post he was replying to. The deliberate malice you find in bullying just isn't there.
In a way, his post was a form of negotiation. He wants the other person to stop posting opinions he considers invalid and embarrassing, so he appealed to their self-interest in order to get them to change their behavior. Real violence comes with the threat of escalation: "you better stop, or else".
Verbally, yes - though it never escalated to actual violence. To be fair, they weren't "career" bullies (for the lack of a better word), but simply a clique of kids (that were otherwise decent in school) that like to make fun of other people - turns out that actually not being afraid and confronting them is all it took to 1) stop the bullying and 2) completely change the dynamics of the relationship where they saw me as one of theirs and from that on we had decent interactions. The only violent incident I was involved in had nothing to do with bullying and was about stealing my phone.
> The only place where violence is tolerated is school
Violence still costs significantly more than verbal bullying, so most bullies would generally not want to resort to it if they can avoid it. If your option is 1) pick on the weak kid or 2) pick on the weak kid that shows a willingness to fight, you will pick option 1 because option 2 will still attract significant more attention from authority even if you easily win the physical fight.
I'm sure there are gangs of violent bullies, but for each one of those there's probably hundreds of verbal bullies that just pick on people verbally for fun and have no desire for violence or even significant confrontation because it's too much risk & effort. Standing your ground would at least protect you against those as they'd rather move onto an easier target. Will it protect you against 100% of bullying? No. Will it protect you against 90% of it? Very likely.
> Also, the problem with bullying isn't bullying itself but that people are receptive to it and don't defend themselves
> If bullying is guaranteed to result in a punch in the face, it will change the risk/reward calculation dramatically and make 99% of it not worth it.
This just isn't how violence happens. Bullies don't select targets they can't win against. In addition to that, they often come in groups. Victim managed to punch one guy? Not only is it likely that he'll overpower the victim, his buddies are there to make sure he doesn't lose.
"Just defend yourself" is what leads to kids bringing weapons to school. Because that actually is how you defend yourself against violent thugs and certainly what a responsible adult would do when faced with unprovoked violence.
Emphasis on "credible". It's not really a credible threat if you lose the fight and suffer ten times worse whatever harm you inflicted. Getting stomped into the ground by a group of thugs you failed to take out will put you in the hospital if not the morgue.
It's not really any different than literal gangs of criminals to be honest. The best way to deal with such violent people is to avoid them. You can't avoid bullies at school. If your plan is to defend yourself, then you better be able and willing to dish out extreme violence when warranted because that's what it's going to take. The ability and willingness to do that is the threat you speak of. Victims of bullying pretty much always have neither. Chances are the bullied kid isn't some hardened street tough capable of taking out three guys before they do the same to him.
Even if these victims were that tough, they can't do that because schools don't really like it when kids create liability for them with violence like that so they impose harsh consequences to violence regardless of how warranted it is. So not only are victims weaker and outnumbered, schools will also punish them for defending themselves as is any human's right.
Violent confrontation has consequences, even in school. At the very least, it attracts significant attention from authority which nobody wants. So it changes the bullying risk/reward calculation, at least for "conventional" bullying for "fun" (if they're after your phone/money/etc, you will need to put up more resistance to counteract the higher "reward").
If you get into a proper fight you will lose, however most bullying is verbal and even bullies have no interest in escalating it to physical violence if it risks yielding consequences (if not for the violence itself, but their other behavior, that might otherwise fly under the radar). So merely showing the intent to fight back will make them move onto another target.
Yes, this is completely different from gangs and I'm not talking about those. If your school has a gang problem, this advice won't help you. However below "gangs" there will generally be a clique of people that may engage in occasional verbal bullying (because it's fun for them and/or bolsters their social status) but otherwise generally do well in school and have no interest in jeopardizing that standing - therefore violence will not be in their best interest, regardless of whether they'll actually win the physical fight.
> You can't avoid bullies at school. If your plan is to defend yourself, then you better be able and willing to dish out extreme violence when warranted because that's what it's going to take
You can't avoid 100% of them. You can avoid 90% of them by being stronger/more difficult than the other targets.
> So merely showing the intent to fight back will make them move onto another target.
This is magical thinking. "If I do A, he will do B" as if it were a cosmic law. No such deal exists! Bully has a whole alphabet of responses to choose from, including taking you up on your challenge.
You need to take a hard look at what you're suggesting here. You're describing people who are verbally violent. You're telling people that the way to get them to stop is by using physical violence. You're escalating the situation. You're doing this on the assumption that verbally violent people are not willing to go further. This is false. The problem with violent people is there's always someone willing to go further than you.
