Valuing Children

One of the most durable taboos in American society is acknowledgment that the local financing of education creates a zero-sum mentality among affluent suburbanites, leading them to view the inferior funding of education in less prosperous (urban) school districts as a competitive advantage for their more fortunate children.

This unfortunate gaming of educational resources in America leads to the planned destruction of approximately 20% of the US workforce, because it is so poorly educated that it cannot participate productively in a modern economy. Until the American middle class stops playing a zero-sum game with school funding, our global competitiveness will continue to slip against nations that value all of their children.

One additional factor that deserves consideration is what the target reproductive rate should be. If sharing the cost of childcare across society leads to a reproductive rate that is higher than desirable, should that argue against sharing those costs? And will this even have any noticeable effects? I think you might even be able to form policies that decouple the cost to families of having children and the resources the children consume in terms of care.

Becker’s treatment of the family is especially insane. My comment is at my URL.

No, Lindsey, it would have left you plenty to say (that’s what Ingrid is implying in her last couple of sentences)!

One of the most durable taboos in American society is acknowledgment that the local financing of education creates a zero-sum mentality among affluent suburbanites, leading them to view the inferior funding of education in less prosperous (urban) school districts as a competitive advantage for their more fortunate children.

Actually, I think that’s one of the most durable myths. Michigan has had state-wide, equalized funding for about 15 years. Some districts that were already high-spending were grandfathered and allowed to use local taxes to maintain funding above the minimum with the differential to be gradually eliminated. However, this is not critical. In local area here, for example, the Ann Arbor school district is one of the ‘hold harmless’ districts allowed to raise and spend more. But several of the smaller suburban districts surrounding Ann Arbor (Saline, Dexter, Chelsea) are at the state minimum but still perform at high levels comparable to Ann Arbor.

Why? The bottom line is this — what schools get in those suburban districts is not more money (they get only the state’s standard per-student allocation). What they get is isolation. Isolation from social disorder, from lower-achieving students whose families don’t have middle-class educational backgrounds and incomes. It does not take a particularly large amount of money to educate kids who come to kindergarten ready to go, whose parents are financially stable college graduates.

Eliminating the funding gap between districts makes little difference because the demographic gap doesn’t change at all, and that’s what really matters the most.

Funding does make a difference. It’s more than school funding though. It takes opportunity, real or even perceived sometimes, in things beyond mere k-12 education. Blight comes in many forms and once deposited takes much effort to recover from. Sweat equity is needed in one home [often] and in raising the next generation; a ‘nice’ village does help.

Anecdotal, Slocum, based on four school districts in one state.

If true I think it’d mean that your parents should be wealthier and perhaps some redistribution of wealth is in order.

The parents also spend heavily on tutoring and test preparation to improve the performance of their children.

Yes, and they read to them from the time they’re old enough to pay attention, and buy them educational toys and games, and take them to museums and on interesting trips, and pay for music lessons, and so on. And, in contrast, lots of lower class kids come from homes where little of that happens. Which is why equalizing funding has so much less impact than you might imagine. Don’t get me wrong, equalizing funding is worth doing. But even afterward, the schools and kids in affluent areas will still outperform and parents will still pay a premium to live in those school districts.

The argument for balanced funding of public schools is challenged by a dogmatic insistence that every dollar of shifted resource must produce a dollar of benefit. Why not allocate according to NEED rather than to PRIVILEGE? If it costs twice as much per pupil to make competent adults out of inner city kids vs. lucky suburbanites, why not allocate at that level? Is not the measure of justice here the attainment of opportunity rather than a false accounting equivalence?

We are all too willing to pay more for policing and incarceration than we are for education that will break the cycle of poverty. As long as each community believes that it is playing a zero-sum game with all other communities, education funding will remain distorted.

The logic and the data suggest a needs-based allocation strategy. Those intent on preserving the competitive advantage of their children insist on “equitable” allocation of funds, knowing that the playing field is tilted, and a “fair share” will continue to favor their kids.

There is a quantum of education investment that is the minimum that will result in a competent high school graduate, and this quantum will be different for different districts, so a procrustean funding scheme will achieve “fairness” only in an accounting report.

This argument takes us to Federalizing of US public education funding, since there is insufficient trust among local taxing entities to make a functionally fair allocation.

Okay, to jump on my hobbyhorse again, when you look at the Direct Instruction material, and material from other educational programmes that are successful with children from poor backgrounds, it’s no surprise that there is no evidence that increasing funding for kids from poor backgrounds increases educational achievement.

