Alice Evans and Augustina Paglayan on schooling like a state; Frances Woolley on colon cancer screening; how the police interrogated Daniel Penny; David Brooks on elitism
Re: "Brooks makes a further error in describing elite college admissions as based exclusively on cognitive ability. That is no longer true, if it ever was."
See major empirical support for Arnold's point in Peter Arcidiacono et al.'s impressive papers about special preferences in admissions at Harvard:
"What the Students for Fair Admissions Cases Reveal About Racial Preferences":
Why shouldn't the Ivies select for beautiful and affable people of merely above average intelligence? If anything the problem is the pretense of what they are educating for. Bertie Wooster has to go to school somewhere.
"And looking at the debates that politicians had around that foundational period, what I discovered was that their goal was not to promote skills, their primary goal was to use primary education as a means to instill obedience to the state."
Nope, that's simply false, in a way that is incredibly easy and quick for any moderately intelligent person to confirm on their own. Or, even being as charitable as one can reasonably be, by assuming this is a kind of rhetorical embellishment which is intended to be understood as shorthand for "most, with some important exceptions", it's still far too misleading to salvage.
Now, in order to prove my point, I will have to ask your forgiveness in my reliance on an obscure and esoteric reference, only read by a mere handful of people, and composed by someone no one ever heard about.
Just kidding. It's Thomas Jefferson's "Notes on the State of Virginia", written while the Revolutionary War was still being fought (Query 16 tells what was done up to that point in the war to the American "Tories" i.e., British Loyalists and their seized properties). Jefferson of course was famously interested in education, and (limited) state subsidy for it, not just at the university level, but for young children as well, for example, the proposal of his bill of 1779. Notes was certainly one of the most important American books of the founding era, and, once upon a time within living memory, was required reading for anyone learning the history of the founders and that era. That's not the kind of reference for which there is any good excuse for a serious and honest scholar to either miss or ignore. The term "Slow History" had to be invented because of things like this.
The parts of that book laying out Jefferson's motivations and ideas about establishing institutions of public education are directly on point and flatly contradict the quote above. Furthermore, Jefferson came to ideas more or less contemporaneously with and likely independently of the Germanic volksschulen projects, and since his writings are much more accurately probing into the American context, whatever the Prussian were thinking is just not nearly as relevant.
Here is what Jefferson told us in clear terms was the actual intended purpose of new schooling programs, from Query 14, regarding laws and the legal system. The "revisal" refers to a major effort to revise multiple parts of the Virginia Code.
"Another object of the revisal is, to diffuse knowledge more generally through the mass of the people. ... The ultimate result of the whole scheme of education would be the teaching all the children of the state reading, writing, and common arithmetic: turning out ten annually of superior genius, well taught in Greek, Latin, geography, and the higher branches of arithmetic: turning out ten others annually, of still superior parts, who, to those branches of learning, shall have added such of the sciences as their genius shall have led them to: the furnishing to the wealthier part of the people convenient schools, at which their children may be educated, at their own expense. -- The general objects of this law are to provide an education adapted to the years, to the capacity, and the condition of every one, and directed to their freedom and happiness."
If I missed the part about indoctrinating the kids into a particular orthodoxy, ruthlessly disciplining them into obedient subjects, and delivering a steady supply of ideal workers to industry, then please point it out.
All of which is not to say that these and other similar goals may have motivated many of the people who had strong influence on the future course of American public education. Indeed, it's impossible to explain how American public education evolved without resort to at least some of those theories. Still, such goals never become the exclusive or even dominant purposes and were always in tension and compromised with the rival advocacy of the more lofty and individualist purposes like those expressed by Jefferson.
I am hampered by not being able to read that transcript, but I suspect that what Alice Evans refers to as the foundational period is not the foundation of the American republic (where, at least in New England, mass schooling long preceded Thomas Jefferson), but the re-foundation of mass education in later XIX century by elite Americans who were coming back from studies in German universities at a time when the influx of culturally distinct European immigrants (first Irish, then others in the order that circumstances prescribed), as well as industrialization, began in earnest. I first encountered this thesis [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Taylor_Gatto#Main_thesis] in an ancient Whole Earth essay called "Six-Lesson Schoolteacher".
