The Unprofessional Boy #10
Buildups, teardowns,
Ninety years [and seven days] ago, this day was significant enough to be given a name external to its broken-down etymology; it was anointed Black Tuesday, as the stock market crash of 1929 peaked and the Western world settled into the Great Depression.
There were Hoovervilles in Central Park. There were Hoovervilles along the Schuykill. Despite my Empire-skewed geographic habitation, I’ve now rowed exclusively in the latter.
We did pretty well.
Now, I’ll do it, attempting to rewind the tape to pretty much first principles. The goal of educating individuals, students, or a populace, can be multifaceted; if we break this complex nature down, though, we are able to identify a number of foundational reasons for the existing institutions. It follows, naturally, that my aim is here to sketch a devision for a system which would more effectively and efficiently accomplish these goals. Thus, rather than make direct replacements, I will seek to challenge those assumptions which are self-serving.
Foundational Requirements:
The fundamental, all-encompassing intent (ideally,) of schooling, in any capacity, is to craft a better person, whether all-purpose or for a specific career; this is accomplished by conferring
Concrete, measurable skills, which are imparted through more directed study, and
Ineffable self-reflection, philosophy, decision-making, reasoning, etc., which conveniently props up humanities classes.
I jest, of course, but —broadly, and reductively— the main distinction to be considered in the value proposition of an educational curriculum is between teaching ‘hard’ skills (programming, painting, writing essays) and developing soft’ characteristics/behaviors (ethics, socialization, grit.) Going forward, here’s what I’m referring to, so it’s unnecessary to wholly extrapolate from my examples: ‘hard’ means “increasing one’s ability to create work with definite results,” ‘soft’ means either “‘growing’ holistically” or something akin to “facilitating the transfer of ‘hard’ things,” the latter of which I read somewhere and I quite like the concept of.
To be Eliminated:
I’ve written a short, incomplete collection of my grievances against the current [American] systems in this Twitter thread; ultimately, I think that the problems which persist are rooted most thoroughly in the incentives and their imbalanced distribution. Let us also, then, list out these misaligned imperatives:
Measure progress accurately — Make measurement easy,
Create good individual outcomes — Standardize treatment,
Make learning interesting for the student — Make it simple for the teacher,
Maximize productivity — Minimize costs
and so on. While these trade-offs are certainly imperfect, the mental model allows us to internalize one truth: at both macro- and micro- levels, educational professionals are pushed towards creating and facilitating a standard, lowest-common-denominator (if that) track. From this process, it follows naturally that a more concrete thesis statement —a positive solution instead of mere complaints— begins to form. If we move forward more positively, with the intention of reinventing this system, we have to keep in mind why it is the way that it is
There are, of course, constraints we’ll still have to keep in mind —time, effort, capital— as with all things, but ignoring the artificially imposed ones grants us a lot of room.
Firstly, I believe that, as a whole, there should be more specialization. By this, I mean that it should be possible to offer more diverse tracks, and to alter the balance of ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ skills between them. There’s no reason that every child should take the same amount of time to learn, nor should they be focusing on the same things. If we allowed a degree of self-selection based on comparative advantage, it would benefit our society by producing a more highly educated populace as well as reducing the individual suffering of students.
This would seem to require greater resource expenditure; I would address this by stripping down other elements. Chiefly, I would render post- eighth grade optional— those who want to work, or go to trade school, or choose some alternative path, should be free to make the decision. The curriculum, additionally, would be very different. English would be concerned with basic literacy, technical writing, and assisting students in the process of developing and expressing their own ideas. Math past basic algebra would be taught as an art, if at all, for students who wouldn’t go on to use it. History would center on recent events which inform the present, and reading medieval European literature would be optional. Everyone takes statistics.
In this way, we pare down waste to focus more closely on the fundamentals, and we allow for a relevant general education with greater application to everyday life. Altogether, this looks like high-schoolers learning to be electricians, doing data analysis, or the finer points of tailoring— these more esoteric elements are accomplished through a more refined system of internship and apprenticeship. In this future, if you opt out of a high school program to work in a vetted setup, you receive the average tuition as a stipend.
In this way we decentralize to facilitate specialization. This is one preliminary thought, which addresses only primary and secondary school, and certainly doesn’t address all matters— but hopefully it provides some clarity as to specific, actionable items I might alter; that only seems fair given the frequency with which I rail against the institution as it is.
One heuristic: I believe that pain is minimized here, in large part, by eliminating bullshit
I also think, as we try to build better humans, that we should endeavour, as much as we can, to teach them
How to traverse The Fine Line Between Fear and Courage,
How to find the right hills to climb,
amongst many, many other things. The kids aren’t alright; that much is inarguable, and though I believe in them —I believe in us— damn, do I think we need some changes to get there.
Work
My latest English assignment may be of some relevance to the general themes of this newsletter, seeing as it concerns the mindset with which we face existential problems. Here’s the link to Interrogative, Imperative, and Constantly Vigilant: A Moody Perspective on Climate Media and the Media Climate; don’t worry, I didn’t call it this in my submission— had I done that, I would have needed to have even more fun with the title.
Links
There were a lot of links relating to my concept of education/crafting better humans in-text above, as well as last episode; as such, instead I’ll attach a few pieces that I read while thinking about and writing said last episode.
I’ve begun to slowly work my way through the compilation of posts entitled the Replacing Guilt series, linked to me by John Greer; they’re very thoughtful meditations on the sort of feelings I regularly have.
Tim Rooney pointed me to James Clear’s article The Proven Path to Doing Unique and Meaningful Work; I found it instructive in its simplicity. It’s the sticking-to-it that matters —I always know that, and I know I can’t see the results from here— but the post’s elaborations on that core concept resonated with me.
I think part of my problem is that I’ve developed some wide-ranging, deep ugh fields; re-reading a description of the concept continues to help me recenter and identify them as irrational patterns to be worked around and on instead of fundamental flaws.
Ben Horowitz, in Which Way Do You Run? makes the business-centered case, essentially, that we have to sprint towards ugh fields; that we must, if we are to be effective leaders. It’s critical in all domains, and I think that foundational nature is important to keep in mind. Conviction is the bedrock of any decision-making process.
Lastly, I can’t speak to the accuracy of this New Yorker Aaron Swartz post-mortem, but it explores the multifaceted nature of an ultimately tragic figure in —what seems to me as— impressive fashion. It’s easy to see one side of a story; it helps to be reminded that our universes of interpersonal interactions hinge on complexity, not consistency.
I do think it’d be cool, at some point in the future, to be able to interface with others, to truly understand their experiences and inner selves — vast quantities of art, I think, stem from that yearning (and its converse.) Until then, we have to imagine. Maybe our words and our works will be despair-inducing millennia from now. Iterations will chunder on, and brief snatches of action will survive to be inflated into caricatures. It’s a real shame we won’t be around to see it, to witness the Markov-Chain-restructures of our souls.
Re-po’d, re-sold, then re-driven,
Orion Lehoczky Escobar
And hey, sorry about last week. I’ll do my best to make up for it.