Secondary school is a very strange place. Child #4 recently described school as "torturecation," and I didn't have the heart to tell him "Wait until you get to secondary school." But Mrs. Apple Pie tells me the problem isn't that teachers are all social creatures out of touch with the inner lives of introverts and misanthropes. Rather, it's that they are the arbiters of norms and values, and they are just not very smart.
I have are good reasons to think this is correct (beyond years and years of memories that still set my teeth on edge). At my own Child #1's previous school, one of the teachers confided in me that she was intimidated by the smarter students. Another teacher was frequently spoken of by students who liked her as oversimplifying and failing to prepare them for difficult concepts on exams. This kind of thing is consistent the finding of the average secondary school teacher near 109 IQ: https://www.iqcomparisonsite.com/Occupations.aspx There are bound to be exceptions, but secondary school teachers are, as a group, who everyone is thinking of when they talk about midwits. High school is basically midwitland.
There is a solution: Pay secondary school teachers more, and require more stringent ability testing for qualification into the profession. Then less intelligent applicants will wash out into elementary teaching. Over time, the prestige of secondary school teachers will rise, attracting more intelligent people into the profession, and reducing the tyranny of the majority.
There is also a reason this solution will not be enacted: Teachers' primary purpose is not to teach. Rather, their primary roles are to
1. Babysit,
2. Prevent vulnerable individuals from slipping through the cracks, and most critically
3. Inculcate the norms of society into children through propaganda and sermonizing.
In other words, modern school is basically church. This is a horrible situation for young people, who might otherwise be expected to sit morosely through droning catechisms one day a week while pursuing apprenticeships, picking crab apples, and flirting with each other the rest of their time, but are now in fact expected to sit morosely through droning catechisms five days a week.
In other words, we modern people, in our enlightened wisdom, have done away with slavery and organized religion, while normalizing torturecation for around 18% of our citizens for the sake of preserving Our Sacred Democracy, and it's probably for the best that the average teacher sees nothing ironic about this at all.
>>But Mrs. Apple Pie tells me the problem isn't that teachers are all social creatures out of touch with the inner lives of introverts and misanthropes. Rather, it's that they are the arbiters of norms and values, and they are just not very smart.
Isn't that two sides of the same coin? Teachers are not very smart social creatures. For that reason, they occupy themselves with maintaining social norms and values, because that is the only thing they excel in.
>>There is a solution: Pay secondary school teachers more, and require more stringent ability testing for qualification into the profession.
There is another solution: Replace the teachers with computer programs, AI style, and reduce the teachers to official baby sitters. But then everyone would start questioning why people would need to be in the se building together.
>>In other words, modern school is basically church.
Yes. All that talk about how-to-fix-school is tiresome. The relevant question is: What should young people be doing all day?
THANK YOU for your child recognizing that people don't take risks because they "think they are immortal" or are otherwise unaware or unable to grasp the "consequences".
Regardless of what people might think of the real value of the esteem of one's peers, it DOES have value, if only in the eyes of the beholder.
>>In a way, you’re arguing that school is a gossip trap
Yes. Probably my reasoning both in this one and several posts here relates to Erik Hoel's gossip trap concept. The reason why I don't directly refer to it mostly lies in a writing style incompatibility between me and Erik Hoel: Although I found his gossip trap post partially both interesting and accurate and related to things I'm writing myself, https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/violent-enough-to-stand-still , I didn't manage to read all of it because it is so long.
> Every teacher I ever had from about third grade until about tenth [when I learned to camouflage my personality better] strongly recommended to my parents that I be placed into psychotherapy
immediately.
There is some importance to the point that when you write, what you write has to be comprehensible to your intended audience. E.g. if you refer to Pickety, the fact that the reader could find out who Pickety is with a minute of research is mostly irrelevant, because the typical reader won't do that research and will instead put down the writing. So the idea of "you are writing over the heads of the readers by assuming too much background, leaving out (obvious) steps in the reasoning, etc." can be valid. And children who read a lot are at risk for assuming that their readers read a lot.
That being said, of course public school teachers are selected for valuing conformity. Combining wide knowledge, heavy use of analytical thinking, and lack of respect for what is socially considered the proper ways of emotionally reacting to events necessarily is non-conformist.
