Homeschooling is in the news a lot these day, for reasons that you already know all about. So, it makes sense to give a plug here to a video interview that Amy Willis of econlin.org did recently with Bryan Caplan, which I just listened to. I got to know Caplan a bit better than before when I attended a lecture he gave last December in London about Poverty and about who’s to blame for it.
This homeschooling conversation, which lasts just under forty minutes, is very commonsensical, I think. Caplan is no zealot for snatching his kids out of school. His one big doctrinal disagreement with regular schooling of the sort his kids were getting is that he reckons maths is more important than schools generally, and his kids’ school in particular, tend to assume.
For Caplan, homeschooling began when his two older sons, twins and introverts, declared themselves to be unhappy with the school they were at. Caplan reckoned he might be able to do better, so they gave it a shot. And it would appear to have worked out well.
His younger and only daughter seems now to be happier going to school, because she likes meeting up with her friends, and because the arts-skewed curriculum appeals to her a lot more than it did to her brothers. She must be suffering a bit now. His younger son, on the other hand, is liking the new stay-at-home regime.
That being a particular thing I take from this conversation: how female-friendly and male-hostile regular schooling of the sort Caplan is talking about seems to have become. Is there a bias in homeschooling numbers between boys and girls being homeschooled? I don’t know, but I bet Caplan does.
Towards the end of their conversation, Willis and Caplan talk about Caplan’s book on education, which is entitled The Case against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money. I guess the guy’s somewhat more doctrinal than he had earlier seemed.
On the other hand, both those twins want to be college professors, and Caplan doesn’t seem to be doing anything to try to stop them.
Schooling has been skewed towards the way girls learn for scores of years. Sit still, stand in line, listen carefully to strange women you aren’t related to, do this, do that, use fine motor skills you don’t have as a boy, be compliant, seek approval, tody if necessary, use violence of language to get your way in the pecking order (the subtle, quiet violence of female culture that is difficult to trace and almost impossible to discipline), don’t challenge, don’t thrash around, accept the reward of an abstract mark as a reflection of your value.
These mostly work with girls.
These mostly do not work with boys.
It is almost never the case that girls fail in the early years of group schooling, only to find their stride in later years and clean up the field. It is not at all uncommon for this phenomenon to occur with boys, who fail or are held back and who, after doing very poorly early on, end up at the head of their class.
As for home schooling as a whole, I usually tell people that they themselves can NOT do a worse job than their neighborhood public school (I’m in the US). People seldom disagree with me. I’ve reviewed thousands of teacher’s resumes and helped hire scores of teachers. It is an intellectual wasteland out there. You do not want the majority of these people shaping the life of the mind.
Schools are boy-unfriendly because men no longer take up the teaching of kids.
In the US, I believe that over 80% of elementary school teachers are female. Of course girls are going to feel more welcome and at home in such an environment.
It isn’t just the environment. It is also the curriculum as well as the emphasis on group conformity. Boys are used to sisters and mums. But sitting around all day and being graded on motor skills they don’t have yet, is a stupid way to treat any child. It’s just not a humane model for children, but girls adapt better.
“People seldom disagree with me. I’ve reviewed thousands of teacher’s resumes and helped hire scores of teachers. It is an intellectual wasteland out there.”
Have you considered recruiting the parents you’ve talked to as teachers? Since they’re so much better?
But it’s not about doing a better job. I do all sorts of things better than the person that I employ to do it. There’s an opportunity cost — home schooling your children means you aren’t doing something you could be doing more productively.
If you are the sort of person who struggles to get or hold full time employment, like an acquaintance of mine, then homeschooling makes sense. (Although his two boys did eventually go to high school.) If you have a good job, then you no more school your children than you cobble your own shoes and make your own clothes.
Provided you ensure your kids can (and do) read when young and can do core Maths skills, then only the last years at high school matter. What Darthlaurel talks about, with boys suddenly catching up and overtaking. And the last years of high school are very hard to home school properly, because who among us is able to help with Maths, Chemistry, Biology, English, PE (at that level), Geography etc?
