A few days ago, I cross-posted an essay on education by a woman named Jessica Wildfire. This will be my response and rebuttal, but to do this fairly and thoroughly requires clarity and context.
On Definitions and Context
Some words are used so differently by different people that they functionally serve almost no purpose anymore. Two good examples of this are “Christian” and “feminist.” Both the Westboro Baptist Church and Pete Buttigieg claim to be Christians. What word could possibly mean anything if there’s any legitimate view that allows both of them to use the same word?
Some who also claim to be Christians would say the Westboro folks are truthful but Buttigieg is lying. Others would say the reverse. Still others would say they’re both truthful, but one or the other is deeply misguided. Still others would regard the word “Christian” to mean something like “of or pertaining to the cultural norms of the West, post-enlightenment,” a broad view that would allow even atheists like myself to claim to be Christian.
Likewise with the word “feminist.” Some people think it means “women should be permitted to pursue any choice of career they wish and receive equal pay for equal work.” Others think it means “a belief system that insists all heterosexual sex is a form of rape and all mothers are participating in a kind of slavery.” Under the current transgender regime, some would say that who’s a feminist depends on who agrees with them about whether males who identify as women actually are.
With both of these words, in most circumstances, clarity and agreeing on definitions should be the initial part of any conversation.
I mention these things because Wildfire’s question—Do Americans Really Care About Education?—isn’t what it sounds like. She’s not really asking if Americans care about education in the sense of educating our children to become citizens, or preparing them for adult life by providing them the opportunity to learn what they need to know.
She is asking if Americans actually care about the public school system—the edifice of it, and the various roles in it played by teachers, staff, and students.
My response—that yes, Americans really do care about education—is based on the premise that her definition of education is nonsense, limited and ideological in the extreme.
What I Think About the Public School System, And Why
I have an unusual perspective on the public school system—at least, I think I do— because I have had unusual experiences surrounding it.
I live in a state with a top 5 education system, and have tutored students from ages seven to sixteen. I employ a local college freshman, and have since the start of her senior year of high school, to run errands for me. She has three younger siblings still enrolled in local schools, and we discuss both her past experiences and the current ones of her siblings regularly. And when I was in college, I tutored several education majors, which shaped my perspective of the sort of people who become teachers.
Here’s what I think about the public school system: it’s failing miserably, in every way, and for multiple reasons.
Failures of Expectations
Local students here in Vermont are not required to meet any deadlines and face no meaningful consequences for failure. They have “due dates” in theory, but in practice the only true due date is the day that final grades are computed and posted online. Anything a student turns in before then will be evaluated and used to improve their final grades. Grades are de-emphasized, when they’re used at all. Emphasis is placed on making students feel good about both school and themselves.
I see wisdom in this approach for little kids. For children who are too young to be expected to keep up with deadlines, or to plan and execute a long-term project, this approach helps to facilitate enjoyment of both learning and school itself. For very young children, I see no problem with grades reflecting effort and little else. When a young child gives his/her best effort, a good grade is appropriate, to serve as both a symbol of achievement and a motivation to continue giving his/her best effort.
However, expectations must change as the child ages and matures. Grades must transition to represent more than just effort—they must reflect an actual measure of what was learned. And there must be meaningful conequences for failure to meet deadlines. Learning to plan, prioritize, and meet expectations are crucial skills. Schools who fail to require this of students, once the student is developmentally capable of such, are failing them miserably.
One of my tutoring clients is an extremely bright 16-year-old boy who has been in Vermont public schools all his life. He has never been required to meet a deadline, and has inculcated this mindset so entirely that he thinks of homework not as practice, but as a potential bonus he may deign to complete and turn in if, a few days before grades would be final, he wants some bonus points to raise his final grade. He also refuses to do projects that he finds boring, unless he needs the extra points when grades are almost final to get the grade he wants.
He is going to be completely hosed when he goes to college, unless his parents or his first college advisor or someone else gets it through his head that college is different—and teaches him all the prioritizing and planning skills he missed during his journey through K-12.
Failures of Curriculum
Common Core, not to put too fine a point on it, sucks. I’ve studied the mathematics curriculum more than any other, and it’s a tragic case of good intentions gone amok — the failure to understand how actual schools work, and why. No matter how lofty the Common Core intentions are, the teachers are what matters. Any curriculum plan that doesn’t incorporate how and why teachers are assigned, and what individual classes and teacher/student situations look like, is worse than useless.
Their One Success: Indoctrination
Our schools have political activism as a primary focus, and turning kids into activists is their primary goal.