I am most interested in your statement "The difference is that the people who find my lines of reasoning incomprehensible have no power to bar me from life." That seems like an excessive concern to me; I would expect that once Child 1 escapes secondary education with the diploma that he surely can arrange to earn, he will have the ability/necessity of choosing what further education, experience, employment to pursue, mostly limited by his own discipline, desires, and (to some degree) intrinsic abilities. But perhaps that is because I am American, and American society does not have a lot of rigid tracks; it is valorized to "strike out on one's own". What I have read about German society (a few decades ago) is that the examinations one takes around age 15 substantially determine the entire course of one's life. And perhaps in Sweden, being assessed poorly by one's public school teachers can seriously limit one's future opportunities.
> They have problems getting jobs on the closed Swedish labor market where unqualified jobs are scarce.
I think it's known that the US job market has fewer requirements for formal qualifications for many jobs than most European job markets. So there are often opportunities "to break into" occupations by simply being willing to work for less than the usual wage. Once one has been successful at a job for several years, that becomes an effective qualification for getting another job in the field at the going wage. (And changing jobs is not very stigmatized.)
Indeed, the current flood of immigrants into the US is remarkable for the degree to which they have become employed (decidedly including a large number who aren't authorized and legally should not be hired).
The teaching profession is broken, but I believe intelligence and lack there of is a more apt explanation for your sons treatment.
When teachers were respected and well paid, (some) intelligent people entered the profession. As teachers lost respect (I blame some (a lot of) teachers for this btw,) smart people, for the most part, entered other professions.
In Norway, where I write from (and teach), have about 80000 educated teachers who are not teaching. Not all of these are paragons of academia, but I believe (myself of course excluded) that many of those who left were better and more effective teachers than those who stayed.
(I see now that I have a lot more to say on this subject, maybe I'll write my own post some time in the near future.)
Aha. I understand you better now. Thank you, and I agree that there aren't enough nerds teaching in Swedish schools. The current government appears to have noticed and has commissioned a study to determine why the number of engineering students are significantly down and psychology majors are way up.
It doesn't help that parents' perspectives are invariably twenty or thirty years out of date. We remember our teachers as impressive, obsessed with their subjects, eccentric or (in many cases) weird sociopaths and assume nothing has changed. It's when we see the results, that we notice that everything has changed.
As someone who approaches three score and has spent a lot of the middle score (20-40yo) unemployed (on welfare) I have recently thought about this as someone who is "mildly not-autistic", or a "low-functioning normie", and is generally understood, but liable to make statements, if not pronouncements, in which blank stares are, if not frequent, are not very surprising.
My whole substack is about trying to communicate my generalist specialties. I will keep trying. But here I will leave some more personal biographical details.
I found it very hard to get an entry level job when young as I appeared more sophisticated than I was. And of course I had no actual experience to back up that apparent sophistication. As well a long period of unemployment in formulaic HR departments of course means "prison". AI is probably worse on this bureaucratic laziness in HR, as its training is built on decades of bad formulaic work, (our worst features are amplified by middle-management decisions (in business & government) who are simply trying to satisfice their arses). Middle-managers rule the world, but the bastards do not know it.
I am a very good worker. I am, in Australian terms, often ' a gun' worker. Whether this is pruning vineyards or preparing systems to process books for AI camera vision training. I am reliable and constant, as well as efficient and quick to notice improvements in flow ( a monotropic gift). I did not know this until I actually got a job someplace. Other people "in the real world" are a shock.
I am a bad manager because I do not understand how people are not as fast as me given the same training. I also do not understand how HR continually gives narcissists a free ride, a free pass, and then some go-away money when they are promoted-by-reference out to be someone else's problem.
The substacker Apple Pie has a great deal of difficulty understanding my style. And god knows he tries. Praise him, i say, praise him.
But life has been good to me despite the lack of pathways for people who are not easily understood, and the world has few resources to deliver for them. Basically I eventually got a break because someone in HR made a mistake.
What you describe in High School continues in other areas late in life, but does so by other means. Because of individualism for the poor and cohort-collectivism for the rich kids who have to pretend to be an "individual" as a branding exercise despite the great houses full of house elves called Dobby.
Narcissists and psychopaths do well in any system they can build or condition to suit themselves.
Autistic people do not have the skills to do that. These are the skills of a grifter.
_________side comment_______
A side comment on Turchin's Elite over-supply meme and ressentiment. Over-supply of narcissists? How does that social ecology happen? Some of us are happy to be parish vicars, or even vergers, or one room school teachers... or librarians transmuting the empathy of library systems into a good future.
