School Work is Practice Work
Because the story of school being for academia or propaganda doesn’t quite add up
The education system seems to have come under critique in recent times for being structured in a world transitioning to a more flexible lifestyle.
The bell dictates when specific work is done and when you’re allowed to take breaks according to your work obligations — and the teachers gate-keep your work and make sure it's to a certain standard many say is deeply flawed.
This style of work, while still prevalent, is slowly being fazed out, and the pandemic accelerated it quite a bit by pushing a lot of work purely online. Not only is the work of school becoming outdated, but some of the things taught are simply false and misleading, such as horrid writing guidelines, convoluted math techniques, and irrelevant science.
These sorts of esoteric additions to the curriculum are easy to spot and very aggravating once you see them, since the proclaimed purpose of school is to educate someone on academia, and these seem more geared to making someone susceptible to downright propaganda.
In light of these facts, it is easy to draw the simple conclusion that school is outdated and biased and that it must be fixed under all circumstances to improve and update our children’s education.
However, I think that the school curriculum is one that makes much more sense if you explain it under one simple purpose.
Trend of Trivia
The purpose of school is ostensibly the education of all kids who pass through it, and it achieves this purpose to an inarguable degree. After all, it would be foolish to argue school is entirely useless, since without it, there would be no academia introduced into someone’s life, and they wouldn’t be a high-functioning civilized human.
In elementary school, this purpose is particularly powerful. Pre-K and Kindergarten teach you to have hygiene, to count basic numbers, to be tidy and clean, and to have some semblance of virtues: the basic building blocks of a civilized person.
In middle school, this purpose becomes a bit less emphasized, but the middle school still teaches you useful things: instead of learning how to speak, you learn how to persuade, and instead of learning how to do basic objective arithmetic, your math education is filled in with all the civilized niche functions relevant to the world like exponents and variables.
In high school, however, the boundaries of what is education and what is trivia begin to blur.
Algebra is used enough in the world of business and bureaucracy, but the complex numbers begin the trend of trivia and it only gets worse from there. Pre-calculus and calculus push the edges of real-world use: they’re used in medicine as an example, but they’re used to calculate the precise spreads of disease, something someone not going into medicine would have no real reason to study for.
Knowing this, it’s impossible to argue that all taught in school is important for the real world, since the real world isn’t a niche math problem — and if schools were truly focused on preparing students, this valuable time should not be put into the general curriculum, and it should probably be replaced with general logic and/or argumentative classes to better prepare someone for a world which boils down to politics and power.
However, this isn’t a discussion on how to fix the school system, because there are many articles, videos, and essays on people’s solutions to the problem of the inefficient American school system.
The true issue is why it had to be designed in such a way anyways. If school is such an integral part of society then its design has to reflect what is necessary out of it, lest it is replaced.
So what does school have that is so valuable?
School work is an assignment given to kids, for the express purpose of testing whether the kid is able to apply the knowledge they are told by the teacher to something — whether in writing or in problem-solving.
This, obviously, is essential in making school as a concept work — if you can’t prove the kid has learned anything, why teach the kid?
Now, homework and general schoolwork have been the growing pains of just about every child in the American Modern School System; it’s standardized, abstract, and at a high-enough level, inapplicable to the real world without forcing it into one’s calculations. When will someone use differential calculus or vectors in Life?
The answer is, you won’t — but you will use the work itself.
In the world that school was designed in, the mass of Americans went to work in factories and offices, where work that seemed trivial and meaningless dominated their careers. Of course, it is ultimately necessary for bureaucracy, the thing that happens when enough humans try to coordinate something massive together — but there is no outright reason.
This fact of life is one that is depressing to many people; it’s the reason that the younger people of the world look towards post-9-to-5 careers that have their values in mind and eliminate bureaucracy. However, this change has yet to be one that is meaningful enough that society as a whole change, and bureaucracy is slow to act, so the school system is still rooted in the 9-to-5 era of Americana.
To run this system, one obviously needs to know that the people in it are able to run it — so the school system you may be in today is one that was designed as a certification process for this work.
Economic Signalling
It’s necessary to state before I write out the rest of my opinion, that school is as objectively good as something still technically subjective can be. I’ve said it just a few hundred words above, but I’ll say it again: school deanimalizes people. Language, society, technology, and the existence of urban life is extremely unnatural.
