(2025-03-07) ZviM Childhood And Education #9 School Is Hell

Zvi Mowshowitz: Childhood and Education #9: School is Hell. This complication of tales from the world of schooling isn’t all negative. I don’t want to overstate the problem. School is not hell for every child all the time. Learning occasionally happens. There are great teachers and classes, and so on. Some kids really enjoy it. School is, however, hell for many of the students quite a lot of the time, and most importantly when this happens those students are usually unable to leave. (school is prison)

Also, there is a deliberate ongoing effort to destroy many of the best remaining schools and programs that we have, in the name of ‘equality’ and related concerns. Schools often outright refuse to allow their best and most eager students to learn. If your school is not hell for the brightest students, they want to change that. (meritocracy)

Welcome to the stories of primary through high school these days.

Table of Contents

• Primary School.
• Math is Hard.
• High School.
• Great Teachers.
• Not as Great Teachers.
• The War on Education.
• Sleep.
• School Choice.
• Microschools.
• The War Against Home Schools.
• Home School Methodology.
• School is Hell.
• Bored Out of Their Minds.
• The Necessity of the Veto.
• School is a Simulation of Future Hell.

Primary School

Peter Gray reports on the Tennessee Pre-K experiment, where they subjected four year olds to 5.5 hours a day of academics five times a week. Not only did the control group (kids whose parents applied and got randomly rejected, so this was effectively an unblinded RCT) catch up on academics by third grade, the control group was well ahead by sixth grade, and the treatment group had a lot more rule violations and diagnosed learning disabilities

NYC officials consider virtual learning to reduce class size. It seems the law requires there be no more than 20 to 25 kids in a classroom depending on grade level. So the proposed solution is to get rid of some of classrooms entirely. Transparent villains happy to inflict torture upon children

Scott Alexander asks, given Americans clearly do not know basic facts that were supposedly taught in school, but do remember things through cultural osmosis, what is even the point of school?

The answer to the puzzle, of course, is that school is not about learning.

Your periodic reminder: Characteristics of White Supremacy Culture according to the San Francisco Unified School District. Features of ‘white supremacy culture’ include Perfectionism, Individualism, Sense of Urgency and Objectivity. They end by saying we can do better. (White Supremacy Culture, loony left)

Math is Hard

A theory, from a longer thread.
David Bessis: The #1 reason why we fail to teach math: we present it as knowledge without telling kids it’s a motor skill developed by practicing unseen actions in your head. Passive listening is useless, yet we never say it. We’re basically asking kids to take notes during yoga lessons

Even getting math thought at all is increasingly hard. Here’s governor Newsom, signing a law, SB 1410, explicitly to force Algebra I to be taught to eighth graders, and all he can do is require the Instructional Quality Commission to ‘consider including’ that it be offered. What happens when they consider it, and simply say no?

High School

Florida 9th graders rebel against their Algebra 1 state exam, refuse to take it despite it being a graduation requirement, in sufficient quantities to invalidate the test.
I do not see why any test would have an attendance requirement to count?
Alternatively, if the students can simply form a union and make the school cave, let’s see what else they want to do with that power, shall we?

Even if you end up at a ‘good’ school, a 10/10 rated school, what do you get? Mostly you get a lot of wasted time.
Tracing Woodgrains: This thread is absolutely correct. Sometimes people treat “good schools” as black boxes where you put kids in and education pops out, with everything working well

The curriculum at so many schools just has terribly low expectations of what a child should be learning. Looking at the english/lit curriculum here was glum. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was disappointing at “elite” colleges now, too.

Matthew Yglesias: It’s mostly child care (for young kids) or prison (for teens) where the hope is that some learning takes place. You could teach much more efficiently but then the kids would have to go somewhere else.

Why does this continue to be true? One reason: A lot of people do not care about smart kids. Or they actively want them to suffer.

Charles Fain Lehman (1m views): I think we underrate how hard it is to provide education to a range of abilities at scale. If the smart kids are bored, that’s an okay outcome.

In other words, **** you.

Here’s a general response: if you think (as the qt does) that “so much more is possible,” provide me with an evidence-based intervention that a) reduces smart kids’ boredom and b) yields large increases in attainment. I’m happy to hear about them!

Okay, at least that is a form of the right question. I don’t know why it has to be ‘and’ here. If the smart kids are not bored, or it increases attainment, either one of those is super awesome on its own.

Here are some interventions that seem very very obviously like they do these things.

Magnet schools or tracking. Give them their own classroom with more advanced topics. Why do I even have to say this.