My reaction exactly. Indeed, the early essay holds up very well. This mentality of "don't confront" anything lest one offend is an idea that needs to be confronted with full moral and practical force. With the election, we are starting to see some movement.
I'd be cautious about reading too much into the recent election results and the purported "vibe shift" and apparent increased tolerance for and quantity of counter-progressive expression. The election did seem to generate a very mild "preference falsification cascade", and many people who were underestimating support and overestimating risk simultaneously were very pleased to learn that and to update their sense of where things really stand. I think many of them are updating too far.
They are likely more underestimating the effectiveness resistance by progressives. Less personal risk, but more open opposition and disagreements. Possibly more respectful disagreement, but many cases with less.
It has a glaring and obvious deficiency. Bobos have always had zero problems actively confronting and offending and making feel bad about themselves some groups (e.g. men, the wrong kind of white people) in situations closely paralleling those for which other groups get the pseudo-nurturant treatment. Whatever causes this behavior, it appears that the over-arching commandment of Bobo-ism is _not_ "Thou shalt not confront."
Conforming to social norms like not shoplifting and carjacking is a useful skill for young people to acquire and if schools can help them acquire it along with reading and math, that all good. Unfortunately many schools do not do a very good job at that or reading or math.
One should also be careful about what norms the schools encourage conformance towards. They don’t need to be good ones we would like, and in higher education especially they are often the opposite.
Oh yes. Even in K-12 one should keep an eye on the norms being pushed. The immoral people pushing looting as justice or notions of the “oppressed” can never do wrong exist in all levels of schooling. The ones in colleges just publish more and so are easier to spot.
I think those two are linked. The teachers learn activism in college, not how to teach, and then they focus on that instead of the subjects they are supposed to teach. Incoming freshman have a lot of nonsense drilled into them even before college, and as you say very limited basic education. All that time in K-12 is filled with something, and it isn’t basic material.
When dealing with underclass people you think are probably guilty, I think you should lean towards convict.
I get all the 12 Angry Men arguments and government power blah blah blah. The reality is that mass anarchy among the lower classes is a lot more likely to lead to increases in government power and overreach which might affect you then some theoretical argument about how putting criminals back on the street might protect your rights in some roundabout way.
Not to mention the actual violence these people commit as individuals.
Brooks speaks a great truth about one thing High IQ folk are good at—rationalizing some false belief they have. This is a bit different than Arnold’s correct criticism of edu elites, their moral arrogance. Their claim of moral superiority.
Both refuse to see that colleges have been waging a war of attrition against conservatives and Republicans. Not hiring qualified professors, not promoting Reps to be deans, excluding them from decision making power. For decades. Brooks hints at it, as usual blaming Republicans, when he claims Reps are warring against Higher Ed. Reps are only now realizing that colleges have at war against them, and in losing the Ed war, the Reps are losing the culture, media, and elite wars.
The open secret college war against Republicans is the big reason that “meritocracy” is failing, because those elites falsely believe their discrimination is not anti-meritocracatic. As Arnold notes, Brooks claims but doesn’t show that the colleges have been meritocrac, because he shows how the kids of the rich get so strongly advantaged.
Brooks offers a lot of good advice at the end, sort of echoing Freddie that it’s a social mistake to push The Cult of Smart. But he’s never honest about the key issue. How should low IQ folk live, prosper, and flourish? Schooling more oriented to low IQ folk needs to be a topic that is on the table. Explicit. Honest. How should low IQ folk live?
If you’re asking how low, you’re trying to distract more than face up to facts.
The fecal immunochemical test is not the equivalent of a colonoscopy: it can discover the presence of cancer, whereas the colonoscopy can identify and remove pre-cancerous polyps, thus preventing the disease, rather than identifying it for treatment.
I don't really want to read about "Penny". I *think* he's the guy who killed the dude who was menacing everybody on the subway (?) for the 1000th time. Thus in any other era he'd be hailed as a stand-up guy, even if a smarter man would have stayed out of it. He can furnish us no guide to our chaotic, upside-down future, whatever your axe to grind.
But I think what you describe in re the guy with the bat and his supposed "misapprehension" (I'd like to leave open, just very slightly, the possibility that some people just speak the truth, in some cricumstances, and it is unwise to utterly eliminate or denigrate this option) probably illustrates how the very traits that will lead to a lot of crime - low IQ, impulsivity - will be weaponized against the public to get someone dangerous out of trouble, more often than they convict someone attempting to deal with the fallout from the left's preference for anarchy and ugliness. Clearly the impulse is the same in both cases, though.
