{"id":1891,"date":"2007-01-18T20:23:00","date_gmt":"2007-01-19T02:23:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/?p=1891"},"modified":"2007-01-18T20:23:00","modified_gmt":"2007-01-19T02:23:00","slug":"flaming-the-value-of-a-good-education","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/?p=1891","title":{"rendered":"Flaming: the value of a good education"},"content":{"rendered":"

Because it’s been awhile since I ripped a bad argument to shreds, and I’m feeling the urge. If you want to see the source of this, it’s a link I pulled from my subscriptions page recently. I have a distant affection for the guy who posted it, despite, or perhaps partially because of, our civil but intense disagreement on a great many issues. (We also vehemently agree on many issues, such as this one<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

But I digress. Here’s a link to the screed he admired. Please read it before reading my response, if you want to form an opinion on your own. <\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.opinionjournal.com\/extra\/?id=110009531<\/p>\n

I’m less than impressed by the argument in this piece. <\/p>\n

His claim is that schools inherently suck because they can’t make people “smarter”. The only definition he offers for smart is IQ. And then at the end he says IQ sucks. <\/p>\n

Yes, IQ is something that’s pretty stable, that was one of the attributes the people designing the test were shooting for.<\/p>\n

Only at the end does the author note that IQ has basically nothing to do with success outside school later in life. So saying that you’ll never change someone’s IQ, well, their misery in school will be different than mine, but I wouldn’t necessarily start bemoaning the terrible life they’ll have. <\/p>\n

He associates lack of education with low IQ and terrible outcomes. He hypothesizes a causal relationship: (stupid people are always makin’ trouble.) That’s not at all the claim he spent most of the editorial discussing. In fact, it appears as the second to last sentence, and is utterly unsupported in the rest of the screed.<\/p>\n

It seems like pretty lazy thinking to me.<\/p>\n

IQ is stable. The goal of school is to make people smarter. Therefore school is a waste of time. But not really. Less educated people are the source of all the trouble. If school can’t affect smartness, then smartness must affect school time. Must be that they didn’t stick around because they weren’t smart. Realize this ultimate truth, and things will be better.<\/p>\n

I disagree with his implicit goal for school. I disagree with his metric and his implicit definition of intelligence. I disagree with his fatalism. <\/p>\n

Let’s start with intelligence. I rather like the definition of intelligence offered by Howard Gardener in Multiple Intelligences. (You’ll note the author dismisses it without describing it. That would mean paying attention enough to know what the hell he’s talking about. He’s clearly much too busy for that.) Gardener describes intelligence as the ability to produce something valued by a culture. That is to say, subsistence farmers probably won’t be impressed by my knowledge of theoretical chemistry or calculus (and not because it is shamefully scant, which it is.) any more than I’ll be impressed by their intimate familiarity with various kinds of dirt, bugs, and plants. (Okay, I’d be a little impressed, but it’d go over my head pretty damn quick.) <\/p>\n

So this embeds intelligence as something dependent on culture, domain, and tools. Even assuming you were fluent in the native language of a pre-literate tribe, trying to impress them in their homeland with your computer saavy ain’t gonna get you far. Especially if you don’t have a computer. Unless you know how to hunt, gather, make tools, or the like, you’re probably not going to impress them with your intelligence. But this gets into the murky confluence of learned skill and inate aptitude. <\/p>\n

Measuring intelligence is much trickier using this definition. You can’t sit someone down, have them take a test, and walk out with a number. This moves measuring intelligence into the realm of “I know it when I see it.” I think that’s a very fair criticism of the definition. To measure the intelligence, you have to measure the outcomes. Gardner may think I need to read more of his books, and I probably do. But I still think it’s a much more useful intelligence, or, rather, set of intelligences, than whatever it is that IQ measures. <\/p>\n

Right, moving on to school. School is a brainwashing center to indoctrinate you into a particular culture, and secondarily teach you skills. School inculcates obedience, scheduling, silence, hand raising, line forming, the independence (or opposition) of the social from the intellectual, passive learning, the death of curiosity, and maintaining peaceful behavior with those who annoy you (or you’ll get detention.) You may or may not also pick up math, reading, social studies, science, and a few related topics. But you’ll get kicked out of school faster for not learning the first set of lessons than for not learning the second. Even dumb people can learn to shut up, do as they’re told (if they’re told simple things), and not hit anyone, unless they are seriously socially stupid. <\/p>\n

And finally, his fatalism. My perhaps cynical, but I’ll claim highly accurate, depiction of school notwithstanding, I think school serves valuable purposes in maintaining and improving both social order and an individual’s lot in that<\/i> social order. Schools perpetuate cultures. “Well behaved” students exhibit a kind of intelligence as defined above. (Whether the intelligence is in understanding and practicing the school rules, disobeying and concealing one’s disobedience, or a mixture of both is another question. I have no idea if Ferris Bueller knew jack or shit about algebra, but there’s no denying the boy was smart.) The entire mission of school is to teach at least one of two particular sorts of intelligence (rule following, or rule breaking without getting caught). And I would claim it generally succeeds.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Because it’s been awhile since I ripped a bad argument to shreds, and I’m feeling the urge. If you want to see the source of this, it’s a link I pulled from my subscriptions page recently. I have a distant affection for the guy who posted it, despite, or perhaps partially because of, our civil … Continue reading “Flaming: the value of a good education”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1891","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1891","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1891"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1891\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1891"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1891"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1891"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}