Yes, school sucks
but you're still going
Squirt has been on a tear about school this year. Which means Squirt and Dad have been having debates where we both end up frustrated and grumpy. Like most debates (looking at you politics), I think we both have some solid points and we end up talking past each other. But it’s important to me that Squirt understands my mindset. This is a meditation on that.Before we dive in, this particular writing session had a theme song on repeat though I let lots of covers play throughout…
So here’s what the piece is about:
Public school is a shit solution for educating my child.
Public school is the best solution for educating my child.
Government Sucks
One thing at the base of my worldview is a belief that large organizations slouch towards mediocrity. Humans, the lifeblood of any organization, aren’t generally interested in excellence so naturally an organization isn’t either. But to combat this is the concept of competition which injects a motivation for excellence. If you just embrace mediocrity you will not rise and you may find yourself getting passed by the hungrier competitor, or the hungrier coworker, and maybe eventually find yourself starving. At its heart, competition is a forcing function to create a tension between mediocrity and excellence.
Organizations can, and do, fail to respond to this forcing function. They embrace mediocrity and fall to a new competitor. They end up dysfunctional and wither away. Or, if they are “lucky,” they slouch along as an undying zombie forever even as they are mediocre, dysfunctional, or both.
That last category is reserved for those companies that are “too big to fail.” Those organizations that are so tightly coupled to society and the economy that the line fuzzes between competition and governance. You can run your business, but now government has integrated itself into the body of the organization. Decisions are no longer the business’s alone but instead only made after meeting requirements of the government(s) in which the organization operates. Are they a competitive organization? Maybe! A part of the government? Also maybe!
This forms a continuum or a spectrum of how subject to a forcing function an organization actually is. The new local restaurant down the road is small and surrounded by competitors. It survives almost entirely on being excellent and the owners are motivated to be exactly that. The government won’t even notice if they fail and it dies. As you drift towards the other pole of the continuum, though, the picture changes. The closer you get to the governance pole the more likely you become to survive even if you suck. Eventually you reach true government, which obviously cannot let itself die and there is nothing that can kill it short of bloody revolution.
And this is the problem. Government has no competition. Government cannot be allowed to die. Government is immune to the forcing function. Government sucks because it doesn’t have to be excellent at anything. So, because of this, public school will not be excellent. Public school is nothing but an extension of government and government is, invariably, a mediocre solution at best. How could it be anything but?
Thus, individualism
For me, this is the argument for conservatism and libertarianism. Small government. Free market. Strengthen and expand the reach of the forcing function. Limit the unmotivated mediocrity of the government, punish any organization that allows the human nature of mediocrity to make it weak and dysfunctional, and remove any protection from a consequence of becoming mediocre.
Allow hard work to be rewarded. Celebrate excellence. This is The American Dream as I learned it as a kid. While the mass of humanity, the mob, may be fine with bread and circuses not all of us are. The American Dream is to rise above this through grit, determination, and hard fucking work. Just today while I was working on this piece a good friend actually posted an incredible illustration of exactly this:
I loved the painting so much I made a point of clicking through to the artist’s website as well and something that bubbled up to my head was that this artist isn’t worried about AI generated art taking their job at all. I’m not linking to their website simply because you should click through and read the piece above to get to it. The artist, like my friend, has reached the summit and once you’re there you can rest. But first, the work.
Excellence creates its own resilience. This is a common theme from the rugged individual and actually a driving force behind the start-up culture. It is incredibly common for start-ups to begin with one idea and then pivot. Indeed, the driving force behind start-ups tends to be the idea of hustle culture or working almost 80 hours a week. Which sounds horrific to me but is exactly the type of thing that pushes the world forward. The closer to you get to individuality the more you can build to your strengths, be adaptable, and pursue excellence.
He who would start a journey alone can leave today; but he who travels with others must wait until the others are ready.
~African / Arabic Proverb (maybe)
Education reflects exactly this as well. It’s actually known as Bloom’s 2 sigma problem. This drives class size as a primary determining factor for value in education. Indeed, you see this constantly with school metrics and how parents determine if a school is good. “How many students per teacher? We should move to a school district with the smaller classroom size…”
The best education is the one that is fully individualized.
This is a good stopping point to ask Squirt for some thoughts I think so…
Squirt Says (so far)…
(Editor’s Note: we’re still working on stuff like picture provenance and credit so bear with me here, all I had were some images that Squirt emailed me as part of his response…)
Yes, school has gone into mediocrity. It hasn’t been very useful for educating the children of any generation. School hasn’t changed for the times. [Compare these cars.]
Quite different.
How different is that? In the photo of school from 1895: textbooks, tightly packed desks, and a blackboard. One leader that teaches a group. In the photo of the [modern] school: textbooks, tightly packed desks, and a blackboard. One leader that teaches a group. Hey! They’re not that different.
What did the students in 1895 do? Fight 2 world wars! What is going to happen to the kids now? School is what guides us, but what does it guide us toward. Mediocrity. If the thing that guides us isn’t good then we won’t be good. I will admit that I didn’t come up with some of the arguments I think it was from some sort of legal case. But my point still stands.
Dad Responds (so far)…
So I see how you’re keyed into the mediocrity argument for sure. And it’s true that school instruction is still very similar to what it was 130 years ago. This seems like a good time to bring in two of the youtube videos that you had sent me as well.
First we have How Schools Make You Dumber which has a central thesis that it strangles “creativity intelligence” in favor of “logical” and “verbal” intelligence. It encourages convergent thinking instead of divergent thinking. Much of this video is not wrong, I think it just has a limited perspective.
Next we have Why Your School Looks Like a Prison which has a central thesis of control, convergent thinking, and laying things out for sight lines and overall standardization. It goes on to explain that school was designed to churn out little factory workers and, again, convergent thinking and following orders.