Saying "he supplied the bat" is also too little information to be useful even anecdotally. His friend came by and said, I'm going to play some sandlot ball, could I borrow your bat? And then killed someone with it on the following Tuesday? Or: the two of them jointly agreed to mess someone up, and the dude obligingly went to get the bat to do it with, which was used by the other fellow because a bat isn't easy for two people to wield at once? Any scenario involving the latter, society should have no interest in scholastic parsing.
If the person in question is mentally retarded, then that becomes a different matter, of course.
"even if a smarter man would have stayed out of it". That's not smarter, it's just more selfish. The more people believe that those positions are correlated, the worse life in society will get.
That's a surefire way to make sure good Samaritans go extinct. Which we can all proudly pat ourselves on the back for being rapidly on our way to accomplishing.
Look, if it's hard for even a lawyer specialized in the topic to accurately predict the legal
consequences of various courses of action, and if you don't usually get a similar prediction from most other similar lawyers, then no genuine "law" worthy of the term exists at all, and any attempt to wisely balance all the best legal principles in the world can come to nothing in such circumstances.
And then, if any ordinary person sees people in trouble and is wondering whether he should be a good Samaritan, then, even assuming that lawyers can accurately predict the law, he still obviously doesn't have the opportunity to pay to retain an attorney to provide a professional opinion on the matter.
Unless the legal system consistently generously grants safe haven across a very wide spectrum of details to people in such circumstances, yes, even when people die, then the message of even one prominent prosecution is clear: don't even think about it. And people won't, not anymore.
The AMA recently changed the age at which they recommend men to get their first colonoscopy check for cancer screening. Used to be 50, now it's 45. I've asked primary care physicians and they don't like my why question. Eventually I was pointed to a summary of one study w/ weak arguments based on generalities I can't trust. I can't trust these health officials anymore...
Sorry, can’t reply directly to Handle’s smart/selfish comment. Having an issue with the website, maybe because of spotty wi-fi:
Sounds like you could ride the subway every day and soon get your wish, to make the world you want to live in by shutting down a deranged person and hopefully you would indeed manage it non-lethally. Yes. Because IQ. But if you do, you will be the patsy of the left, *because the left put him there on purpose*. No matter how many right wing podcasters or whatever they are, call you a hero.
You write: “My objection to Lakoff's view is simple and straightforward. Most citizens are adults, not children.” Another point worth making is that families are small, with face-to-face interaction; nations are large, with millions of strangers. This difference in *scale* is enormously important.
Also strikes me that Brooks is re-hashing a version of Charles Murray’s case made in Coming Apart: simplistically put, the meritocracy-sorting machine that the top colleges have morphed into are a big (main?) driver of the massive disconnect between “elites” and “non-elites.” It seems like that argument has now, 11 years on, reached its logical conclusion in the current Democratic Party base…
A "libertarian crank" is a derogatory term that typically refers to someone who espouses extreme or unconventional libertarian views in a way that seems out of touch with mainstream political thought or reality. The word "crank" implies that the person might be overly obsessive, eccentric, or dogmatic in their beliefs, often advocating for ideas that are impractical, overly idealistic, or disconnected from practical governance.
In this context, the term "libertarian crank" might be used to describe someone who advocates for a very rigid, idealized version of libertarianism — such as complete opposition to any form of government intervention, even in situations where most people would see a need for regulation or social welfare. This label is typically used to criticize people who are seen as taking libertarian principles to an extreme, or who persist in promoting these ideas in a way that seems disconnected from realistic policy debates.
Re: "Brooks makes a further error in describing elite college admissions as based exclusively on cognitive ability. That is no longer true, if it ever was."
See major empirical support for Arnold's point in Peter Arcidiacono et al.'s impressive papers about special preferences in admissions at Harvard:
"What the Students for Fair Admissions Cases Reveal About Racial Preferences":
https://www.nber.org/papers/w29964
"Legacy and Athlete Preferences at Harvard":
https://www.nber.org/papers/w26316
Strikingly, the authors also establish that special preferences are extremely distorted for offspring of Faculty and of senior administrators.