For example, look at this rubric for identifying authentic Direct Instruction programmes. http://www.zigsite.com/PDFs/rubric.pdf. Page 21 includes a set of rules for presenting information, eg “1.e. The presentation introduces all discriminations that are
necessary for a reasonable test of what is taught and none
that are not necessary.”
Now this sounds reasonable enough. If you are going to teach kids what a triangle is, it makes sense to show them not just equilaterial triangles, but isosceles triangles and scalene triangles, and triangles that are just made up of three lines and triangles that are made up of solid blocks of colour and so forth, but too much information will confuse kids.
Or take rule 3.g on page 25. “3 g. The examples in the set do not have spurious cues or
patterns (such as a pattern of correct responses, yes, no,
yes, no, yes, no).”

Again, fair enough. In a class there is likely to be some kids who would get confused if there was a spurious pattern and remember the pattern, not the rule they were trying to use.

Or look at this synthesis of Effective Schooling Practices at http://www.nwrel.org/scpd/esp/esp95toc.html.
“2.2.3 Administrators and teachers:
a. Schedule school events so as to avoid disruption of learning time.
…
e. Keep unassigned time and time spent on noninstructional activities to a minimum during the school day; they keep loudspeaker announcements and other administrative intrusions brief and schedule them for minimal interference with instruction.
” (http://www.nwrel.org/scpd/esp/esp95_2.html#2.1.1)

Again, sensible, logical.

I can’t see anything in the rubric that requires large amounts of money to implement, and most of the things in the synthesis are cheap as well. But the flip side of that is that there is no reason to believe that more money will lead to any more of these cheap things happening.

Dan S. – is there any evidence that the Main Line township schools educate those 2.8% of students below the poverty line to a higher level than Philadelphia schools educate their 31.3% of students?

“Note that antinatalism does not deny that procreation provides benefits to society (a sort of positive externality) – only that it is morally wrong to the children themselves.”

And where exactly does that get you? Except perhaps a warm self-righteous glow of non-standard moral sanctimony?

Sister Y,

Your moral argument is question begging. One could just as easily say asking anarchists to obey laws and pay taxes in on a moral par with asking those who think reproduction is wrong to subsidize the reproduction of others.

Your empirical claim that reproduction choices are not affected by financial incentives just does not seem to be supported by evidence; e.g. studies showing that the absence of secure retirement planning in poor countries is a casual factor in higher birth rates or that the levels of financing for parental leave, day care, etc… helps explain variation in birth rates in wealthy welfare states.

Tracy W, I was just thinking of you! As I stumbled out of bed in the early morning darkness to take a shower before Mrs. S. got up – so she wouldn’t have to rush en route to her classroom of 30 low income kindergartners (without an assistant for any part of the day, however briefly) , filled with materials often purchased with her own money – I thought to myself, ‘Self, I should write another comment on that CT valuing kids thread, about how I don’t know how it is overseas, but here in the U.S. one can pretty much count on folks jumping up to insist that better funding just won’t help! no no no! – and it’s true, Self, if given the choice I would go with an end to de facto segregation and massive socioeconomic inequality first, but, well . . . .’

Valuing Children

Why not use market-based approach?

Can you please tell me what you think about Direct Instruction?

It’s a fascinating topic which up until now has been criminally neglected on the internet!

It strikes me that many of the arguments for the benefits of education are surrounded by a fallacious glow of nostalgia. It is true enough that once upon a time people escaped from ghettos of material deprivation through scholarship; as it is also true that 200 years ago, English and other working men strove to educate themselves to fight political and social oppression. However, they did so in a cultural climate that provided strong positive reinforcement for doing so. There once was a time, and it is in its rosy glow that we debate, when a) being ignorant was widely seen as wrong, and b) grinding poverty really did grind.

Nowadays, is that really the case?

One might phrase the issue in any number of ways, from a variety of perspectives: Curmudgeonly Rightist: the working class wallow in their subsidised ignorance; Bitter Gauchist: the elite dominate education with their money, and if it ever became universal, they’d just change the rules and make something else the criterion of success.

The underlying basic issue seems to me to be this: can an ‘advanced’ society educate itself out of inequality and stagnation? Isn’t it more likely that it will just be overtaken by a less ‘advanced’ one, where point b) above still gives point a) a real sting?

Is there not a really toxic blend of racism and desperation in the mantra repeated since the 1990s, that the USA, UK etc have to educate themselves to stay ‘ahead’ in the prosperity stakes? The idea that the products of multi-generational welfare-dependence can magically be brought to compete with those who know what it actually means to risk falling back into a tropical slum is laughable, isn’t it?