• Allow grade skipping, both in individual subjects and overall. If you can pass the tests, you can move up.
• Let kids acing a class do other things when bored, and ideally skip the busywork too. This could not be simpler.
• Let the kid stay home and learn from LLMs and textbooks, provided they keep passing your periodic tests. Seriously.
• Let the kid take online college classes. Arizona State University’s are $25 each and some are done by children as young as 8. Others are often outright free.

Great Teachers

There is mostly universal agreement that great teachers are much better than good teachers, who are much better than bad teachers

Strangest of all, there is no agreement that we even should in theory be firing the bad teachers and hiring good ones. It’s easier said than done, but you have to say it first. There are even those who say ‘it is wrong to attempt to get your child in front of better teachers, that’s not fair,’ which is somehow not a strawman.

The paper in question is ‘Early Mentors for Exceptional Students,’ which is a different topic than finding good teachers in general, but finds that exceptional teachers going the extra mile can massively increase the chances talented students will win honors, attend selective universities, and have the most valuable career paths. There are obvious concerns about selection effects, they did some work to minimize that but I’d still be wary. (is "mentor" the same here as "tutor"?)

Alex Tabarrok emphasizes that the highest marginal educational value is in mentoring the smartest and most talented kids to be all they can be. Having access to a mentor greatly increases the chance that our best talent truly excels.

Alas, so many in education think that when exceptional students get a chance to excel further, this is at best a nice to have, and perhaps even bad because it ‘increases inequality.’

The paper examines a nationwide merit-based teacher-hiring system in Colombia that replaced experienced contract teachers with higher test-performing new teachers. The reform decreased students’ test scores and reduced college enrollment and graduation by more than 10 percent.

From what I (read: me asking Claude questions) could tell, the policy did not in any way evaluate the teachers being replaced, or attempt to replace bad teachers rather than good teachers.

Thus, what we find here is that when we replace random existing teachers en masse with new teachers, and do so without using local knowledge and relying mostly on test scores (see Seeing Like a State) the reduction in experience and non-measured qualities overwhelmed the new teachers scoring higher on the tests.
The study goes too far when it suggests that test scores are uncorrelated with teacher quality.

Not as Great Teachers

from r/NoStupidQuestions: My son’s third grade teacher taught my son that 1 divided by O is 0. I wrote her an email to tell her that it is not 0. She then doubled down and cc’ed the principal. The principal responded saying the teacher is correct… What do I do now?
Andrew Hoyer: Ask them to enter 1 / 0 into a calculator and report back.

Andrew Rettek: People say this is fake, but as a high school senior I had two teachers and my principal tell me that 22/7 was irrational.

Elizabeth van Nostrand: One year I worked as assistant at summer school for 3rd graders. The teacher said echolocation worked because water was made of electricity, and columbus was financed by the wife of King James of Spain.

The War on Education

At any given level of education, literacy rates have fallen dramatically, despite overall literacy rates remaining unchanged. Simpson’s Paradox! But as Alex Tabarrok points out, also a scathing indictment of the educational system, pointing to both the signaling model of education and also highly expensive inflation in that signal

Schools in many places, including Palo Alto and Alameda, increasingly refuse to allow math acceleration. They flat out don’t let kids learn math at any reasonable pace, and this is allowed to continue in areas with some of the brightest student pools around

Andrew Bunner: Our district is as Niels describes. Our daughter got in trouble for working on her outside-school advanced math during class even though she finished the worksheet they were assigned.

Gallabytes: this happened to me. my parents are not remotely tech bros. they tried their best, put me in schools they felt were good, and those schools thought that the best way to enrich my math education was to make me teach the other kids. this WILL NOT HAPPEN to my children

*Niels Hoven has other examples as well, such as this one from Justin Baeder, a former principal now training other principals. Or this from his own experience, in response to Baeder asking “what would be the point?”

Niels Hoven: It’s fascinating to see “education thoughtleaders” who are not only unable to imagine the benefits of supporting high-achieving kids, they’re unable to imagine a world where it’s even possible!*

**Justin Baeder: Let’s say your kid reads many years above grade level, as mine do and always have. Guess what—that just means they run out of books to read faster than everyone else!

Pamela Hobart: just another underappreciated yet tremendously brave teacher protecting an uppity 5yo from running out of books here in South Austin, what a relief.