Why shouldn't the Ivies select for beautiful and affable people of merely above average intelligence? If anything the problem is the pretense of what they are educating for. Bertie Wooster has to go to school somewhere.
Here's an unpaywalled link to the David Brooks article.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/careers/how-the-ivy-league-broke-america/ar-AA1u4LW9
Thanks! Better than I feared, still flawed.
"And looking at the debates that politicians had around that foundational period, what I discovered was that their goal was not to promote skills, their primary goal was to use primary education as a means to instill obedience to the state."
Nope, that's simply false, in a way that is incredibly easy and quick for any moderately intelligent person to confirm on their own. Or, even being as charitable as one can reasonably be, by assuming this is a kind of rhetorical embellishment which is intended to be understood as shorthand for "most, with some important exceptions", it's still far too misleading to salvage.
Now, in order to prove my point, I will have to ask your forgiveness in my reliance on an obscure and esoteric reference, only read by a mere handful of people, and composed by someone no one ever heard about.
Just kidding. It's Thomas Jefferson's "Notes on the State of Virginia", written while the Revolutionary War was still being fought (Query 16 tells what was done up to that point in the war to the American "Tories" i.e., British Loyalists and their seized properties). Jefferson of course was famously interested in education, and (limited) state subsidy for it, not just at the university level, but for young children as well, for example, the proposal of his bill of 1779. Notes was certainly one of the most important American books of the founding era, and, once upon a time within living memory, was required reading for anyone learning the history of the founders and that era. That's not the kind of reference for which there is any good excuse for a serious and honest scholar to either miss or ignore. The term "Slow History" had to be invented because of things like this.
The parts of that book laying out Jefferson's motivations and ideas about establishing institutions of public education are directly on point and flatly contradict the quote above. Furthermore, Jefferson came to ideas more or less contemporaneously with and likely independently of the Germanic volksschulen projects, and since his writings are much more accurately probing into the American context, whatever the Prussian were thinking is just not nearly as relevant.
Here is what Jefferson told us in clear terms was the actual intended purpose of new schooling programs, from Query 14, regarding laws and the legal system. The "revisal" refers to a major effort to revise multiple parts of the Virginia Code.
"Another object of the revisal is, to diffuse knowledge more generally through the mass of the people. ... The ultimate result of the whole scheme of education would be the teaching all the children of the state reading, writing, and common arithmetic: turning out ten annually of superior genius, well taught in Greek, Latin, geography, and the higher branches of arithmetic: turning out ten others annually, of still superior parts, who, to those branches of learning, shall have added such of the sciences as their genius shall have led them to: the furnishing to the wealthier part of the people convenient schools, at which their children may be educated, at their own expense. -- The general objects of this law are to provide an education adapted to the years, to the capacity, and the condition of every one, and directed to their freedom and happiness."
If I missed the part about indoctrinating the kids into a particular orthodoxy, ruthlessly disciplining them into obedient subjects, and delivering a steady supply of ideal workers to industry, then please point it out.
All of which is not to say that these and other similar goals may have motivated many of the people who had strong influence on the future course of American public education. Indeed, it's impossible to explain how American public education evolved without resort to at least some of those theories. Still, such goals never become the exclusive or even dominant purposes and were always in tension and compromised with the rival advocacy of the more lofty and individualist purposes like those expressed by Jefferson.
I am hampered by not being able to read that transcript, but I suspect that what Alice Evans refers to as the foundational period is not the foundation of the American republic (where, at least in New England, mass schooling long preceded Thomas Jefferson), but the re-foundation of mass education in later XIX century by elite Americans who were coming back from studies in German universities at a time when the influx of culturally distinct European immigrants (first Irish, then others in the order that circumstances prescribed), as well as industrialization, began in earnest. I first encountered this thesis [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Taylor_Gatto#Main_thesis] in an ancient Whole Earth essay called "Six-Lesson Schoolteacher".
Read Arnold’s early essay on Brooks!
My reaction exactly. Indeed, the early essay holds up very well. This mentality of "don't confront" anything lest one offend is an idea that needs to be confronted with full moral and practical force. With the election, we are starting to see some movement.
