Equity is mediocrity going downhill
At the confluence of civilizational crises (part one)
Although I always wanted to address this problem, what prompted this post was reading this:
Vivek Ramaswamy is Right - by the
Vivek is complaining about the loss of the spirit of America while the
is bemoaning the loss if its soul.
Somehow both of them blaming education and uncontrolled immigration for the loosening of societal norms. We can easily add a bunch of others, like consumerism, social media, partisan mainstream media, political corruption and so on.
But it would be legitimate to ask: are these causes or symptoms of the real problems? When we identify an underlying problem, can we still look deeper to find a whole structure of approximate causes?
The nature of problems (and what creates them) is complexity, the nature of direct solutions is simplicity.
The problem of addressing a particular problem with an undifferentiated solution is twofold:
If it does not address the underlying causes, it will not succeed as those causes will just find another way to reassert themselves. The ‘solution’ will fail by not addressing the complexity.
Real solutions should strike at the root
Thinking about solutions should always start with walking down the tree from proximate to ultimate causes. Let’s look at the example that prompted this post: education. I could have any number of examples, but let’s get to them at the end.
Education is a real problem. In international ranking, the US does not even make it into the top 20.
So what is the problem? Not enough competitiveness or not enough respect for the classics?
What is wrong with the system? The educators? The curriculum? Educational policy?
Could it be this relentless (and delusional) push for equal outcomes?
Could it be the incompetence of the educator class or the ideology that drives them?
The wife of a relative (now retired teacher) told me few years ago that in a meeting they (the teachers) were told that 80% of their efforts should be directed toward the elevation of the bottom 20% of their students to bring them up to the middle.
Educating the smartest would just increase inequality. How can you ‘solve’ what this attitude represents?
This focused, deliberate neglecting of the best in favor of the worst? It could be argued, that this is the result of the feminization of education. Clearly, this is still just a proximate cause, but shouldn’t it be addressed?
Educational outcomes are bad because students are neither motivated nor compelled to learn.
We cannot have a system where everybody is a pretend winner.
Students are not motivated because hard work is not valued and its opposite is not penalized.
Same goes for teachers. They underperform because they are unionized.
Private schools work better, because there is accountability on both counts.
Why do we have such a system? Because it provides political power and it benefits from it. It is this incestuous relationship that is the source of the problem. There is only one way to fix it, give parents all the power back with an unconditional voucher system paired with a twice a year national testing to measure educational outcomes. Anything else would be just a cosmetic change.
AS for the curriculum and educational style, the root of the problem is centralized decision making. Government financing, teacher’s unions, centralized curriculum and, most importantly, a centralized educational ideology that does not permit failure.
The root cause is the ideology that is fundamentally opposed to the concept of competence hierarchies.
The root cause is the set of institutions that are supporting such ideologies.
The root cause is the political class that empowers such institutions.
The root cause is the electorate that keeps them in power.
“We met the enemy and it’s us”
In China, 35% of all children go to private schools. In India, the number is 29%. In Korea, it is 78.5%. In Japan it is 30%. In the US, it is 10%.
The solution is to empower the parents by giving them back the control over the education of their children. Let them decide what kind of schools they want. Let a million-schools flourish! Some strict, some technical, some academic, some pragmatic. Let them compete. Let them ‘discriminate’. Let there be all girl and all boy schools.
Let there be schools with different teaching styles, methods and focus. Let the parents decide which serves best the interests of their children.
Why is higher education so bad? Because it has outgrown its original ‘mandate’. They are no longer elite institutions for those who can afford the luxury or can gain truly useful knowledge attending them.
They turned from institutions of intellectual inquiry into factories of mass indoctrination and compliance training.
Universities are no longer serving the interests of their students, they are just desperately trying to survive the information revolution that is slowly making them irrelevant.
Part of the problem is that the input is bad. About 40-50% of university students have no place being in higher education. If you need a remedial reading class, there is no reasonable expectation that you will be able to appreciate the finer points of Edward Gibbon or Thomas of Aquinas.
Attending a university does not make anybody smarter.
Attending a university will not benefit students with an IQ of less than a certain threshold. (I would set that at 120).
The student loan system is an insidious tool of financial slavery.
The student loan system is also the greatest corruptor of the American Universities. It makes them to prostitute their standards for the student loans income.
The only way out of this is the phasing out of the government guaranteed student loan system.
It could be replaced by a grant program that would pay the tuition (fully or partially) of the top performing 5-10% of students (paid retroactively). The rest of the students could go to commercial banks which will perform the necessary credit worthiness and risk evaluation for every loan. The worthy will find a way making the target more worthy in the process.
Woke faculties, useless courses, partisan politics, safe spaces and bloated administrations will disappear in no time. Cutting off the easy money will also make the ‘product’ better.
The root of the problem is the student loan system. Everything else is just a symptom.
But maybe even the student loan system is just a proximate cause.
The root cause is the communist ideology suggesting that with the ‘right’ effort, we can all be made equal, meaning the same in every way.
The idea is total nonsense, but that does not stop the left from trying it again and again.
Aiming for the middle is an iterative process leading to constant overall decline.
Why is this so hard to understand for people of the leftist persuasion?
When I started this post, I meant to offer more then one root cause analysis of cultural decline but I am running out of the year so I will return to it in 2025.
Happy new year to you all!
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So many bases to cover, so little time. If only. If being a hinged word in the revolving doors of hypothetical/circular logic. Only is boolean in inclusive/exclusive reasoning. That age old question of "Is it real, or is it Memorex?: Is it genuine or is it Deep fake"? Is it a 0 or a 1? Did the computer screen tell Neo to "follow the White Rabbit?" So many wabbit holes, where to begin? Where will it end? I sometimes take comfort in knowing that which has a beginning, also has an end, although in-between can be sometimes seem interminable
Excellent as usual Zork. You've nailed it.