Niels Hoven: This article is typical of the toxic attitudes toward high achieving kids.
High achieving students are seen as “the kids who need it the least” as though they’re some kind of second-class citizen. If they learn quickly, it isn’t a success, it’s a problem to be solved

Kelsey Piper: Our schools are failing children. Some parents, mostly the rich ones, have the time and confidence to speak out about it. Then people go “oh it’s a whiny privileged people problem”. No. Your schools are also failing the children whose parents don’t know how to speak out

Entertainingly many of these same people hate private schools on the grounds that it’s bad when privileged parents opt out instead of advocating to make the schools better. damned if you do, damned if you don’t

Some places used to have standards, including standards for admission, like Thomas Jefferson High School. Then they killed many such places, so RIP, with national merit semifinalists down 50% in a year despite increased class sizes.

A lawsuit was allowed to go forward challenging NYC’s gifted programs as ‘segregation,’ including targeting Stuyvesant High School and Bronx Science. It asserts that testing for academic ability is ‘racial’ and discriminatory. The admission tests in question are very similar to the SAT. (Nyc Specialized High School)

Ozy Brennan: a question for people concerned with educational equity: if schools aren’t flexible enough to serve children who are multiple grade levels ahead, how well do they serve children who are multiple grade levels behind? (badly. it’s badly)

I also agree, for these reasons and also for others including cultural ones, that parents should have a right to see the curricula that is being imposed by force upon their children in a public school, so they know what and how their children are learning. And that a school or teacher refusing to share this information, or the state supreme court saying you don’t get to see it is a five alarm fire.

Sleep

The ultimate proof that school is not about learning is that we know school starts too early for teenagers to properly sleep and thus be ready to learn, we’ve known forever, and it is impossible to fix this.

The school responded with, “Well, we can’t adjust it now; we have a contract with the bus drivers.”

Relatedly, morning classes fail spectacularly.
Abstract: Using a natural experiment which randomized class times to students, this study reveals that enrolling in early morning classes lowers students’ course grades and the likelihood of future STEM course enrollment.

survey of undergraduate students enrolled in an introductory course, some of whom were assigned to a 7:30 AM section

School Choice

Legal battles continue (WSJ) over whether, if you decide to have charter schools at all, also allowing religious charter schools is then mandatory or forbidden. There does not appear to be middle ground

If it was mandatory, in some places charter schools would get a lot more support, and in other places they would get a lot less

Then there’s the step beyond that, those who appose privately funded private schools. People being mad that some pay for private school while also paying for everyone’s public school will never actually stop being weird to me... you are expecting parents to sacrifice their children on the alter of public pressure to improve failing schools, please speak directly into this microphone.

Tough but fair.
Politico: School choice programs have been wildly successful under DeSantis. Now public schools might close.
Chris Freiman: Netflix has been wildly successful. Now Blockbuster locations might close

The data cited in Politico says that the decline in enrollment due to increased homeschooling is modestly bigger than the increase in private school attendance, some of whom are getting scholarships to do it. Home school as always has principal-agent issues where you worry if the education is happening, if you do not trust parents to want to educate their children.

Bryne Hobart: Discussions about school vouchers, homeschooling, etc. make me feel grateful that it’s legal for us to cook for our kids, even though neither my wife nor I went to culinary school. Things could be very different.

Microschools

Microschools are an obviously great idea. The cost of private school is far in excess of the costs of hiring a teacher, renting a space and paying for plausible supply and other costs. You get the socialization benefits of school, and the flexibility and customization to not do the awful parts, and as a society we get to try different stuff.

Also, home schooling and stay-at-home parent are expensive, and now you can spread that cost around along with its benefits.

Politico: Florida Republicans, led by Gov. Ron DeSantis, want to let tiny private schools open in libraries, movie theaters, churches and other spaces where they can fit makeshift classrooms.

Florida’s policy change appears small; it allows private schools to use existing space at places like movie theaters and churches without having to go through local governments for approval.

Primer, a company poised to act as a support system for such schools, is backed by Sam Altman

The War Against Home Schools

Scientific American used to be a magazine my family subscribed to that contained cool articles about science. Now it is… something else.
The latest example of this is Scientific American’s hit piece on home schooling. Eric Hoel has a thread and a post detailing the situation.

after using a child that was not home schooled as justification for a moral panic, they cite a 36% rate of homeschooled children being reported for alleged abuse to show how horrible it is.

We estimate that 37.4% of all children experience a child protective services investigation by age 18 years.

As Hoel notes, focusing on withdraws from school only, and other details, suggest that the base rate of abuse for home school is potentially substantially below normal. At worst, it is normal.

the actual thesis of many against homeschooling, when they’re not making up things like the claims earlier in this section, is flat out that parents are not qualified to teach their children. And that those who claim that they could teach their own children things like how to read or write or do arithmetic are therefore ‘big mad’ and also presumably flying in the face of education and The Science.