I'd be cautious about reading too much into the recent election results and the purported "vibe shift" and apparent increased tolerance for and quantity of counter-progressive expression. The election did seem to generate a very mild "preference falsification cascade", and many people who were underestimating support and overestimating risk simultaneously were very pleased to learn that and to update their sense of where things really stand. I think many of them are updating too far.
They are likely more underestimating the effectiveness resistance by progressives. Less personal risk, but more open opposition and disagreements. Possibly more respectful disagreement, but many cases with less.
It has a glaring and obvious deficiency. Bobos have always had zero problems actively confronting and offending and making feel bad about themselves some groups (e.g. men, the wrong kind of white people) in situations closely paralleling those for which other groups get the pseudo-nurturant treatment. Whatever causes this behavior, it appears that the over-arching commandment of Bobo-ism is _not_ "Thou shalt not confront."
Yes, very prescient.
I suspect that american health care cost numbers are grossly inflated because of insurance being a tax write off for employers
everyone in this system including the ultimate payer benefits from nominally high prices
so cost to benefit calc is way off
Conforming to social norms like not shoplifting and carjacking is a useful skill for young people to acquire and if schools can help them acquire it along with reading and math, that all good. Unfortunately many schools do not do a very good job at that or reading or math.
One should also be careful about what norms the schools encourage conformance towards. They don’t need to be good ones we would like, and in higher education especially they are often the opposite.
I agree, but I understood the context to be K-12.
Oh yes. Even in K-12 one should keep an eye on the norms being pushed. The immoral people pushing looting as justice or notions of the “oppressed” can never do wrong exist in all levels of schooling. The ones in colleges just publish more and so are easier to spot.
Yeah, that too, if it happens. But I don't think that's much of a problem in K-12 compared to inadequate instruction in the basics.
I think those two are linked. The teachers learn activism in college, not how to teach, and then they focus on that instead of the subjects they are supposed to teach. Incoming freshman have a lot of nonsense drilled into them even before college, and as you say very limited basic education. All that time in K-12 is filled with something, and it isn’t basic material.
When dealing with underclass people you think are probably guilty, I think you should lean towards convict.
I get all the 12 Angry Men arguments and government power blah blah blah. The reality is that mass anarchy among the lower classes is a lot more likely to lead to increases in government power and overreach which might affect you then some theoretical argument about how putting criminals back on the street might protect your rights in some roundabout way.
Not to mention the actual violence these people commit as individuals.
Better the innocent urban poor get convicted than the guilty urban poor go free.
With respect to intelligence and moral discernment I am reminded of the following quote:
“Intelligence is like four-wheel drive. It only allows you to get stuck in more remote places.”
― Garrison Keillor
Brooks speaks a great truth about one thing High IQ folk are good at—rationalizing some false belief they have. This is a bit different than Arnold’s correct criticism of edu elites, their moral arrogance. Their claim of moral superiority.
Both refuse to see that colleges have been waging a war of attrition against conservatives and Republicans. Not hiring qualified professors, not promoting Reps to be deans, excluding them from decision making power. For decades. Brooks hints at it, as usual blaming Republicans, when he claims Reps are warring against Higher Ed. Reps are only now realizing that colleges have at war against them, and in losing the Ed war, the Reps are losing the culture, media, and elite wars.
The open secret college war against Republicans is the big reason that “meritocracy” is failing, because those elites falsely believe their discrimination is not anti-meritocracatic. As Arnold notes, Brooks claims but doesn’t show that the colleges have been meritocrac, because he shows how the kids of the rich get so strongly advantaged.
Brooks offers a lot of good advice at the end, sort of echoing Freddie that it’s a social mistake to push The Cult of Smart. But he’s never honest about the key issue. How should low IQ folk live, prosper, and flourish? Schooling more oriented to low IQ folk needs to be a topic that is on the table. Explicit. Honest. How should low IQ folk live?
If you’re asking how low, you’re trying to distract more than face up to facts.
The fecal immunochemical test is not the equivalent of a colonoscopy: it can discover the presence of cancer, whereas the colonoscopy can identify and remove pre-cancerous polyps, thus preventing the disease, rather than identifying it for treatment.
I don't really want to read about "Penny". I *think* he's the guy who killed the dude who was menacing everybody on the subway (?) for the 1000th time. Thus in any other era he'd be hailed as a stand-up guy, even if a smarter man would have stayed out of it. He can furnish us no guide to our chaotic, upside-down future, whatever your axe to grind.