The underlying basic issue seems to me to be this: can an ‘advanced’ society educate itself out of inequality and stagnation?

Why do you think this is the basic issue?

My own opinion is that education is good as a preparation for adult life – as well-informed citizens, as capable of further study in wider fields, as useful in day-to-day life (eg being able to write shopping lists), as an enlargement in the mind by appreciating more arts, as being able to be more productive in an economic sense. All those to me are good things, even if society is still unequal, and stagnant. Though the more I learn of history the more that I doubt any society was ever stagnant for long, so I don’t worry at all about that one. There are way too many serious issues like global warming to worry about.

Is there not a really toxic blend of racism and desperation in the mantra repeated since the 1990s, that the USA, UK etc have to educate themselves to stay ‘ahead’ in the prosperity stakes?

Why racism? I can see the desperation, but I am surprised that anyone would argue that wanting to teach every kid to read and write and do basic maths is racist.

The idea that the products of multi-generational welfare-dependence can magically be brought to compete with those who know what it actually means to risk falling back into a tropical slum is laughable, isn’t it?

Well I suppose it depends on your sense of humour. Personally I prefer the Marx brothers’ sense. Leaving aside laughter for a moment, I think a more relevant question is “Can the products of multi-generational welfare-dependence be brought, by hard work in the application of methods that have already been shown to be successful in terms of educational achievement, to be able to support themselves and to be engaged citizens?”

I think you’re missing my point, which is that ‘education, education, education’ has been politically touted as a solution – specifically – to international competitiveness in a ‘flattening’ world. Since as the world ‘flattens’, many more people with much greater individual incentive to do the ‘educated’ stuff for themselves will become equipped to do so, I can’t see the implicit agenda of the ‘solution’, that ‘we’ will always remain better at it than ‘them’, if ‘we’ try hard enough, can ever work – and it’s both racist and desperate to think that it might.

I’ve nothing against education, I think we’d all benefit from a lot more of it. It’s a shame politicians and the people at large haven’t agreed, for their assorted reasons. Your last rephrasing of my point was very telling, speaking as it does to the failure over the last half-century to sustain the interest of the working classes in education that was once their pride.

abb1, do you have any actual evidence that the real productivity of labour rises with the availability of welfare? What does the curve look like? Up to what point does someone who would be paid almost as much for not working at all continue to put him/herself out to maintain a competitive advantage over someone else for whom working actually matters to sustain their household’s standard of living?

I take it in your world that people work for their employers out of the goodness of their hearts? Funny that, you being an unreconstructed Marxist and all.

Look at the charts here: http://www.poverty.org.uk/29/index.shtml especially Chart 3, European households of working age with nobody working: the average is almost 10%. That’s the extra load the economy is carrying. That’s welfare-dependency. You can be all Marxist about it and blame the system, wave your hands and pretend it’ll all be better in some lovely shiny People’s Democracy, but someone is paying for the food these people eat. Right now that someone is often an Indian or a Chinese worker. When their standards of living rise, what happens? It would be nice to think we could expropriate a few capitalists, but as we’re finding out these days, they don’t have any real money as soon as someone goes looking for it, and you can’t eat yachts.

This discussion resembles a demolition derby among dilapidated paradigms. A fresh solution would take the educational resource allocation decision down to the individual child, just as the future of medicine is to administer drugs specific to an individual’s genetic makeup.

In a more enlightened future, each child would be screened for talents and deficits upon entering the educational system, and an allotment (state-issued voucher) of resources would be made specific to the child, with a customized instructional plan. The resource pool would be national, to avoid regional distortions, and the technology base for screening and curriculum engineering would be the product of Federally funded research.

The word the future is whispering in our ear repeatedly is “precision,” and moving the target of educational strategy away from the school district by aiming directly at the pupil is accepting that future education should be tailored to individuals rather than institutions.

If you’re going to bring Benatar’s arguments into this discussion, you might as well bring in the Marquis de Sade’s theory of desire, and Elron Hubbard’s engram theory, and the Manichean doctrine that matter is evil.

One more reason why analytic philosophy does more harm than good. The goal of analytic philosophy is to develop every single argument and every criticism of every argument, so that you end up with a complete inventory of every possible argument. The goal is that, whatever any non-philosopher says, a philosopher will be able to say “Yes, A and B argued that, and C and D argued that they’re wrong”. It’s like an enormous pattern shop.