___________ end side comment____________
Two examples of my failure in the jobs market, 20+ years ago (Tasmania).
Government example: It was the last of the entrance exams (only degreed graduates were taken in after this year). I did really well on all academic sections, but failed the "no-answer-is-wrong" personality testing. So I didn't get in. Yes I would definitely be bad at entry level customer service.
Large corporation example (these were the same year). Large supermarket, groups of applicants fill forms in before they get through to the next stage. This included basic arithmetic. Exam-like room. There is an area of blank paper for one's working out the arithmetic questions. I do not use it. I just fill in the answers. As usual I finish first or near first. I have to wait, as usual. I look around. I see people furiously doing their working out on the provided blank sections. I have to say at this point, that I regard myself as bad at mathematics. Weeks go by and I see those same faces working in the large supermarket. I never get an entry level position before the age of 45.
I tended to come across as a pay-grade I had never achieved. This scares people, middle-managers in particularly, especially if they notice you, most of their decisions are for an easier life, when not empire-building. This means you cannot get an entry-level job designed for normies. I am trying to not let that happed for my kids, but outside of cronyism what is there?
Our boy #1, now 28, seems rather like you, though he is highly verbal rather than arithmatical. A few months after he started at school, at 5, his school referred him to a psychologist who reported he had a 4 std deviation range in his WISC IQ subtests. Through school he caused a fair bit of consternation, sometimes getting academic prizes while other teachers despaired of him. He went to Uni to do stuff like design and media studies, but bombed so went to work at an equestrian centre looking after horses. His younger siblings have done Computer Sc and last year he returned to do Cybersecurity. 18 months in, he is doing pretty well (average grades), though I still fear for him.
I think cronyism is the key. For that reason, Anders and I are preparing some options for businesses that our kids can run if everything else would fail for any of them. Just waiting for life to begin year after year is a terrible option.
From your essay, Tove, and those of other substackers, and your discussion with Laura in the comments here, I am becoming convinced of Peter Turchin's "Elite Overproduction" theory. The teacher should not have been awarded the credential allowing her to teach at sixteen-year-old level; and, yes, there are far too many like her.
It feels like society is about to go the way of the Norwegian frigate, KNM Helge Instad. The people in charge are too busy being social to do their jobs, which they don't really know how to do anyway.
The American science fiction writer Jerry Pournelle said something that seems apposite:-
"Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: those who work to further the actual goals of the organization, and those who work for the organization itself. Examples in education would be teachers who work and sacrifice to teach children, vs. union representative who work to protect any teacher including the most incompetent. The Iron Law states that in all cases, the second type of person will always gain control of the organization, and will always write the rules under which the organization functions."
His Iron law applies to large corporations as well as government, this needs underlining. Indeed we can target the exact types who carry out the organizational empire building, they are primarily narcissists and psychopaths. And we all must police them, in particular we must police those who appear to be on our own side. Leaving the blame only on 'teh bureaucracy' is bad world-building. The people who are "those who work to further the actual goals of the organization," are worlding in a good way, but if they do not also police those who do their damnest to suit themselves, and set up structures to suit themselves, then the world will be seriously stuffed.
There are two problems. One is that the goal-oriented people have a naive faith that everyone means well and also wants to further the goals of the organisation. The other is that goal-oriented people are busy working towards the goals of the organisation, and do not notice what is happening in terms of structure.
The type specimen for the Iron Law is the reverse takeover of Boeing by McDonnell-Douglas. Formally, Boeing bought McDonnell-Douglas, but because Boeing had an engineering culture while McDonnell-Douglas had a political management culture, all of Boeing's people were pushed out and its systems dismantled, with the result that Boeing's planes are now falling out of the sky, and whistleblowers mysteriously die suddenly.
"I told the school as nicely as I could that logical, rationalist reasoning is not a mental illness." I laughed out loud in a doctor's waiting room when I read this.
I wonder what role the previous teaching style had on the way the current crop of teachers turned out. Any thoughts on that?
I suggest that your son read Thomas Sowell. Professor Sowell has the gift, rare in academia, of writing simply and clearly on difficult subjects. One rarely loses the thread of his argument.
If his instructors still object to his work, there’s no help for them.