What you're actually doing is telling kids to make a threat display. Like a thug displaying his gun to intimidate the other person into backing down. This is an effective deterrent but you better be able and willing to follow up on that threat if necessary. If you do this, all bets are off. There is no guarantee that your opponent will back down. It's also possible that your threat will be perceived as a challenge to his masculity, especially if you do it in front of his peers. He'll think he'll have no choice but to take you on because he'll lose face if he doesn't.
If you're going to do this, you better be able to quickly incapacitate your opponent. I don't mean punching his face once and walking away victorious. I mean literally breaking his jaw and then following up with more attacks until he's unconscious on the floor. Then you better hope that this display of extreme violence was enough to intimidate any other bullies hanging around or you'll have to do the same thing to them before they gang up on you. If at any point your confidence in your ability to do this ever wavers, you should not attempt it.
No that really doesn’t hold up. You do not have to be able to win the fight. You simply have to demonstrate that you’re willing to resist. Bullies, thugs, prison gangs, etc. will almost always leave you alone if they think you’re going to retaliate. That doesn’t mean you’re making an enemy of them of course.
> Bullies, thugs, prison gangs, etc. will almost always leave you alone if they think you’re going to retaliate.
You're putting people in actual danger with this advice. There's any number of things people can do in response to your threat display. You're telling people the aggressor will always fold. They might call your bluff instead.
Can you actually retaliate? Because eventually someone is gonna wonder if you're for real and you're gonna need to make good on that threat. If there's even the slightest doubt in your mind about it, you can't.
Or they kick your ass extra hard for having the audacity to even think you could beat them and proceed to humiliate you twice as hard next time just to teach you your place. I think you underestimate how self-centered these people can be.
Being bullied definitely can teach some important life skills (dealing with conflict). You are absolutely correct that bullying is a theme in all stages of life, it just comes in many different forms. I think we discuss bullying in schools so much because children are more overt about it (e.g. stealing lunch money or what have you) and also more vulnerable.
If you're a kid that does something really obnoxious/socially unacceptable, bullying is a way for peers to correct you. The kid that picks their nose will be made fun of and they'll grow up to be an adult that doesn't pick their nose.
As with most things, bullying can go too far but that's not the norm.
I used to read arguments like this and find sense in them, now they just make me sick
It's possible to nudge proper behaviors without causing physical (or emotional) harm to a person. That kind of violence is never necessary, and the thinking that justifies it is hideous complacency at best
Firstly, I just don't think the old image of a bully who beats up a smaller kid is or ever was common. That sort of physical violence is wrong and should be prevented as much as possible. I feel that should go without saying but wanted to make it clear.
These days, bullying has grown to an umbrella term that includes things like teasing. Teasing or making fun of a kid who does gross things is part of a natural reaction from the other kids. Sure you could nudge that kid to stop in a positive way but whose job is that? The other kids? Probably not. The teacher/parents? They have probably tried and failed. So what complacency are you describing? Do you think as a society we can stop kids from being mean to each other?
Teasing is just probing for vulnerabilities with plausible deniability. They're testing you. They're determining your boundaries and testing your response to violations. Officially nothing is happening, they're "just messing with you" and so any reaction seems disproportionate. Such tests often escalate rapidly though until they discover some behavior they can't get away with.
There's a certain point where it goes from teasing to something else entirely
There was a kid I went to high school with who was in a friend group I was also in. There was a point where we started calling him names just as a joke to mess with him. It got to a point where he became emotionally distant, but we kept doing it anyway just bc we didn't think much of it. His personality completely changed. He went from being a happy person to a shell of a person. We were his only friends at the time. He was still distant when we weren't around. He's (apparently) still like this also
I still feel sick to my stomach about that situation to this day, but tl;dr there's a line at which teasing goes from just teasing to something horrible
Yep that's the other thing with bullying. Most people will experience some form of it, but in generally there's one category that's just light-hearted dumb jokes you can ignore (and are not even directed specifically at you - the person is being an asshole to everyone without a specific focus), and a second category that picks on a particular point - a point that's different enough about yourself that makes the bullying acceptable to the rest of your peers; in which case the best course of action is to correct that difference.
> Also, the problem with bullying isn't bullying itself but that people are receptive to it and don't defend themselves (partly because school rules prohibit defense).
Agree. The worst things people do are to themselves. If you're trapped in an abusive situation, it'll fuck you up. But if you're receptive to that kind of abuse and stop seeing it as an inherent wrong, this is where people go from being abused to abusing themselves.