We should stipulate the Benatar, Hubbard, Sade, and the Manicheans are wrong, and go on with the discussion. The alternative is a fifty year long argument ending in terminal boredom while the world goes on without us.

I have to ask, does this apply to folks who for example were given vast estates because they married the queens 2nd cousin, or mineral rights and land given to former family members who say were involved in rail way construction, or current folks on wall street?

Well I may be missing something here, but I would say that the answer is yes. The US senate I understand is dominated by people from wealthy backgrounds, and being a US senator I think thoroughly counts as being an engaged citizen. Okay, while I cannot speak for US senators, I do think that NZ would be better off if some NZ politicians had instead lived lives of political apathy, and perhaps the same is true of US senators. But I don’t think

Is there any reason you are particularly concerned about the children who expect to inherit wealth? I know that children with low-income parents on average do badly at school far more often than the children of middle-income backgrounds, I didn’t know that the children of the ultra-rich tend to have similar problems. Can you cite some statistics?

abb1, do you have any actual evidence that the real productivity of labour rises with the availability of welfare?

It seems to me that empirical evidence of a close correlation between public welfare and productivity of labor is overwhelming.

But perhaps when you say “welfare” you mean something like “free stuff given to undeserving poor people”? Well, even with this definition the correlation is still there and it’s still very obvious. You are not likely to find high productivity and good education in places where people starve and live in slums.

Ingrid Robeyns says (in the original post):

Moreover, philosophically speaking, even the most radical views such as those of David Benatar who argues that we are harmed by coming into existence require serious consideration: if Benatar were right, what would be the implications for Folbre’s analysis? [Emphasis mine.]

Allocate educational resources to each child according to needs and talents. Is that too difficult? Rationing success means incubating failure and sowing the seeds of social upheaval.

“Allocate educational resources to each child according to needs and talents.”

The problem is that these usually point in opposite directions, aside from some obvious cases.

Is there any reason you are particularly concerned about the children who expect to inherit wealth? I know that children with low-income parents on average do badly at school far more often than the children of middle-income backgrounds, I didn’t know that the children of the ultra-rich tend to have similar problems. Can you cite some statistics?

Going backwards;

No, not my field though I would say that two of the privileges of great wealth are privacy and elite numbers, both would ten to make good sats easy to come by. Our fearless Decider could be cited as an example, but he is far from alone. I’ve known growing up as well as taught many from well above median [income] who were quite the bad asses, who while not ignorant were uninterested. Most would snap out at one point or another, which from my POV was largely because of the ‘family carrot’ being dangled in front of them and its’ possible retraction. But my main point was that many of the “children of the ultra-rich” have indeed benefited from, like the rose under a different name, is welfare. It comes in many more forms than just direct monetary support or food stamps, it may in the form of the siting of a landfill or highway, or how legislative districts are drawn on a map, or how much inheritance they may lose to taxes.

Notsneaky,

Regarding 54, the case can be made that the farther the child is from the center of the normal distribution, in either direction, the greater the educational expenditure should be. At one extreme, a large investment is justified to avoid a significant future dysfunction. At the other extreme, a large investment is made to reap a favorable future return.

Ingrid, there are lots of other ideas that sound crazy that someone or another has said. Must we consider every single one of them? Benatar’s are so far from the beliefs and conviction of about 99% of the population anywhere in the world that taking them into consideration, unless they are refuted and rejected, will produce a conclusion that will convince almost no one, and for that reason will be effectively stillborn. And the refutation of Benatar will take decades. (Convincing the American population that Benatar is right would be more difficult and more unlikely than converting them to Buddhism, which has its attractive qualities).

25 or 30 years ago Rorty wrote something wondering why philosophers don’t seem to be named to blue ribbon panels discussing political and social issues. I immediately imagined a philosopher beginning a session on something like welfare reform with a brain-in-a-bottle argument about other minds. To me, in the present context Benatar’s argument of the the brain-in-the-bottle type.

If you follow the logic of maximizing return on educational investment, the distribution of subsidy should be the mirror image of the talent distribution, or a bathtub shaped curve, with the high needs and high benefits kids getting the most and the OK kids getting the least. The figure of merit is how much DIFFERENCE each dollar per kid spent will make to the future welfare of society. The OK kids will be OK with modest expenditures. The prodigies and handicapped will show a big swing in results per dollar.

Unfortunately, this optimal allocation gives the parents with the fewest votes the most money and the parents with the most votes the least money. Now you know why parents with handicapped OR gifted children feel shortchanged by their public schools. The schools favor the kids at the center of the talent distribution.