But I think what you describe in re the guy with the bat and his supposed "misapprehension" (I'd like to leave open, just very slightly, the possibility that some people just speak the truth, in some cricumstances, and it is unwise to utterly eliminate or denigrate this option) probably illustrates how the very traits that will lead to a lot of crime - low IQ, impulsivity - will be weaponized against the public to get someone dangerous out of trouble, more often than they convict someone attempting to deal with the fallout from the left's preference for anarchy and ugliness. Clearly the impulse is the same in both cases, though.
Saying "he supplied the bat" is also too little information to be useful even anecdotally. His friend came by and said, I'm going to play some sandlot ball, could I borrow your bat? And then killed someone with it on the following Tuesday? Or: the two of them jointly agreed to mess someone up, and the dude obligingly went to get the bat to do it with, which was used by the other fellow because a bat isn't easy for two people to wield at once? Any scenario involving the latter, society should have no interest in scholastic parsing.
If the person in question is mentally retarded, then that becomes a different matter, of course.
"even if a smarter man would have stayed out of it". That's not smarter, it's just more selfish. The more people believe that those positions are correlated, the worse life in society will get.
Also, where there are multiple possible principles at work in a legal system: there is no reason that one of them should hold primacy over the others.
That's a surefire way to make sure good Samaritans go extinct. Which we can all proudly pat ourselves on the back for being rapidly on our way to accomplishing.
Look, if it's hard for even a lawyer specialized in the topic to accurately predict the legal
consequences of various courses of action, and if you don't usually get a similar prediction from most other similar lawyers, then no genuine "law" worthy of the term exists at all, and any attempt to wisely balance all the best legal principles in the world can come to nothing in such circumstances.
And then, if any ordinary person sees people in trouble and is wondering whether he should be a good Samaritan, then, even assuming that lawyers can accurately predict the law, he still obviously doesn't have the opportunity to pay to retain an attorney to provide a professional opinion on the matter.
Unless the legal system consistently generously grants safe haven across a very wide spectrum of details to people in such circumstances, yes, even when people die, then the message of even one prominent prosecution is clear: don't even think about it. And people won't, not anymore.
I was talking about the right not to “self-incriminate”, not sure what you’re going on about.
The AMA recently changed the age at which they recommend men to get their first colonoscopy check for cancer screening. Used to be 50, now it's 45. I've asked primary care physicians and they don't like my why question. Eventually I was pointed to a summary of one study w/ weak arguments based on generalities I can't trust. I can't trust these health officials anymore...
Sorry, can’t reply directly to Handle’s smart/selfish comment. Having an issue with the website, maybe because of spotty wi-fi:
Sounds like you could ride the subway every day and soon get your wish, to make the world you want to live in by shutting down a deranged person and hopefully you would indeed manage it non-lethally. Yes. Because IQ. But if you do, you will be the patsy of the left, *because the left put him there on purpose*. No matter how many right wing podcasters or whatever they are, call you a hero.
You write: “My objection to Lakoff's view is simple and straightforward. Most citizens are adults, not children.” Another point worth making is that families are small, with face-to-face interaction; nations are large, with millions of strangers. This difference in *scale* is enormously important.
Also strikes me that Brooks is re-hashing a version of Charles Murray’s case made in Coming Apart: simplistically put, the meritocracy-sorting machine that the top colleges have morphed into are a big (main?) driver of the massive disconnect between “elites” and “non-elites.” It seems like that argument has now, 11 years on, reached its logical conclusion in the current Democratic Party base…
Per ChatGPT.
A "libertarian crank" is a derogatory term that typically refers to someone who espouses extreme or unconventional libertarian views in a way that seems out of touch with mainstream political thought or reality. The word "crank" implies that the person might be overly obsessive, eccentric, or dogmatic in their beliefs, often advocating for ideas that are impractical, overly idealistic, or disconnected from practical governance.
In this context, the term "libertarian crank" might be used to describe someone who advocates for a very rigid, idealized version of libertarianism — such as complete opposition to any form of government intervention, even in situations where most people would see a need for regulation or social welfare. This label is typically used to criticize people who are seen as taking libertarian principles to an extreme, or who persist in promoting these ideas in a way that seems disconnected from realistic policy debates.