Waitman Beorn: The Home Schooling Crowd is big mad. lol But also, how insulting is it to teachers who literally train specifically to teach kids of a certain age a specific subject that Ashton and his trad wife think they can do it just as well in the playroom of their log cabin mansion?

Austin Allred: Anti-homeschooling folks often have expectations of school teacher qualifications that are just wildly out of touch with reality. Jake McCoy: Dr. Waitman admitting he couldn’t teach 2nd grade math is not a great look for him.

Home School Methodology

Kelsey Piper answers questions about her private tiny home school. Parents typically teach a weekly class, student/teacher ratio is 4:1 to 6:1, full price is $1200/month/child

Comparing the Bryan Caplan home school method to Robinson’s similar one, with critique of the general framework and focus. Both focus on not helping the student, letting them work things out, with Robinson being full on ‘the student must never be helped with any problem

They assigned kids two hours of math a day. I am confused why that is needed,

why so much time in a chair doing school-style work? I don’t understand how that helps.

Of course all of it is obsolete now. If you have access to Gemini Pro 1.5 and Claude Opus, all previous learning techniques are going to look dumb.

Violeta: Re: the socialization issue with homeschooling...
I asked my 16yo daughter who went back to high-school this year “do you wanna continue next year?”
“I don’t think I’m ready for the isolation of sitting 6h with people only of my exact age and an adult speaking at us for 90% of the time, I need to socialize more.”

Aella summarizes her home school experience, listing pros and cons of the type she experienced. The cons are that parents control what you learn and who you see, and your social skills and knowledge base are different from other kids. The pros are you don’t waste massive amounts of time instead learning at your own pace, you don’t get stratified by age and you dodge a lot of toxic dynamics in normal schools

The exact opposite method is illustrated in this video, the concept of never making a child do anything they do not choose to do on their own. As several people here note, this is the ‘homeschool with no effort by doing actual nothing’ method, and by default it is absolutely be an excuse for negligence. It can also be done right, via noticing what children actually want and ensuring they find it and helping steer them, which requires work as active as other methods.

When can you teach children about law and procedure and proof? Tracing Woodgrains suggests about 8, Kelsey Piper thinks similarly

School is Hell

Michael Gibson: Why do kids hate school? If you don’t have an answer to that question then you’re not even in the conversation, let alone the debate.

Notice that teachers are saying that 95% (!) of their kids love Kindergarten (I can’t imagine they’re paying close attention, given my anecdata and this very different poll even if its sample is biased, but perhaps normies be norming), they still believe 74% love fourth grade, and even at the trough 37% are supposedly loving Grade 9.

If you force kids into a fixed location and subject them to strict control and force them to work at arbitrary stuff for roughly half of waking hours, these would be very good rates of loving the results, if the teachers are describing the kids remotely accurately (Big if. Also: Stockholm syndrome)

Remember, it could be so, so much worse.
Richard Hanania: In South Korea, 84% of five year-olds and 36% of two year-olds attend private tutoring schools. What causes a culture to go this far off the rails? This is genuinely horrifying.

Bored Out of Their Minds

for many children, it mostly makes them miserable while wasting their time.
And I’d boldly claim that this is not good.

Kelsey Piper: I’m not going to say “kids are 100% accurate at identifying the best learning environment for them”. But they will absolutely tell you “I hate school” if they hate school. They will tell you by begging you to quit your job and homeschool them, by telling you it’s okay if that means the family ends up homeless, we can set up a tent in the lot on the corner. They will tell you by pretending to be sick, and by really being sick.

If they love their school, they tell you that too. They will tell you by begging you to take them in to their school on weekends. They’ll spend Christmas break complaining that school isn’t in session.

If you’ve decided your five or six year old is too stupid to be worth listening to, you may miss the signs they’re in a really bad situation that is harming them a lot

Then there was one person who spoke up to say that kids saying they are miserable is fine, actually.

Ed Real (Teacher): Vomitous drama queen tripe. In Kelsey’s fantasy world, people are secretly wondering “why isn’t my kid begging for me to homeschool them? What’s wrong with me?”

EdReal: I think your inability to distinguish between misery and a kid whining that he’s miserable is a very big part of your delusion. Absent criminal neglect or abuse, “miserable” is not the word to use about a child’s state of mind. Not seriously, anyway.
Especially since you’re claiming these kids are “miserable” for academic reasons. I mean, social reasons, bullying, sure. But academic? Please.