Did Leo Strauss waltz?

“the unequal distribution of innate talent and the problems of personality disorder and substance abuse, all of which have heavily genetic influences.”

Isn’t it odd how each wave of poor immigrants in the US is diagnosed as having intractable personality disorders and substance abuse problems. (Drunken Irishmen were once considered physiologically incapable of responsible work.) Those candid middle class taxpayers are investing in their kids out of selfish instincts, and no amount of rationalization will conceal their motives.

I would also like to add that I am not specifying any particular ethnic group where all the social challenges originate. There is a wide range of diversity of talent both within and between differently evolved ethnic clusters. There is not one population cluster from which the majority of individuals are incapable of contributing to a modern post-industrial society.

there are public schools in NYC with leaking roofs and rules that prevent textbooks from being removed from the classroom.

I’m not trying to disparage the discussion of educational policy at all, but how about we first make sure that all pupils are provided with a decent learning environment and access to educational resources.

62: HH: The figure of merit is how much DIFFERENCE each dollar per kid spent will make to the future welfare of society.

You assume that an extra dollar will have an impact on the future welfare of society. There is no evidence that, at developed-country funding levels, an extra dollar has any impact on educational outcomes. I therefore find it doubtful that an extra dollar will have an effect on the future welfare of society.

The OK kids will be OK with modest expenditures. The prodigies and handicapped will show a big swing in results per dollar.

This assertion is wrong. If prodigies and the handicapped showed a big swing in results per dollar, we should see the countries and schools that spend more per student having better results than the ones that spend less (even if the OK kid doesn’t respond at all, the improvement in the prodigies and handicapped should bring up average test scores). We don’t see this.

The argument about dollars is a waste of time until we have an educational system that converts more dollars to better outcomes. We don’t.

Because we have such poor data on educational outcomes relative to investment, we are all groping and guessing on this issue, but it is indisputable that writing kids off leads to explicit downstream social costs. The low-performing dropouts are going to inflict direct and indirect costs that likely exceed the “savings” achieved from shortchanging them in their schooling. Pay now, or pay (more) later.

Tracy,

Surely this depends on the quality of the formal education? As I understand it, an IQ of 80 is not the same as a limit on the ability to form new memories. It strikes me as plausible that a kid with an IQ of 80 who keeps getting exposed to new knowledge in an effective formal education system would keep benefitting from it, even if they were unable to ever draw the subtler insights that a smarter child can.

Not really. I spent 6 years as a part-time private tutor (well-paid) for kids from mostly a nearby prep school and one of the better high schools in the Seattle area. Alot of the kids were in the 1150-1400 SAT range, old test, so I had a good percentage who were AP Calc. But I did get some parents who wanted their Juniors to finish Algebra 1, so I had a very good panorama of the variation in ability.

Could I get almost everyone to laboriously memorize the Pythagorean Theorem (PT) and then apply it on a sterile sheet of paper? Sure, after lots of drilling. Did they remember it 2 weeks after they scraped by with their 2.1? Not a chance. It was gone. The ability to apply an abstract concept in many different scenarios like the PT is something that requires a fairly decent IQ. Now what is possible is that someone could apprentice as a framer and learn the PT over the course of a couple of years and eventually it would be an inextricable part of their routine as a framer.

But guess what? Take them out of that specific context and they wouldn’t have a clue in how to use the PT because they’re not able to recognize the general pattern.

Can I get alot of students to pass a non-AP Calc class? Sure, with lots of one-on-one. Intuitively, I’d say that maybe half, or even a little bit more. What percentage would actually be able to go beyond rote memorization and actually understand the concepts and follow the abstract patters? Maybe 20 percent, but I’d say it’s probably less than fifteen.

So if the “under-class” becomes better educated, I am harmed how, precisely?

But they won’t become better educated. They’re incapable of being “better educated” in the sense you mean. Now if you’re talking about basic life skills: how to plan a budget, how to avoid massive debt, how to accumulate the capital to start a family, etc., then that’s a different matter. FA Hayeks’ point that central government expenditures *for* one group will almost always be *against* others; governmentally spent dollars is always a zero-sum game.

Government expenditures spent in one area are expenditures not spent in another area.

HH

Because we have such poor data on educational outcomes relative to investment, we are all groping and guessing on this issue, but it is indisputable that writing kids off leads to explicit downstream social costs. The low-performing dropouts are going to inflict direct and indirect costs that likely exceed the “savings” achieved from shortchanging them in their schooling. Pay now, or pay (more) later.