Per your great recommendation of Dr Joyce Benenson’s book “Warriors and Worriers: Survival of the Sexes,” women are generally more social and more socially conscious of the group think in which they find themselves. The female dominated profession of education, especially K-6 with something like 96% female, has taken this to a new level where the brightest are not challenged in a meaningful enrichment sense but in being antagonized for thinking outside of the box. And everything is being watered down, including college requirements. If you look into it, the lowest SAT scores by major are education majors so they are intimidated by the highest performers and are living out their fantasies of rescuing these kids from high expectations.
There are family friends whose child wrote a brilliant essay about the Japanese economic thought process leading to Pearl Harbor. It had nothing to do with excusing anything but simply sought an understanding of the economic necessities and how Japanese leadership realized they would be sunk if they didn’t change things dramatically and get the oil they needed. The female teacher could not process this as an objective, rather coldly analytical approach to mere economics. Instead, she gave what should have been an A or A+ paper a low grade as she inferred that the child somehow supported the Japanese war effort because they didn’t include details of Japanese atrocities! We are ruining future great researchers and historians because the midwits can’t process anything not on their standards checklist or they’ve never heard before.
I am both amazed and slightly jealous that high school kids in Sweden get to write Substack-like essays for school. In Poland, all writing in high school is part of the 4-year crash course in history of literature. All essays one ever gets to write are like 'Compare how the theme of envy etc. is shown in book X and book Y', and the main purpose of that is to confirm that one has read and understood the books. This is also the main mandatory part of our SAT-like high school exam.
“Bullshitting around fluffy subjects is very important. It is so important that everyone must learn to bullshit roughly the same way, so everyone can understand each other’s bullshitting. Higher education and professional life is only for people who have learned to bullshit as expected. Teenagers need to be reformed until they learn to think like us.”
This quote looks like straight from David Pinsof. I believe that one of the things school should teach kids is to know and follow social norms. The above would make sense if the ability to bullshit was critical to succeed in academia, work and/or personal life in Sweden. Is it?
You mentioned that teaching is no longer a high-prestige occupation. I think this is the key driver of the negative selection of low IQ and/or lazy people who become teachers for whom Child 1 essays are "not understandable".
Secondary school is a very strange place. Child #4 recently described school as "torturecation," and I didn't have the heart to tell him "Wait until you get to secondary school." But Mrs. Apple Pie tells me the problem isn't that teachers are all social creatures out of touch with the inner lives of introverts and misanthropes. Rather, it's that they are the arbiters of norms and values, and they are just not very smart.
I have are good reasons to think this is correct (beyond years and years of memories that still set my teeth on edge). At my own Child #1's previous school, one of the teachers confided in me that she was intimidated by the smarter students. Another teacher was frequently spoken of by students who liked her as oversimplifying and failing to prepare them for difficult concepts on exams. This kind of thing is consistent the finding of the average secondary school teacher near 109 IQ: https://www.iqcomparisonsite.com/Occupations.aspx There are bound to be exceptions, but secondary school teachers are, as a group, who everyone is thinking of when they talk about midwits. High school is basically midwitland.
There is a solution: Pay secondary school teachers more, and require more stringent ability testing for qualification into the profession. Then less intelligent applicants will wash out into elementary teaching. Over time, the prestige of secondary school teachers will rise, attracting more intelligent people into the profession, and reducing the tyranny of the majority.
There is also a reason this solution will not be enacted: Teachers' primary purpose is not to teach. Rather, their primary roles are to
1. Babysit,
2. Prevent vulnerable individuals from slipping through the cracks, and most critically
3. Inculcate the norms of society into children through propaganda and sermonizing.
In other words, modern school is basically church. This is a horrible situation for young people, who might otherwise be expected to sit morosely through droning catechisms one day a week while pursuing apprenticeships, picking crab apples, and flirting with each other the rest of their time, but are now in fact expected to sit morosely through droning catechisms five days a week.
In other words, we modern people, in our enlightened wisdom, have done away with slavery and organized religion, while normalizing torturecation for around 18% of our citizens for the sake of preserving Our Sacred Democracy, and it's probably for the best that the average teacher sees nothing ironic about this at all.
>>But Mrs. Apple Pie tells me the problem isn't that teachers are all social creatures out of touch with the inner lives of introverts and misanthropes. Rather, it's that they are the arbiters of norms and values, and they are just not very smart.
Isn't that two sides of the same coin? Teachers are not very smart social creatures. For that reason, they occupy themselves with maintaining social norms and values, because that is the only thing they excel in.