Scott Alexander: I was miserable at school and begged my parents to home school me. I still endorse this 30 years later, and my parents (who refused at the time) in retrospect agree. I can’t figure out if you’re denying my existence or saying that because I was a child my feelings didn’t matter.
Ed Real: Neither. I am saying that “miserable” is not an accurate description of your state of mind. You were a bright kid who felt you could do better. Oh, well. Pretty obvious you didn’t suffer career-wise.

I think that if a child tells you they are miserable at school, chances are they are miserable at school. And yes, of course I speak from experience. Do people doubt that being constantly bored, for hours every day, is insufficient?

*Matt Bateman: People are so used to talking about minimum acceptable outcomes in education that they truly have no idea how high-variance educational outcomes can and should be.
The top quartile of students can skip grades. The top 2 percent of students can do an entire multiyear curriculum in weeks.

• what we need a richer options than "go faster", though doing that (alongside equally motivated/talented peers) would certainly be a huge improvement.

The Necessity of the Veto

As Nuno Sempere says, there are obvious problems with ‘kids decide when they get to drop out of regular school.’ At minimum, there need to be highly credible costly signals sent, rather than simply expressing a preference. Kids often have to be told to do things they don’t want to do. And you want a credible signal of how much they don’t want to be there, not one designed to get them what they want

Democracy mostly works, to the extent it works, because when things are truly terrible, people get mad and then they Throw the Bums Out. Like the children miserable at school, we do not know what we need, but we know when conditions are miserable and it is time for a change.

Interruption to highlight that yes this is a thing. There are schools where they are very strict about not allowing students to get more of an education than they are supposed to get. No books that are too advanced

Kelsey Piper: When I was in third grade at a public school, the teacher called up my mom to try to tell her that I would not be allowed to take advanced math, because the teacher thought it wasn’t healthy for girls to take advanced math. My mom objected and I got into advanced math, but I had a miserable year under that teacher, who kept me inside on detention every day on various pretexts (I’d never gotten in trouble before or since).

When I was in tenth grade, the school inexplicably assigned a person who didn’t know Calculus to teach the Calculus class. He identified the smartest boy in the class on the first day and told that boy to teach us all. He did his best.

When I say a school is bad, I mean ‘it does not teach reading’. I mean ‘it does not allow students to work ahead at their own pace’. I mean ‘the teacher was hostile to my child’. I mean ‘the teacher was sexist’ or ‘the teacher was incompetent’ or ‘the teacher was not sober’ or ‘the teacher was not familiar with the material’. Bullying and unsafety are ways a school can be bad for kids, but not only is it not the only way, in the cases I’ve run into it’s usually not even in the top three reasons why a child is miserable at school.

Under the worldview where all we can do is shuffle student bodies, school choice is suspect, probably just another way for some people to profit at the expense of others. But under the worldview where schools vary in quality and in which traits they possess, school choice (if implemented justly) is obviously a good idea

The second advantage is that children are different from each other! Some want to start at 8am because they drive their parents nuts by being up since 5 anyway. Some need to start at 8am for their job. But some work night shifts or have late risers and job flexibility and benefit from a late start. Some kids do well in orderly quiet classrooms; some do well with hubbub and flexibility. Some kids care a lot if the school allows them to work ahead, and some don’t. School choice allows people to self-sort around what works for their child.

It’s a good idea in two ways. The first is a form of accountability which isn’t about test scores. Schools where the teachers are miserable bullies will lose students to other schools that do better at hiring. Schools that don’t serve their students will lose out to ones that do.

The well-intentioned focus on standardized testing introduced the most painful costly clear-cut Goodharting I’ve seen in any industry. (Goodhart's Law)

Sarah Constantin: “surely nobody would criticize Kelsey for putting a ton of work into founding a goddamn school to make sure her kids got a good education, that’s like motherhood and apple pie”

oh no.

School is a Simulation of Future Hell

Wes: Exhibit A in why I hate school. This is from Roxie’s preschool. They don’t let the kids inside until 9am, so if they show up early, kids will often play on the playground right next to the entrance. This is now banned. The reason is “the morning transition time is very important in order for the students to begin their day ready to learn.”

One thing that I am very grateful about California is that you can just start your own school, pretty straightforwardly. There are no state fees; the legal requirements aren’t even that onerous. You and a few of your friends can get together and see if you can build something that’s good for your kids, and if it is, you can open it up to more kids.

It’s obviously not a panacea. We know that because we’ve had school choice in various forms for a while now and I observe a distinct lack of panacea around here. Incentives to solve education only get you so far if no one knows how to solve education.

When you have an unsolved problem, like how to provide just, high quality education to every child everywhere, it’s really valuable to open up the possibility of inventing and iterating and finding something better.