So many targets, so little time … first, what the hell is up with this mindless “writing kids off” I keep hearing about from so many otherwise intelligent people? What in the world does that mean? If it does mean anything it means placing a kid capable of only rudimentary reasoning and expecting them to sit through 12 years of classroom education when they only have the cognitive capacity to access 5. It means making professional careers such an ideal that you demean contractors, self-employed and entrepreneurs.

I have a high-end yacht detailing service for which I charge 42/hr plus materials. I also have a dual Finance/Econ degree from the U of Wash. What reaction do you think I get from girls when I tell them I “detail boats”? Trust me, it’s often somewhere between bemused empathy and utter scorn, despite the fact that I make better money than most of those “professionals” and have an absolutely dynamite work environment, stay tan and fit, and have my choice of customers.

The problem is that all of this obsession with “education”, please note the scare quotes because a lot of it is just masturbation, you end up demeaning all the jobs that don’t require a formal education.

Finally, I’m not sure what sort of “pay now” you’d like to see. Early childhood programs like Head Start are complete failures. They do nothing, and some evidence seems to suggest that they instill a negative emotional prejudice against classroom time versus similar students not in these programs. But if there is something that can be done it is certainly not by throwing more money at kids for whom we are completely already wasting valuable social resources. Teach life skills (see above).

Since I like to stick things in people’s eyes, and I’m very very good at it, I will leave you with one disturbing thought: societal control of breeding will become a political issue. I cannot tell you the numbers of people who in private want “licenses” in order for people to have kids. And I live in Seattle, where 4 in 5 of my contacts are Democrats.

What’s been called “eugenics”, a misnomer btw, will be on your radar screen sooner than you think. A government (at all levels) that can take 60 percent of each dollar earned, which for me happens at around 1700 hours, can be used to prevent people with IQs of, say, less than 85 from breeding.

Have a good night.

In my experience, this is my impression, many of the people like me who support Roe v. Wade do so not for “choice”, but in hopes as many low-IQ babies as possible are being aborted.

I’ll be damned.

Jeez…

So, Asher, your response is “I can’t do it, therefore no one can ever do it”. I find this argument rather unconvincing, just because you can’t do something doesn’t mean that no one can do it. So a question for you. Is there any evidence that could lead you to change your mind that low-IQ kids can be better educated? And if so, what is that possible evidence?

I also asked you earlier for some support for your assertion that “society is far better off from investing in the children of the 70 percent in the middle over the 15 percent at the bottom.” I also asked you to explain how I am harmed by the “under-class” becoming better educated. Can you please answer those questions?

What we do know is that there is an underclass that is pretty much constitutionally incapable of contributing to society. Whether that is closer to 20 percent or closer to 5 percent is not explicable through one particular study.

Actually I don’t know that there’s such an underclass. That’s why I’m asking you for some evidence that there is.

Quibbling over the specific point does not negate the clear reality one does exist.

Well if it is a “clear reality” you should have no trouble finding some evidence to support your assertion.

As for the rest of your points, you appear to be arguing that the only value of education is to prepare someone for a career, and thus there is no point in further educating people who are destined to be janitors and dishwashers. This implies remarkable confidence on the ability of schools to identify those students who are destined to be janitors and dishwashers, and also ignoring the value of education in life more generally, from working out the correct dose of medicine to take to arguing with the local equivalent of IRD to providing mental occupation in leisure hours.

My own opinion is that schools show considerable variation in how effective they are with students of a similar background level, depending on the effectiveness of the school. We do have systems that have been shown to be replicable for drastically improving the effectiveness of schools, even with kids of low-IQs. See http://www.projectpro.com/ICR/Research/DI/Summary.htm for an example. The first priority should be to roll those out, so every primary school student gets a state-of-the-art education. The next priority, seeing if those techniques can be adapted for high school systems. If some kids can never get to college, then perhaps they can at least cite Rudyard Kipling’s “If” poem to themselves when times get tough. And perhaps later on we will figure out how to teach vector calculus more effectively.

I do agree with you that we are using socially-valuable resources in a way that may well even harm the people we are trying to help. That’s why I energetically advocate for a proven education system like Direct Instruction rather than mindlessly chucking more money at education.

Because of people like you who refuse to address reality, people like me are giving up in droves and simply withdrawing into our own personal worlds and waiting for the implosion.

What a tragic waste of your life that I wholeheartedly encourage.