When I tutored education majors, I consistently met the most Woke of the Woke. They were always white, mostly women or obviously gay men, and our tutoring sessions would start with something like a Tumblr-style privilege declaration. In the initial, get-to-know-you-and-why-you-want-tutoring session, they would always make sure I knew all the Tumblr things—their sexual orientation, disabilities (including mental health diagnoses), whether they grew up poor, middle class, or rich, etc. Anything that could conceivably give them the slightest oppression point was trumpeted. These students were always activists, and I would occasionally poke a bit, hoping to make them see the stupidity of their positions. It never worked. Conversations went like this, more than once:
Tutoring client: “We have to stop at 5:30 because I’m due at (local homeless shelter) at 6 to help serve dinner.”
Me: “Oh, that’s nice. Do you get to interact with the residents much?”
Tutoring client: “Oh yeah, we talk to them the whole time we’re serving and usually we sit down and eat with them.”
Me: “That must give you a good opportunity to talk to them about their white privilege.”
Tutoring client: “OMG, totally. You’d be shocked how uneducated some of them are. They really have no idea how much harder it is for POC to be homeless.”
My part-time employee, who graduated from the local high school and whose three younger siblings are all still students, has told me the following stories in the last few months:
Her teenage brother is such a rarity, being an ordinary straight boy who dresses and acts like a boy and claims no queer identities of any kind, that the handful of girls who likewise claim no queer identity of any kind fight over him.
Her youngest sibling, a 6-year-old boy, came home in tears after the most recent school-wide efforts at transgender awareness. After his class had multiple transgender kids’ books read to them, he thought (being, you know, six years old) that he had to become a girl when he grows up. Her parents had to call the teacher and ask if the class could possibly read some other kids’ books for awhile?
She and her parents have had to comfort the youngest repeatedly because classmates tell him that he’s going to die because he didn’t get the COVID vaccine. One classmate tells him things like, “My mommy says I can’t play with you because when you die from COVID I’ll be too sad.”
I help several families, both local and distant, homeschool, all of whom left the public school system for reasons related to these issues.
Wildfire’s Take on the Public School System
Wildfire’s piece (which I cross-posted a few days ago, anticipating that I’d be writing this, but you can read here if you haven’t already) is in response to recent media coverage of pandemic “learning loss,” which she finds pointless and insulting.
She asserts the following:
That test scores are worthless, so using them to measure pandemic “learning loss” is pointless.
COVID has caused brain damage in kids, which is the reason for any “learning loss.”
Teachers are underpaid, underappreciated, overworked.
The problem with American students isn’t: phones, a mental health crisis, or anything else. It’s capitalism.
These points are used to support her thesis that Americans don’t actually care about “education” (by which she means the public school system, only—she gives no attention to private, parochial, or home schooling as options for education).
Wildfire’s First Argument: Test Scores
For the sake of argument, let’s assume that test scores are even worth paying attention to. (They’re not.)…We know that standardized tests don’t work. They do a terrible job measuring anyone’s knowledge or learning. It’s been covered over and over.
This is an interesting argument on one level. I don’t have a particularly high view of standardized testing, myself. Multiple choice tests can be very easy for even a smart person to do terribly on. I hated those tests, especially questions asking the test-taker to eliminate the one that doesn’t belong. It was common for me to have a logical reason to eliminate each one, and I would have to guess what the test designer would have been thinking. Here’s a good example:
Which is the odd one out?
A. Fork
B. Spoon
C. Knife
D. Axe
E. Drill
Fork is the only one used for both eating and navigation — take the fork in the road.
Spoon is the only one used for both eating and to describe a type of human physical contact — spooning in bed.
Knife is the only one that begins with a silent letter.
Axe is the only one used to fell trees and the only one commonly joined with a crime (“axe murder”).
Drill is the only one that is used for both building and as a conversational technique—drill down until the conversation gets to the truth.
So what’s the “right” answer? No clue.
Of course, standardized tests have many types of problems other than “odd one out” questions, but I wanted to show an example of one way in which they really aren’t suited to measure creativity, originality, or other things we care about.
I don’t think tests of this nature are particularly valuable for mathematics, for which producing your own work — in the form of proofs (mathematical arguments) — is far and away the best way to learn. Nor for English, because what matters most is the ability to communicate fluently in writing.
But this doesn’t make the tests “utterly worthless.”
What test scores absolutely can do, is provide a standard measure. They may not measure much of anything we care about, but they do a better job than anything else. High school students in schools with grade inflation may get straight A’s while actually knowing significantly less than students in more rigorous schools. A standardized test provides an objective measure that is the same for all test-takers, which is an absolute necessity in a country with so many disparate school systems run by so many different types of people at so many different levels of government.
As such, it provides objective information about the performance of one school or region against others, and this is valuable even if we don’t particularly care about whatever it is that the test measures.