Other parts of the world have grown and evolved but schools…not so much. It’s still kids sitting in a room being talked at by a teacher. Now there are some modern tools, like laptops you can take home and software that learns with you but, at its heart there hasn’t been anything like the same changes as the hansom cab to the Mustang.
This isn’t nearly enough criticism.
There is a concept in debate called Steelmanning where you build the strongest opposing argument you can in order to strengthen your own position. We’re going to do that here because, in the end, I’m going to bring this home with an argument that concedes almost all the criticisms while arguing that they are not enough.
The individual student is almost entirely irrelevant to the overhead view of education. The best student, from a high level, is the one who doesn’t stand out at all. They live right above the average of the Gaussian distribution of the bell curve. They don’t argue, they don’t get in fights with other kids, they don’t bully. They just exist and drift through school nudging up that bell curve and participating in a club or two.
A school’s primary motivation is to take any of the kids that are struggling to get to this sweet spot and nudge them along. The farther you are from the middle the less “important” you are when you consider education’s motivations. Remember, mediocrity.
To be an outlier, in either direction, in public education is to be invisible to the organizational motivations. I do think it’s important to separate the organizational motivations from an individual educator’s motivations also. There isn’t really a higher calling than being a teacher. And they sure as hell are not doing it for the lucrative paycheck or the short hours.
Teachers, I believe, are the most responsible and important members of society because their professional efforts affect the fate of the earth.
~ Helen Caldicott
Teachers are rock stars who are underpaid, overworked, generally not thanked, and also constantly on guard for super opinionated parents who have farmed educating their kids out to the teacher. You couldn’t pay me enough.
But the system is…mediocre. It is also, I might add, underfunded to an atrocious degree compared to most modern democracies. Because if there’s anything Americans like better than having an uninformed and ill-educated opinion it’s bitching and moaning about taxes and socialism.
I could go on but, as a general rule, I think most good faith criticisms of the public school system are valid. And I think that our system is worse than many other modern nations because of the general approach of American culture. We want to be the best but we certainly don’t want to be taxed at the rate required to be the best. So I think I’ll just move on.
Yeah, Squirt, you’re still going
Happy to talk about it until we’re both blue in the face but I think the public education system is the single best way to prepare an American child to grow up in America and thrive in America.
One thing I’ve appreciated that at no point has Squirt tried to argue that he shouldn’t be educated. He is, thankfully, a mind-hungry child who loves learning. Most of his arguments, in fact, have revolved around not learning enough in school. He says he could learn more in other ways. And he is absolutely correct.
Remember Bloom’s 2 sigma problem from earlier. The best education in terms of knowledge is an individual education. The next best is when you’re one of a pair of students, and continuing on up to massive college lecture halls where all you're really getting is the gravitas of the professor and some proof that you could meet their expectations.
And this is why we talk past each other. Because while I’m highly interested in him learning, I am more interested in preparing him to be the best adult he can be. And in my opinion the best adults are not necessarily the most educated adults. Nor are they the richest. Nor are they necessarily the happiest. For me the best adults are those that are comfortable and confident in who they are, understand how they fit into the world, and are able to adapt.
We are not islands. We are a part of the world and we must understand how we fit into the world. We must adapt ourselves to the world at times and we mustn’t yield at other times. We must be strong like Lao Tzu’s water.
Water is fluid, soft, and yielding. But water will wear away rock, which is rigid and cannot yield. As a rule, whatever is fluid, soft, and yielding will overcome whatever is rigid and hard. This is another paradox: what is soft is strong.
~ Lao Tzu
In short, education is about learning how to exist in the world as it exists. And, for me, that means being educated in the public education system which is the closest analog to the real world.
Squirt lives in a house where the singular focus is frequently on him. This is well and good for the house. I believe a child should be a singular focus in the home they live in. But it is not the world. The world is not focused on him at all and it never will be. He is an afterthought if he is ever thought about at all.
A private school, with its walled garden of fiscal hurdles, is not the world.
A homeschool program, shaped and flavored by a vanishingly small set of families is not the world.
But a large organization. An organization that’s part of a larger whole and part of the community and subject to the silly whims of the masses and trending towards mediocrity because of simple inertia but filled with individuals who are rock stars as well as a bunch of incredibly self-involved participants of various levels of economic and intellectual achievement? That is America.
It won’t always be fair. It won’t always be fun. It will let some people slip through the cracks. It will not always make sense. It will make silly decisions. It will have weird rules that you have to follow. It will require you to understand a larger picture and adapt and accept tradeoffs. That, too, is what America is.
The public school system is the best reflection of America that is out there.
Matter, how tiny my share
Time, how brief my allotment
Fate, how small my roll to play
Self, all that can be mastered
~ Pierce Brown
We cannot control the world, we can only exist within it and adapt as we’re able. We can only master ourselves. School, for all its flaws, is the first opportunity to learn how to master one’s self in something approximating the real world of America. And so, yes, you’re still going.
Squirt Says…
The education system is horrible. It is ineffective at its job. It only accounts for about 70 % of all students. 70 % sounds like a lot but that means that 16.2 million children do not receive a sufficient education per year. They could do it in a better way.
The Best defense is a good offense
-Sun Tzu
We should encourage creativity. Educate with amazement. Not boredom.
Dad Responds…
I’m not really sure why we’re quoting Sun Tzu here but Substack is telling me I’m nearing the maximum email length so we’ll pause it here. I really like the “educate with amazement” line though…
I’m biased based on my career area, but it seems like a good redirection here is to ask squirt to evaluate alternatives or even design an alternative. The old “don’t come to me with problems if you don’t have proposed solutions” mentality.