This is the difference between someone getting bullied vs someone becoming an emotionally scarred shell of a person
My schools had very little bullying and basically none of the violent variety. I’m pretty sure any belief that bullying is good is some twisted status quo bias.
Very little bullying that you know of. Kids/teenagers will be kids and sometimes assholes. In general however, the system self-regulates well enough that it flies under the radar of authority, and indeed there wasn't any violence because it's against even the bullies' interests.
And I'm not saying bullying is good, but it's virtually impossible to eradicate completely (if you think there is no bullying you just need to look closer), so short of getting rid of it, trying to at least get see the "good" parts of it in the form of a lesson on dealing with conflict is IMO the most pragmatic observation.
This is even worse nowadays with social media where bullying "leaks" outside of school premises and can follow you around even across schools.
If we’re expanding the definition of bullying to include teasing and being mean, sure, that’s going to be a thing everywhere. But I’m very confident nobody in my school was getting beat up or robbed. If people had been, it likely would have been my social circle if nothing else. There was, in general, very little drama and people were free to be who they wanted to be.
Eh, hard disagree. There was next to no bullying in my class after primary school (I was a chubby kid and the worst was that other kids sometimes made fun of me living in a street that translates to "fat mountain" or "bacon mountain"), in primary school there was one bully, but it turned out that getting the fat kid (me) angry enough to throw himself on you and not getting out under him, makes you a bit of a laughingstock.
And bullying did not magically appear later in my life.
I was bullied, but find it hard to believe that not interacting with kids was the solution. The root cause of the bullying (from my side) was because at the time my social skills were lagging behind my peers', and I don't regret not being taken out of that situation.
Stockholm syndrome? There's really no excusable "cause" for bullying; it's like saying you don't regret getting raped because, at the time, your sexual drive was lagging behind your peers. That's a rationalization and a way to cope with trauma for the victim. From the other side it's simply blaming the victim.
I'm in no way grateful that I was bullied, I didn't enjoy my school years. But part of the reason why I was singled out for bullying was because I spent a lot of my school years buried in math books rather than being with my peers. When I started to understand how badly behind I was socially at around age 14, I started to make the changes necessary to catch up. This meant talking and listening to to the kids at my school a lot more. I didn't realise this because of the bullying, but they were clearly related.
The bullying was damaging I agree, but I think taking me out of school completely would have been so much more harmful.
Right, indeed, I'm not a psychologist by any means, but I also think that removing the problem altogether without solving it could be damaging too, maybe in other, more subtle ways later on. To be honest, I don't think there's a solution to bullying that wouldn't be damaging in some way, for all involved - once it starts, it's already too late to go back to normal; you can only do damage control and hope for time (and/or professionals) to help heal the wounds.
I'm glad you've made it out of that situation without major harm (and even some constructive conclusions), but you're an outlier, I think. Normally it doesn't go that well. It really shouldn't happen in the first place...
I’ve actually heard that bullying has been dramatically decreased in public schools over the last generation. (People complain about feminization of education, and I suspect they have a valid point, but that trend comes with some upsides.)
Of course. Just not in a compulsory school setting where you're forced to associate with toxic people whether you want to or not just because shoving lots of kids into one class is the most convenient mass education format.
> What about your children's social/well-being from not interacting with their peers?
With "social skills", you mean either tolerating bullying or becoming a bully? (Compulsary) school is a prison, so the only social skills that children learn in school are about surviving in this prison.
Society is a compulsory prison too, and even in adulthood you can't always run away from a situation, so being able to survive in a suboptimal environment is a worthwhile skill. Even if we assume you had unlimited money and could literally buy an island and live on it, you will still have to deal with bullies - just that they will generally have much more resources and will be less shy in resorting to violence or significant crime.
Not saying this is right, but you can't change the world (neither as a parent nor as a kid), so adaptation is the best strategy.
There’s lots of social activity available for homeschoolers. Field trips, athletics, and lot of other stuff geared for social development. Homeschool parents are usually very connected to each other and make sure there’s lots of social time for their kids.
As someone who to some degree falls in the category you describe, I'd say you are potentially misunderstanding the argument.
I certainly wouldn't argue that spending time in a public school math class correlates negatively with math learning. I have no doubt that some math education takes place in public school math classes.
I think the argument is that it doesn't do a great job teaching most students most of the time while simultaneously having serious issues like requiring young children to sit still for extended stretches and punishing kids who aren't well suited to this.
I'm not saying that's the whole argument, just an example
Yep. My daughter remote schooled, and it would have been far more effective if the school had just mailed my wife and I the curriculum and had us teach it.