Wildfire’s Second Argument: COVID Brain Damage
None of these stories mention the very obvious and glaring fact that Covid causes brain damage. That’s not a secret anymore…
The real story is hiding in plain sight. Bankers and hedge fund managers forced students back to school so they could force their parents back to work. Everyone got Covid. Now they can’t think straight anymore.
Wildfire believes—she is utterly serious about this—that COVID has caused widespread brain damage (in everyone but her and her fellow college professors, presumably, as the possibility that she is suffering from brain damage, herself, is never mentioned).
I am dubious but agnostic (meaning, I could be convinced with good evidence) about all the claims related to widespread “brain damage” and “long COVID” — mentioning the latter because the people pushing this “brain damage” line are the same ones who argue that fully 25% (or more) of people who get COVID get “long COVID.” I will note this from the following demographic report on “Long COVID”:
“Long COVID” is an illness that carries enormous social cachet, sufferers of which gain social status and major “oppression points” in our current scheme of importance-based-on-victimhood, and which women and trans people are most likely to get (by significant margins).
If I wanted to make a prediction about what “illnesses” are most spread by social contagion, my first prediction would be that women and trans people are most likely to get it.
The idea that American students are doing badly in school as a result of widespread brain damage from COVID seems….unlikely, at best. I am willing to be convinced I’m wrong about this, but I need to see something more than declarations of “brain damage” or vague references to “brain fog” from “Long COVID.”
Wildfire’s Third Argument: Teachers are Underpaid, Unappreciated.
It’s also worth pointing out that almost all the good, veteran teachers have either quit, or they’re about to quit. States are so desperate for teachers now, they’re relaxing or even eliminating certificate requirements. In some states, you don’t even need a college degree anymore.
Americans have always said anyone can be a teacher.
Now it’s true.
Most of them don’t make enough to support their families. They have to work extra jobs. When they hear about the plight of teachers, their eyes glaze. They get annoyed. They immediately shoot back, why should we pay teachers more?
What makes them so special?
Wildfire has a point here — Americans do tend to think that anyone can be a teacher.
That’s because, well, anyone can be a teacher.
Teaching in the classroom sense is one subset the broader skill of teaching — and nearly everyone has actively used that broader skill. Every parent is a teacher. Nearly every job, from minimum wage grocery store workers to high-powered professional tracks, requires training, supervising, mentoring — all of which are, surprise surprise, synonyms for teaching.
Effective teaching is, above all, knowing what you’re talking about and having good theory of mind. If you know what you’re trying to teach and you know roughly what your student is seeing and understanding, you can match your instruction to where they are.
This isn’t always easy, of course. But it’s also not always hard. It’s not even usually hard. Teaching is a knack, a talent, at least as much as it is a skill that is learned in colleges of education. In my opinion and based on my experience, it’s a knack or talent far more often than it’s a skill learned in colleges of education.
College professors, private school teachers, parochial school teachers — many (even most) of the places where the most effective education happens in our country are places where a degree in education is rarely (if ever) something the teachers have at all.
Teachers, in our system, receive what Wildfire calls “vocational awe,” but this has much more to do with their strategic timing. They are positioned, by virtue of spending 6 hours a day, 5 days a week, with young children, to be influential figures in children’s lives. As children grow older, they are positioned to influence the passion that kids develop and/or maintain for various endeavors, types of information, intellectual disciplines.
Teachers receive “vocational awe” because almost everyone has a particularly good or bad memory of a teacher, one that shaped their future choices — not because teaching is some rarefied skill that deserves awe and reverence.
As to being underpaid, the 2022 average was $66,397. That’s right at the American median household income, and it comes with a tenure system ensuring almost total job security, good benefits, and the same vacation days, including summers, that students get (for the most part; some do take training or continuing ed during at least some summers).
Teachers are not supremely well-paid, but that’s not the same thing as being underpaid.
Wildfire’s Fourth Argument: the Problem is Capitalism
We can’t fix education until we address the larger problems. It’s not test scores. It’s not phones. It’s not a mysterious mental health crisis. It’s a system designed to prepare young people for a life of exploitation.
This is just silly. It’s not phones? Really? So I suppose that Big Tech specifically designs addicting algorithms to do dopamine-jacking and cause us all to have fragmented attention spans — why? For shits and giggles?
It’s not a mental health crisis? Again—really? She looks at this culture and sees an epidemic of mentally healthy, well-adjusted kids?
Teenagers aren’t stupid.
They’ve figured it out.
They hear our politicians talking about cutting social security. They see the planet overheating. They see their leaders doing nothing. They get it. They know they’re being set up to spend the rest of their lives working to support an aging class of affluent baby boomers, who plan to throw them away once they’ve got robots good enough to replace them.