The fact that you are reading this is an abomination to what Mother Nature designed us to initially be, but through the power of critical thinking, we’ve created the Internet, and utilities, and mass-produced the incredible machines of thought you’re using to read this passage right now.
That being said, the school does not really teach people things that are useful within the life that we’re living now, and it certainly will not teach things useful in the life that we will live in the future.
Literacy and arithmetic are obvious necessities, but beyond that, I believe that most of the high-school curriculum is simply building on it on levels that aren’t necessary.
If you wish to argue that school teaches advanced math, niche history, and essay-writing for the sake of being able to say that the Proletarians of 1984 will never come into existence, you’re wrong: they already exist, and you and I are probably among them.
Scientific research, which is now the defining mark of intelligence, has vastly exceeded the point that most people could hope to even understand, and it will soon exceed the physical limits of the human brain once neural networks and other such technologies are fleshed out into functional tools.
Instead, schools are economic signals.
In economic signaling, someone is able to credibly show another person information, usually about themselves. In practice, this often takes the form of employers letting people use their experience at that institution as “job experience” or, importantly for my argument, use formal education as a great signal that they, the applier, have intelligence as a good quality about them.
My theory is that formal education is ultimately just a signal to employers that the applicant has the ability to do work at X degree and to X efficiency without being immediately burned out.
Allow yourself to imagine that you’re trying to hire diligent and intelligent people for your job as, say, a hardware development agency. If you wish to sort these applications out from the rest of the applications, which aren’t even worth a read, then schooling is the best idea that can be implemented to sort out intelligent and diligent people.
Think about it: in school, you work on assignments on a few subjects; as much as your assumedly-average tiny kindergarten brain can handle. As you climb up the ranks and age, your subjects get more advanced and you get more work from more subjects — you are expected to score well on memorizing the work and handling it well. Ultimately, your work ethic is built.
This is the nature of school for most people, as for most people, school isn’t something enjoyable, but it is enjoyable to the employers who the average person has to inevitably look forward to. Not only this but it’s reflected in the way that earnings from school are staggered.
Earnings from those who complete a bachelor’s degree are around twice as much as a high school graduate — this is something that isn’t a surprise. However, the interesting thing about these statistics is what happens in between.
For instance, if the claim of school is correct — that consistently going consistently improves your ability to work and function in the Real World, then there should be a marked difference between someone who only attends one year of high school versus one who attends three years of high school.
90% of the wage difference is earned at graduation, and so someone who goes through 99% of high school but then isn’t able to earn one final credit to graduate is treated the exact same as someone who never even set foot in a high school building — the education which you receive is worthless unless you receive the diploma certifying you have passed through High School.
This also has a similar effect when dealing with college, although at least getting no degree from college still produces some extra income — though the cost of a student loan to get this bonus makes it not even worth considering unless you spend 4 years to get a bachelor’s degree.
This opens up an interesting conundrum, which is that for a good percentage of people, going to college is actually not a good financial decision, and non-attendance is superior. This is best summarized in the following chart:
Above, we can see skill premiums and failure probabilities for students entering college. There are multiple interesting things about this data, [taken from the Library of Economics], such as the fact one can accurately predict failure rates from seemingly little data (though that is for another time), but one of these is that people who are below the 50th percentile of students, their college enrollment rates take a fast downturn — even for subjects which are very high-paying, it doesn’t take long until almost anyone tries to enroll.
The question posed by this information is that if college was able to educate people, then college would be very much in demand. Right now, 37% of people have graduated from college who are over 25, and while this is 30% more than the college graduate rate from 1960, starting salaries for college graduates have increased by only $3,000 from 1960 to 2015; while the average prices for things have deca-tupled (10x)
Without a massive salary difference, it’s clear that the reason that people go to college is because it’s necessary now to have what employers deem as college-level intelligence in what is becoming an increasingly STEM-dominated world.
For those who fall behind the curve of students who have employers deem necessary knowledge, then there isn’t much to yearn for in your career.
In the end, if school is to be able to truly claim it isn’t simply a sieve for what it deems people worthy of careers out of the mass of American children, then it’s clear that there needs to be massive, from-the-ground reconstruction of the practice-work system.