I'm sympathetic towards public schools; they have to deal with a wide variety of kids and families, and what works for my family might be a disaster for another. I'm less sympathetic to the politicians who vastly underestimated the harm from closing the schools. The schools were nowhere near prepared or equipped.
detrimental is a single dimension valuation, but there are definitely some severe downsides that you don't see while you're there.
The way those kids are treated was a completely shock to me, and I went through the system. They're treated like subhumans and it's done right out in the open because it's so normalized (I usually hate that word, but it applies here).
I did a brief stint as a dell person who was sent out to a few schools (for extra money towards the end of my college career) and what I saw there was very eye opening. It was very eye-opening.
The other part that was very eye-opening was having a kindergarten teacher interacting with me almost as if I was an overly tall kindergarten teacher. It made me realize these people interact with kids all day, every day, and it sort of becomes ingrained in them. They themselves probably don't even realize the extent to which interacting with kids every day affects how they socialize.
i do not think there is a single homeschooling or unschooling advocate who would've told you that keeping kids locked indoors on conference calls all day is a good method for educating children.
All this confirms is that kids are unfocused and need someone to focus their attention. Remote learning requires you to take responsibility and takes getting used to. Parents generally aren't going to get involved in students learning, clearly, as this confirms.
If you aren't motivated in some way, you will not do well. In person school was boring for me and wouldn't have made a difference for me since I always looked up youtube videos to learn math and science anyway. We can see here that remote learning needs more work and time in order to catch up to in person school scores.
"kids are unfocused and need someone to focus their attention" is simply not true on its own. I think it needs the caveat of "focus their attention on things they're not interested in".
"Remote learning", or sitting in front of a computer and using it for a few hours in a row, is something many children do willingly and must be pried away from with continual arguments, see video games.
I argue the problem, generally, isn't the fact that students need to sit at a computer, but that remote learning, much like current in-person learning as you say yourself, is simply boring.
A) I never said modern. Video games have been enthralling to people for decades.
B) The word "addictive" gets bandied about very freely when it comes to video games. Unless we're talking about loot boxes or pseudo (or not so pseudo) gambling in video games, there's a pretty big difference between video game "addiction" and an alcohol/nicotine addiction.
My hobbies are not "addictive", and nor are the things I find boring "anti-additive".
Video games are designed primarily for the person playing them to want to be there, to learn what the games world has to teach, and in some cases to draw as much money out of the whales as possible.
Standardised schooling is designed primarily to be quantifiable and scaleable.
If my kid gets addicted to the right video games, they WILL learn more than the same time classes.
Case in point? Paradox interactive grand strategy titles. You'll learn more history and geography in a CK2 campaign than a whole year of the average 8th grade history/geography course.
Of course, we always assume children get addicted to video games that don't teach anything.
> Case in point? Paradox interactive grand strategy titles. You'll learn more history and geography in a CK2 campaign than a whole year of the average 8th grade history/geography course.
What proof do you have about this?
Stuff like this sounds highly attractive – "If we just designed the right games, our kids would learn as they play", but it's about as useful as your CEO saying "I could just have my 16-year old write that program, he learns programming at schools".
Curricula to teach specific subjects have been designed by professionals to carefully cover learning with reinforcement over time. They don't stop being valid just because you played a game one time that you think you enjoyed a lot.
This is anecdotal, but I learned a lot of history and geography by playing the Total War games - Shogun: Total War, Rome: Total War, Medieval: Total War.
I'm not sure how to go about proving the benefit that the OP mentioned, but I am willing to put my money where my mouth is at least when it comes to the education of my own children.
> Shogun: Total War...I am willing to put my money where my mouth is
Well, let's see.
This is a totally honesty-based exercise, but could you write two paragraphs upon the causes of the Tokugawa Shogunate's policy of isolationism (Sakoku), and its short- or long-term (pick your favorite) effects upon the relationship of Japan with the rest of the world?
I am actually interested to see how far you can extend the understanding from the game. In my opinion, this is a reasonably broad question which any adult who has studied the highlights of the history of the period that that game covers should be able to answer to some degree.
Haha, this feels a lot like homework and my policy through university and graduate school was to simply not do assigned homework.
Nevertheless, let's give it a shot.
This is my impression based not only on the game, but also from subsequent content I have been exposed to after having played the game (based on my interest in the game factions - Oda, Hojo, Toyotomi, Uesugi, etc.).
Upon exposure to foreign culture (after the landing of the black ships), the shogunate worried about the influence of foreign ideas on its populace. They also recognized the value of foreign technology (e.g. guns in the game). So they limited foreign interactions to mercantile activity on the island of... the name escapes me (something-jima).
This policy continued for... a couple of centuries? But started to fall apart before the era depicted in media such as The Last Samurai.