>>There is a solution: Pay secondary school teachers more, and require more stringent ability testing for qualification into the profession.
There is another solution: Replace the teachers with computer programs, AI style, and reduce the teachers to official baby sitters. But then everyone would start questioning why people would need to be in the se building together.
>>In other words, modern school is basically church.
Yes. All that talk about how-to-fix-school is tiresome. The relevant question is: What should young people be doing all day?
Also, "in this house we value diversity", although some diversity is worth more than others.
THANK YOU for your child recognizing that people don't take risks because they "think they are immortal" or are otherwise unaware or unable to grasp the "consequences".
Regardless of what people might think of the real value of the esteem of one's peers, it DOES have value, if only in the eyes of the beholder.
In a way, you’re arguing that school is a gossip trap: https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/the-gossip-trap
For a lot of smart people, science / math departments at universities are an escape from gossip traps.
For adults, events like manifest: https://jakeseliger.com/2024/06/13/manifest-the-manifold-markets-nerd-festival/ function similarly.
>>In a way, you’re arguing that school is a gossip trap
Yes. Probably my reasoning both in this one and several posts here relates to Erik Hoel's gossip trap concept. The reason why I don't directly refer to it mostly lies in a writing style incompatibility between me and Erik Hoel: Although I found his gossip trap post partially both interesting and accurate and related to things I'm writing myself, https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/violent-enough-to-stand-still , I didn't manage to read all of it because it is so long.
I'm reminded of a blog quip by a friend of mine:
> Every teacher I ever had from about third grade until about tenth [when I learned to camouflage my personality better] strongly recommended to my parents that I be placed into psychotherapy
immediately.
There is some importance to the point that when you write, what you write has to be comprehensible to your intended audience. E.g. if you refer to Pickety, the fact that the reader could find out who Pickety is with a minute of research is mostly irrelevant, because the typical reader won't do that research and will instead put down the writing. So the idea of "you are writing over the heads of the readers by assuming too much background, leaving out (obvious) steps in the reasoning, etc." can be valid. And children who read a lot are at risk for assuming that their readers read a lot.
That being said, of course public school teachers are selected for valuing conformity. Combining wide knowledge, heavy use of analytical thinking, and lack of respect for what is socially considered the proper ways of emotionally reacting to events necessarily is non-conformist.
I am most interested in your statement "The difference is that the people who find my lines of reasoning incomprehensible have no power to bar me from life." That seems like an excessive concern to me; I would expect that once Child 1 escapes secondary education with the diploma that he surely can arrange to earn, he will have the ability/necessity of choosing what further education, experience, employment to pursue, mostly limited by his own discipline, desires, and (to some degree) intrinsic abilities. But perhaps that is because I am American, and American society does not have a lot of rigid tracks; it is valorized to "strike out on one's own". What I have read about German society (a few decades ago) is that the examinations one takes around age 15 substantially determine the entire course of one's life. And perhaps in Sweden, being assessed poorly by one's public school teachers can seriously limit one's future opportunities.
In an earlier column you write:
> They have problems getting jobs on the closed Swedish labor market where unqualified jobs are scarce.
I think it's known that the US job market has fewer requirements for formal qualifications for many jobs than most European job markets. So there are often opportunities "to break into" occupations by simply being willing to work for less than the usual wage. Once one has been successful at a job for several years, that becomes an effective qualification for getting another job in the field at the going wage. (And changing jobs is not very stigmatized.)
Indeed, the current flood of immigrants into the US is remarkable for the degree to which they have become employed (decidedly including a large number who aren't authorized and legally should not be hired).
Fairness = every individual has equal access to opportunity which means equivalent access to resources, bc people want and need differently.
The teaching profession is broken, but I believe intelligence and lack there of is a more apt explanation for your sons treatment.
When teachers were respected and well paid, (some) intelligent people entered the profession. As teachers lost respect (I blame some (a lot of) teachers for this btw,) smart people, for the most part, entered other professions.
In Norway, where I write from (and teach), have about 80000 educated teachers who are not teaching. Not all of these are paragons of academia, but I believe (myself of course excluded) that many of those who left were better and more effective teachers than those who stayed.
(I see now that I have a lot more to say on this subject, maybe I'll write my own post some time in the near future.)
So, this morning I read this blog by John Hersh.
https://everythingstudies.com/2017/11/07/the-nerd-as-the-norm/
Tove, are you using 'social' to mean 'anti-nerd' or what he coined the term 'wamb' to mean?