I have taught quite a few kids who arrived at high school having been home schooled. They needed quite a lot of patching, because their parents simply did not know that a particular skill was a core one, whereas this other skill the kid spent time on, was only only incidental. Many are really good at the theory of Maths, but struggle to get questions right because they had never spent the time practicing long question sets. Some of that boredom of school isn’t a bug, it’s a feature — many things you have to grind away at to be good. The joyful aspect of homeschooling ignores the reality that much learning is not joyful. Even the top musicians do scales.
Nullius in Verba (May 8, 2020 at 8:21 pm), I’ll let others comment on schooling, here and in the US, but as regards the possibly analogous case of NHS managers, I have heard talented NHS consultants say (in almost the same breath), to those of their offspring and friends who have demonstrated management skills in other work, that the NHS desperately needs good managers and they should apply but that they should not apply because “the bureaucracy would drive you mad and/or prevent you achieving what you are capable of.”
Nullius, There is a difference between parents who love their children and are doing the best they can in their home to teach them to read, figure, and look at the world with wonder, and a teacher going through a crap curriculum year after year.
We do, indeed, hire parents with content knowledge (as opposed to a scrap of paper that claims they are certified to teach). One school where I helped with hiring refused to hire people with an Ed. school background. They get excellent results on state and national testing, as well as college placement and scholarships.
Chester, I absolutely agree about high school. But there are more and more options for parents who aren’t willing to send their hs kids to a building filed with drugs, kids dressed like hookers, teachers who hate what they are doing, and dangerous students who prey on the weak. When patents don’t have alternative schools, or can’t afford private tuition, I think it is wrong to shame them for trying to do the best they can.
It is more than their local school district is likely doing. And they are paying twice. They pay their taxes and they pay again for the responsibility of trying to get their kids out of adolescence marginally literate.
The schools and states don’t seem to care that they graduation millions of functional illiterates every year. Why is it such a crime when a parent doesn’t meet the standard?
> home schooling your children means you aren’t doing something you could be doing more productively. <
Production uber alles. Educating YOUR children is more important.
A large problem with education is that, being so much smarter that previous generations, we have cleverly constructed a society that had no use for teenagers. We then have no alternative but to incarcerate the least academic in an education system from which they derive no benefit and act to the detriment of those who do.
A school can be an excellent place.
But sadly too many schools have become leftist indoctrination centres – and not just the government schools.
Even some of the private schools have joined the Collectivist parade -aiming to get the children into “good universities” (which are controlled by the left) and then on into “good jobs” – in the government bureaucracy and in the bureaucracies of the “Woke” Big Business Corporations (which are joined at the hip with the government bureaucracy).
So Home Schooling may well be the way to go – if you want your children to have any independence of thought and not just be mindless “Woke” Marxists chanting about “Diversity” and “Social Justice”.
Paul Marks – exactly. The parents in the US who started home schooling 30-40 years ago, when it was still illegal, were motivated by this as well as the intellectual vacuity of the curriculum and the anti-family attitude of much of the public ed administration.
And that is also the genesis of the charter school movement. Again, the idea of parents being “how can we do a worse job? At least we love our children.”
Yes, newrouter. Thank you.
Towards the end of their conversation, Willis and Caplan talk about Caplan’s book on education, which is entitled The Case against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money. I guess the guy’s somewhat more doctrinal than he had earlier seemed.
I didn’t absorb much of a doctrinal flavour to this (I haven’t read the book though.) I think the title is really :
The Case against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money.
ie he’s not doctrinally opposed to schools or to education, he just thinks the Education System, as currently constituted, is very wasteful of children’s time and taxpayers’ money. He suggests that :
(a) a very large chunk of said time and money is spent on signalling to employers – ie if I can carry this ludicrous peacock’s tail of a History degree around, I must be worth hiring.
(b) a rather small chunk is spent on children acquiring useful skills and knowledge for their adult life
(c) another fair sized chunk is spent on things that are a complete waste of time
I imagine that most of us would think that (b) is worth spending time and money on, and (c) not so much.
The real question is how much it is worth spending on (a). Presumably signalling is not an entirely worthess business even when viewed from the social perspective rather than just the individual one. Employers probably do want to know who is clever, conscientious and reasonably obedient. But the economic objection to government subsidies for signalling is that it it’s subsidising an arms race. An unsubsidised arms race would presumably result in the same ranking but without so much spending. If every peacock’s tail is reduced in size by 70%, peahens can still pick the best cock, so to speak.