Now I will admit that my understanding of the events and impact is somewhat superficial. It may also be inaccurate, in which case I am sure you will correct me. But my understanding would have been non-existent if not for the game.
anecdotally, fighting games and mmos pretty much taught me how to actually study and develop a skill set. mmos in particular also serve as a very good proxy for the kind of team management environments you encounter irl.
>Stuff like this sounds highly attractive – "If we just designed the right games, our kids would learn as they play",
the act of playing and improving at a game is in fact an exercise in the generalized learning process and one that i would argue is often better designed than most curricula. good level design is pretty much the artform of pattern recognition and syllogism.
And when we test students a few months later on what they learned and remembered from that carefully designed curriculum, what do those outcomes look like?
Curricula are typically designed for learning, not to guarantee outcomes on standardized tests.
"But...we want a way to measure!"
Keep thinking that way and you'll end up with a test prep industry for fourth grade. Take it from an immigrant who comes from that culture and hopes American schools don't get it any time soon.
If you really want to measure progress on history and geography, you have to measure minor intangibles like whether your kid can find their neighborhood on a city map, or can recognize similarities between strategic problems in history and the problems that they face. I at least have not heard of any meaningful attempt to measure minute aspects like this, but would be interesting if there were any.
Oh I agree with you that more standardised testing is not a solution, nor is more of what is already the default in North America.
That being said, "But...we want a way to measure!" and "Curricula are typically designed for learning" are not opposed to one another. How do you know if learning took place without some sort of measurement?
I'm not advocating for standardized testing; measure however you want. Measure by having a conversation with the student about the topic and see if they can make coherent sentences, if they can articulate what they learned, if they remember what they learned.
But you still need to measure somehow, even if it's not quantitative.
At the end of a semester of learning a new language (e.g. French or Spanish for high schoolers), can they pronounce they alphabet? Do they know the alphabet? Can they use basic phrases and sentences. If they can't, then that class was a failure.
I agree. But also, we shouldn't throw around the word "addicted" so freely. Aside from the argument of if it's really an addiction, there's the issue of framing:
Addicted to video games or simply absorbed in an interactive medium?
Uninterested in learning or simply bored by the un-engaging monologue?
This whole exercise in mass mediocrity cannot end soon enough. We need to be measuring exceptions not averages. Just like an honest measure of public investment in "piano education" would be the ability to produce Mozarts, not enormous masses of people who can play a tune 8% better after decades of investment.
Is 13% increase in NAEP scores worth all the increased the public school math / STEM investment since 1990? And that's being charitable - believing that the increase is not due to mucking around with the "representative sample" or "accommodations" that have been granted.
And why is classroom instruction important for basic maths anyways? People bought and sold goods, kept accounting books, had investment portfolios, mortgage-style debt instruments far before there was ever a "4th grade" education, much less a 4th grade NAEP score. The ones that need to learn such things will learn, far faster and better than in a decontextualized classroom. I highly doubt people got 13% wiser in managing money or whatever other pro-social thing this increased NAEP math average is supposed to be a proxy for.
So, it doesn't produce more Galois' and Gauss' and it doesn't make people wiser with mathy things... literally what's the point.
One should also mention the enormous costs - all the public expense diverted to this pointless endeavor, the stifling of the truly mathematically gifted in structured "lesson plans" fit for mass mediocrity, and torturing future truck drivers, dancers, janitors, and burger flippers for years with equations.
> This whole exercise in mass mediocrity cannot end soon enough.
the point of developing "mass mediocrity" is to prepare the ground for the exceptions by having a strong education system to support them. Equal access to education is important for locating and helping the exceptional
1) That's not at all the point. If it was, NAEP and its ilk would be measuring the exceptions, which they are not. It is not even mentioned, let alone measured.
2) Also, "equal access to education" does not mean sticking kids in classrooms and instructing them according to a pre-set plan and pace. Education has never been more equally accessible, mostly thanks to the internet. What you're talking about is "equal access to a human instructor who acts as a cattleprod to force you to learn math" by gatekeeping diplomas, complaining to the parents, or generally using/abusing the obedient nature of kids in the presence of adults. Nobody exceptional has come from external force like that. Exceptions are exceptional due to intrinsic motivation, which Khan Academy et al is plenty enough to help discover.
3) There is enormous iatrogenic harm in education against the exceptional. They are forced to share classrooms with students uninterested in math, they can rarely find their peers, they are at the whim of ever dwindling gifted/accelerating programs, often artificially slowed down and bored to death, their time wasted and their spirit broken.