Ah, but of course. The problem is that teenagers are so full of wisdom and understanding that they see much better than adults three to five times their age what should be done about various problems. Their despair comes from being powerless to effect their great wisdom into policy.
This is just so dumb. Teenagers who choose career paths with in-demand skills (as opposed to, say, explicating poetry — Wildfire is a PhD in English) can look forward to exploiting the free market system to earn a good living.
This may necessitate choosing a path that leads to something other than orgasms of intellectual joy, of course. I get it. I love mathematics, but it’s hard. It’s difficult. I did thousands of hours of homework and still feel like I’m barely keeping my head above water sometimes.
If I went to college to “follow my bliss,” I’d have an MFA in creative writing, an MFA in studio art, $250,000 in debt, and I’d be considering jobs earning $4,000 per class taught, per semester, at a community college.
It’s almost like….some skills are more needed and harder to learn than others, and correspondingly earn higher pay.
Wildfire’s Conclusion
We could design a really kickass education system if we wanted to. We could pay teachers well. We could make a curriculum that prepared everyone for 21st-century jobs. We could give students choices about what classes to take…We could give them more time to play outside, or just read a book. We could listen to real education experts instead of bureaucrats and corporate flunkies.
It wouldn’t even be that hard….
Here she gives the lie to her earlier bullshit about brain damage. If the problem is brain damage, none of these things matter. Students who are too brain-damaged to succeed in mandatory classes will need to use those same, damaged brains to take classes they choose.
Everyone, I think, would love to see kids play outside more and read more books. That’s something parents will have to facilitate and encourage.
As to “real education experts,” she means people like her.
People who think our kids are brain damaged, our system is fundamentally corrupt, and that the real problem isn’t phones, a lack of personal responsibility, broken families, an ever-coarsening culture, or any of the other myriad problems contributing to our kids’ educational failures.
People who can only chant in unison, “The problem is capitalism!”
People who want to tear down the greatest innovation-creating engine in the history of the universe.
People who want to impose their values, top-down, on everyone else, instead of letting people decide for themselves and letting the market sort things out.
No thanks.
About My Substack: I’m a junior data scientist (two years experience and presently job-hunting if you’re hiring). My great love is mathematics, but I also enjoy writing. My posts are mostly cultural takes from a broadly anti-Woke perspective—yes, I’m one of those annoying classical liberals who would’ve been considered on the left until ten seconds ago. Lately I’ve regained a childhood love of reading and started publishing book reviews. My most widely useful essay may be this one, about how to resist the demon of self-termination.
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The question, “Do Americans care about education?” seems to me to have a broader context and a narrower answer. I’ve my own view of part of this in my substack:
https://alexanderscipio.substack.com/p/jfks-eo-10988-unionized-teachers
But to the point:
Do Americans care - THAT - we have a broad public Ed system? Yes, no other way seems to exist to create an educated franchise for a Democratic republic. Besides, who’s gonna sit the kids while mom is out earning more status, that extra car or bigger house? (As if anything is more important than raising the next generation… but I digress.)
Do Americans care - WHAT - that system is, how it functions, or its results? That’s a firm “No.”
If we cared, teachers would not be unionized, allowing the rejection of merit in all hire/fire decisions.
If we cared, those kids, of whom we too-often see videos of beating the crap out of a teacher, all immediately would be jailed rather than be allowed to continue to cow teachers and prevent other students from learning. Or just hanged as the damage they do to their victims will determine life choices for those victims who, more than likely will be less than they otherwise would have been.
If we cared, the Schools of Ed would not be populated by “the dregs of the academic community” (former Dean, BC School of Ed), but by our best and brightest rather than our dumbest and dimmest.
If we cared, our best & brightest would be compensated higher (because capitalism and chasing the best who have more work choicrs), they’d be providing actual value, not the grade-less, homework-less, urgency-less, honesty- and integrity-less pabulum & propaganda found today from K-BA/BS. As educated kids grew into educated parents and taxpayers, they’d know the value of good teachers and that they are worth the expense. And they would have the wherewithal to pay them more because they’d not elect the utter morons we today elect to spend trillions we don’t have to buy votes from uneducated people.
Liberal Arts (i.e. education - all else is training) would lead any K-12 & college curricula and not have been thrown out or bastardized and corrupted to the point it has - a Lib Arts grad today knows virtually nothing. (I’m an English major from 1977.)
So: do Americans care about education? No, but they pat themselves on the back for pretending to - itself a product of not caring, in any real sense, about education.
It's curious that the most vocal advocates for "democracy" regularly disparage the single most democratic institution in human history: the free market.