I woud guess that the same quantity and quality of signalling could and would be achieved on a much lower budget, if employers had to pay the cost themselves. So, for example :
(a) a few IQ tests, annually from age 10 to 14
(b) a maths test and a reading and writing test at age 14
(c) employment law allowing employers to hire and fire freely up to age 21 say
should be sufficient signalling for pretty much any job below the most demanding 20% of jobs. There’s no known reliable test for conscientiousness, even hacking your way through a 3 year degree, so as far as the employer is concerned, you may as well be tested out on the job. The employer can probably figure out whether you’re a lazy bum or not in less than three years.
For smarter kids destined for higher things, I’m prepared to believe that, oh maybe, 20% of current university degrees are worth three years of an intelligent 18-21 year old’s time.
I don’t think Caplan wants area bombing on the education infrastructure. Just a serious artillery bombardent to take out the 80% surplusage.
Actually, there is.
Academic achievement relies mainly on IQ and conscientiousness. The harder the subject, the more IQ and conscientiousness it requires.
I recall my own experience. After my A Levels, where my results were easily in the top percentile of the cohort, I applied for several prestigious government scholarships. The process included IQ tests, interviews, the usual gamut.
I actually did well on the IQ test, only failing on the very last question (I figured out the answer too late). I was offered a decent scholarship, but always wondered what it was that got me.
Eventually I deduced they looked at my IQ score and concluded I should have done more. With my intelligence, I should have took part in science competitions, taken ‘S’ papers, went for Olympiads, took up leadership positions in my extra-curriculars. The very fact that I did none of these told them quite clearly my conscientiousness score wasn’t what they wanted.
In other words, by measuring IQ, and then academic achievement, you can measure conscientiousness indirectly.
In fact, the entire process of standardised national exams is to determine who has the most intelligence and conscientiousness to pick up high level skills within that schooling period, skills that the students will never again use in adulthood.
I guess the signal is considered so useful that employers are more than willing to foist the cost off to the government and not waste any time at all on finding out on their own dime whether or not an employee is suitable for them.
On a libertarian blog, one may ask why that sentence has its last 5 words. 🙂 But if the idea is that in the real world the change would be less hard to make with those words in the law, point taken – though any failure of perfect statistical parity in the under-21-group will still have the usual suspects screaming.
Very true: every employer knows that their knowledge of an employee some months after hiring them far exceeds what they knew in the interview. Knowing they can fire employees who turn out to have been bad guesses can outperform law, quotas and PC hectoring in persuading employers to take a chance on ‘minority’ candidates – but you won’t be taught that in a state school.
But if the idea is that in the real world the change would be less hard to make with those words in the law, point taken
That is the idea.
In other words, by measuring IQ, and then academic achievement, you can measure conscientiousness indirectly.
1. Not reliably. The problem is that “conscientiousness” consists in the determination to do things you don’t really want to do. Even I, who have won awards for idleness, can work very hard at something I really want to do and enjoy doing. But my conscientiousness score is flat zero. So a grid comparing academic achievement against IQ is going to be fooled by a third unmeasured axis – how compelling you found your degree.
2. I also believe that standard IQ tests become less valid once you get out more than a couple of standard deviations from the mean. There are tests designed for the very clever but I don’t think they are much used and so their validity (and reliablity) is doubtful. IQ tests are pretty good for judging intellectual aptitude for jobs requiring IQ 85-130. Above 130, they don’t tell you great deal more than “above 130.” A bit like A level A grades.
3. In any event while I am sure you’re right that employers would prefer that the general taxpayer financed the signalling cost of finding suitable employees, my feeling is that the cost would be lower if they financed it themselves. You spend your own money on yourself more efficiently than the government spends your money on other people.
4. And since, as Niall points out, an employer’s knowledge of an employee’s usefulness increases rapidly over the first few months of work, it seems unlikely that employers could not figure out how to replace the signalling value of three years at a university, with zero work productivity, with a much shorter period of on the job assessment with at least some work productivity.