I am arguing for a different telos of education: maximize the number of Mozarts and its equivalents in every field. Not a system that maximizes the average score of the nation's Jingle Bells performance over time.
I care singularly about the Mozarts. Identification of talent, airlifting the proto-Mozarts out of Jingle Bells classrooms, putting them in company of their peers and under the tutelage of the best pianists alive. Sink or swim, let the eagle soar or faceplant. If they soar, we get Mozarts. If they faceplant, they can always go back to practicing Jingle Bells.
As to what you do with the mediocre masses - I personally think it's cruel and inhumane to force them into Jingle Bells practice for years on end if they hate it, but ultimately I only care about rescuing Mozarts from being swallowed and stifled by mediocrity, not the suffering masses. Too much money, careers, egos tied up in torturing the masses with Jingle Bells lessons and Jingle bells diplomas and overruling that is not my concern.
This is not how high-achievers are taught/educated. They do strive for mastery and continuous improvement, but not in a "sink or swim" way. The difference is that effective tutoring requires individualized attention.
Effective mass instruction is driven by completely different dynamics, but these are not really "sink or swim" either, more about very direct, continued reinforcement of somewhat basic "lessons" that are to be effectively committed to memory, more or less verbatim. (Think of the way "memes" spread and advertisement campaigns are run; mass education that's truly optimized for raw effectiveness is not very different from that.)
Exactly who do you think was running all this covid testing and DNA sequencing for strain typing - Mozarts or Jingle Bells? How should Jingle Bells understand math behind test pooling so they can correct errors, etc? You are advocating Soviet military approach which is failing spectacularly in Ukraine at the moment
It was unplanned because we had public health leadership which decided to ignore decades of pandemic planning and lessons learned, and a president who went along with it.
Countries like Singapore, Taiwan, New Zealand, and South Korea suggest that with sufficient planning and political will, there were alternative outcomes available compared to what happened in the US and Europe.
NAEP (one of the few national standards we have in the US to consistently measure math/reading performance) shows a decline in 4th and 8th grade math performance since being measured in 1991.
Lots of speculation of course as to contribution from Covid / school shutdowns, etc.
In a world where emotionally charged lies generate higher profits than the truth, objective sciences like math are clearly appearing less and less useful.
I mean I like math. But if I had to choose between "how to get 1 mio followers on tiktok" and "how to calculate the differential of log(x)", I'd still consider the first course to have a higher roi... Attention is easy to convert into money in today's economy. Math skills, less so.
I'm not sure what you're on your soapbox about, but this decline is probably due to the enormous disruption in children's education caused by the Covid pandemic. The report even compares pre- and post-Covid achievement rates.
A distinction without a difference. Many parents were keeping children out of school regardless of lockdowns, so it wasn't only lockdowns that contributed.
Given the number of slots available for 1 mil tiktok follower influencers versus those which require to calculate the differential of log(x), multiplied by resulting lifetime earnings, I differ with you and estimate that the latter's roi is actually higher.
That couldn't be more false. A STEM degree will almost certainly land you a well paid job. Any other degree or no degree, not so much. As for your chance to get rich on tik tok, that's winning the lottery probabilities.
While it's surely emotionally satisfying in the short term to blame it on people primarily seeking short-term emotional satisfaction, I think there are some easy candidates for more proximate and parsimonious explanations like nobody being in school reliably for >2 years.
>objective sciences like math are clearly appearing less and less useful.
Literally could not be more wrong.
>I'd still consider the first course to have a higher roi...
Even knowing in theory how to get 1M followers, luck plays a massive role and you might as well be playing the lottery. So I'm not sure you've really "done the math" on your position here.
>Attention is easy to convert into money in today's economy. Math skills, less so.
On a website full of SWE's largely making well over 6 figures per year I find this take to be truly laughable...
How could this be achieved against an airborne illness that children are largely asymptomatic for? This is true of many adults too - you can't really guarantee that the elderly will be safe unless they can be quarantined, which for almost all simply wasn't possible. Assisted living homes were the first place COVID tore through, which are largely sequestered from children.
If you don't think you can quarantine old people and people with actual immune system issues, why do you think you can quarantine healthy children?
I honestly don't think either could have really been achieved. But it's illogical to recognize that it's impossible for one group to justify pulling out all the stops to quarantine children.
Why would I respond to you when you ignored my central question and then misrepresented what I said? I said you can't quarantine old people and then act as if everything is business as usual in the outside world - the disease will get in.
> However, fewer than half of students at each grade had teachers who were quite or extremely confident in their ability to address learning gaps that may have occurred due to pandemic-related school closures.
So _hopefully_ but I'm not sure that _most likely_.
This might be more indicative of the view many teachers have towards their profession now. There's a reason there are teacher shortages across the country
They're not doomed. If anything this will show the hyper fixation on academic schooling is misguided. Only the very few whom persue higher education may be required to take higher math that they will also not use.
Most academics is for the enrichment of the school and instructors, not because it's an effective education.
It's even worse actually - a school admin recently was removed because they dare question the effectiveness of diversity initiatives. It's a new Reagan era.
> Only the very few whom persue higher education may be required to take higher math that they will also not use.
This has to be one of the of the most worn out stupid takes. The point of teaching things like math and science which people "will never use in real life" is to teach problem solving and critical thinking. NO ONE actually thinks knowing the quadratic formula is useful in and of itself.
Idk how they're teaching the quadratic formula nowadays, but when it was taught to me it was taught as a fact to be used later on. The problem solving and critical thinking time could have been spent on working through and coming up with it
>Idk how they're teaching the quadratic formula nowadays, but when it was taught to me it was taught as a fact to be used later on.
I find it hard to believe that anyone could actually say that and believe it. In what scenario would a person that is not actively working in a STEM field (and frankly even then) ever need to solve a quadratic equation by hand? When most kids can barely handle using the formula on it's own I don't think deriving it is going to add any value to anyone other than already advanced students.
I believe that's false. It's easier to understand something if it's tied together and built on other things you already know. Simply being handed a formula and told to use it does neither of those thing.
As you said, what good is being given a formula and told to use it for problem solving if you can barely understand it. Instead do the problem solving to derive the equation.
Not sure this makes sense pedagogically. I would challenge you to try this in a classroom of average middle schoolers and see how it goes. I don't think you grasp the difficulties here.
But the length of the real proof is beside the point. We teach them about 1 and 2 before going to 1+1=2. And when we do go to 1+1=2, we show it to them using objects and counting. We don't simply tell "here's the function for addition, just put numbers into to to solve problems".
And it is used later on, probably every day until you graduate. Most people probably won't use it at their jobs, but things that are useful during your studies are useful period.
You will learn more problem solving in a day building a shed than you will the quadratic formula. "Critical thinking" is the unproven excuse so that schools can collect tax dollars.
Perhaps, but the quadratic formula only takes a minute to learn, so you can't expect it to yield as much as a day of shed building.
Also, NOT knowing the quadratic formula will make it much harder to solve hundreds of other math related problems. And the same is of course true for most of fundamental math knowledge.
But whatever you may think about the usefulness of mathematics, I can assure you that it's not a giant conspiracy to siphon money from tax payers. Every math teacher you can find (anyone in a STEM field, really) is 100% genuinely convinced that mathematics is extremely useful in a multitude of ways. They could of course all be mistaken, and devwastaken have seen the truth, but I don't think that is very likely.
I know for a fact that there are plenty of people in the US country who can build sheds all day but cannot distinguish fact from fiction and believe wholeheartedly that a man named Qanon is trying to save the country from blood sucking child cannibals. So I don't buy that line for a second.
Not sure if I'm following: are we really applying VC growth demands to childhood education? It seems like it hasn't gone below the early 2000s levels, which is probably the level (or lower) that most people in this thread were on themselves?
Although it is easy to attribute this to school closures, we should not dismiss the possibility of these results being caused by brain damage from (repeated) COVID infections [1, 2, 3].
Interesting study. I read most of it and couldn't immediately find any big mistakes. Unfortunately, the study does not compare official government tests.
In addition, the study compares up to Q1 2021 (average would be feb 2021). By then it had 580k confirmed COVID cases on a population of 10 million (5%) and it was in the middle of the first large wave.
Personally, I think the study is not 100% convincing, but important to position within a larger frame of evidence.
In case you didn't notice, COVID is still making the rounds but kids are at school. Kids were at school, at least in Canada and the US, during the massive surge at the beginning of 2022. There are more than 93M reported cases.
I'm amazed at the level of ignorance about a disease that has killed more than a million people in the US and Canada alone; thousands dead unnecessarily because this ignorance.
4th grade math dropped from 241 to 236, this puts us at around 2003 levels. 8th grade math has dropped from 282 to 274 which puts us at 1996 levels.
4th grade and 8th grade reading dropped slightly, but there's only slight improvement since the 90s
tl;dr we pretty much lost 20 years of educational advancement. It probably isn't the end of the world, but there's a widening achievement gap and there's much work to be done. Hopefully it's resolved within the next couple years. Inability to course correct by that time would be far more troubling
There are many homeschooling curricula that are tailored for remote learning or for parent assisted learning. The government schools tried to do remote learning just like a classroom, but remote. Big fail.
Parents I know who switched to homeschooling with classes designed for that did quite well, except that extra curriculars were all shut down by government.
The teachers unions insisted on schools being closed, despite no perceivable risk. It was known very early on that since ACE2 receptors kick in at puberty, there was very little if any risk to children. The disease needs those receptors.
they kept schools open for up thru 10th grade, with no masks. The incidence of covid in teachers and other adult staff was pretty much the same as for the general population. The incidence of covid between 10th grade (in school) and 11th grade (remote) was indistinguishable.
In other words, kids may get it, but get a weak case. The incidence of severe infection was like the flu, and we don't shut down everything for the flu.
Also from this data, adults very rarely get a strong case from children.
This was known by the end of term in 2020 (spring). There is absolutely no excuse that school systems should have been shut down going into fall 2020 with this as a known fact.
It looks like a whole generation needs to be coached into catching up with the system. It sounds expensive, but is it feasible?
Also this is inevitably going to lead to a quality vs quantity discussion. Between grades 4 and 8 I had some brilliant mathematics teachers, and some mediocre ones.
is this really important? US are top in global University rankings, top in global innovation metrics. Could it be that Math is overrated or that even education is overated?
Students attending top colleges represent a small percentage of their particular demographic.
Being able to read, write, and having a basic grasp of math is what an alarming number of kids are missing out on.
These proficiency levels are appalling, and everyone responsible for them should be deeply ashamed of themselves...and I am not even addressing the decline due to covid.
These aren't college students or engineers. These tests are measuring pretty rudimentary math skills, the kind you need to live everyday life.
And the scores are important because they suggest to us how well education systems are working in the country, regardless of how "important" you may think the resulting knowledge is.
You might not believe me, but the decline of the insect population (also on the frontpage) and the fall of test scores and the fall of sperm quality since the 90s have the same single origin.
From this specific data, this viewpoint is hard to justify, because the scores were at or near their highest in 2019, and the data shows modest improvements since the 90s
"You might not believe this random comment that claims to know the ~real~ reason for declining test scores"
You're right about that.
The timing of the decline in scores matches up pretty precisely with the start of covid shutdowns. Whatever you are alluding to (pesticides?) has been a thing for well before covid.
The short explanation is insecticides: microtoxins to break the fertility of insects for higher crop yields. These same substances also affect humans, albeit on a different level: slightly lower intelligence because mothers are exposed to these substances and they transfer them to the womb, and they also decrease male fertility.
Children of hairdressers or farmers have slightly lower IQ (controlled for all other variables) than others because the mothers are exposed to similar substances.
They are probably referring to some kind of large-scale environmental contamination, but as far as I'm aware it's quite difficult to make any of these theories fit with the timeline of international historical trends.
Typically the differences in rates and magnitudes are apparent across borders and thus would more easily be explained with cultural factors rather than an environmental contaminant that is (largely) agnostic to cultural effects.
Do you have a graph that overlays test scores with pesticide use? Because I'm looking at the one in the article and I'm not sure how they would match up.
Since the objective of learning switched from acquiring knowledge and build competencies to cather to emotional needs of different groups, and since when every participant gets a prize no matter what he/she does to not make him/her being left behind, I am not surprised at all of the outcome.
Since the western society does not want to change the way learning is done, the path will lead us downwards.
The only chance as a parent to build a better future for your own child is to fight the system and help the child learn.
The decline in learning is yet another example of politics ruining things that work in the society.
You're saying it's the two years when kids almost entirely paused schooling to any notable degree because they had no local oversight, and not the participatory trophy nonsense that boomers have been complaining about for the past 20 years despite them being the ones that made it a thing in the first place?
1) I hadn't heard people making exactly the same argument since I was a kid in the 1970s,
2) I've read even older accounts making identical claims,
3) there was no correlation with covid,
4) western society hadn't actually had many changes over the last 150 years in the way learning is done. (My grandfather's high school education was very different than mine, as I describe out https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25574534 .), and
5) education in the US, except of the children of the rich, has always been intimately connected with politics. If there were a golden era where education wasn't ruined, then it was because of politics.
> "The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers."
> ~ Socrates
One human constant seems to be thinking that future generations are the worst.
Luckily, we send her to private school. It reopened more quickly than public schools in many areas nearby (Fairfax VA and Montgomery MD). And once we were back in person, she got 1 on 1 reading instruction every morning until she caught back up. My wife sometimes resisted the expense of private school (we both went to public) but the pandemic totally confirmed why it was worth the money.