>>Tove, are you using 'social' to mean 'anti-nerd' or what he coined the term 'wamb' to mean?
Yes! Exactly.
Aha. I understand you better now. Thank you, and I agree that there aren't enough nerds teaching in Swedish schools. The current government appears to have noticed and has commissioned a study to determine why the number of engineering students are significantly down and psychology majors are way up.
I hope they talk to a lot of gymnasium students.
I'm quite enjoying my evening read about Erik Charles Nielsen.
I wish the original was not lost now to the land of removed links. EDIT: ooops, I was mistaken, the computerworld article which vanished is not the original essay. It's the other link to a Psychology Today article he mentioned. https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/articles/200807/field-guide-the-nerd-its-all-geek-me
It doesn't help that parents' perspectives are invariably twenty or thirty years out of date. We remember our teachers as impressive, obsessed with their subjects, eccentric or (in many cases) weird sociopaths and assume nothing has changed. It's when we see the results, that we notice that everything has changed.
As someone who approaches three score and has spent a lot of the middle score (20-40yo) unemployed (on welfare) I have recently thought about this as someone who is "mildly not-autistic", or a "low-functioning normie", and is generally understood, but liable to make statements, if not pronouncements, in which blank stares are, if not frequent, are not very surprising.
My whole substack is about trying to communicate my generalist specialties. I will keep trying. But here I will leave some more personal biographical details.
I found it very hard to get an entry level job when young as I appeared more sophisticated than I was. And of course I had no actual experience to back up that apparent sophistication. As well a long period of unemployment in formulaic HR departments of course means "prison". AI is probably worse on this bureaucratic laziness in HR, as its training is built on decades of bad formulaic work, (our worst features are amplified by middle-management decisions (in business & government) who are simply trying to satisfice their arses). Middle-managers rule the world, but the bastards do not know it.
I am a very good worker. I am, in Australian terms, often ' a gun' worker. Whether this is pruning vineyards or preparing systems to process books for AI camera vision training. I am reliable and constant, as well as efficient and quick to notice improvements in flow ( a monotropic gift). I did not know this until I actually got a job someplace. Other people "in the real world" are a shock.
I am a bad manager because I do not understand how people are not as fast as me given the same training. I also do not understand how HR continually gives narcissists a free ride, a free pass, and then some go-away money when they are promoted-by-reference out to be someone else's problem.
The substacker Apple Pie has a great deal of difficulty understanding my style. And god knows he tries. Praise him, i say, praise him.
But life has been good to me despite the lack of pathways for people who are not easily understood, and the world has few resources to deliver for them. Basically I eventually got a break because someone in HR made a mistake.
What you describe in High School continues in other areas late in life, but does so by other means. Because of individualism for the poor and cohort-collectivism for the rich kids who have to pretend to be an "individual" as a branding exercise despite the great houses full of house elves called Dobby.
Narcissists and psychopaths do well in any system they can build or condition to suit themselves.
Autistic people do not have the skills to do that. These are the skills of a grifter.
_________side comment_______
A side comment on Turchin's Elite over-supply meme and ressentiment. Over-supply of narcissists? How does that social ecology happen? Some of us are happy to be parish vicars, or even vergers, or one room school teachers... or librarians transmuting the empathy of library systems into a good future.
___________ end side comment____________
Two examples of my failure in the jobs market, 20+ years ago (Tasmania).
Government example: It was the last of the entrance exams (only degreed graduates were taken in after this year). I did really well on all academic sections, but failed the "no-answer-is-wrong" personality testing. So I didn't get in. Yes I would definitely be bad at entry level customer service.
Large corporation example (these were the same year). Large supermarket, groups of applicants fill forms in before they get through to the next stage. This included basic arithmetic. Exam-like room. There is an area of blank paper for one's working out the arithmetic questions. I do not use it. I just fill in the answers. As usual I finish first or near first. I have to wait, as usual. I look around. I see people furiously doing their working out on the provided blank sections. I have to say at this point, that I regard myself as bad at mathematics. Weeks go by and I see those same faces working in the large supermarket. I never get an entry level position before the age of 45.
I tended to come across as a pay-grade I had never achieved. This scares people, middle-managers in particularly, especially if they notice you, most of their decisions are for an easier life, when not empire-building. This means you cannot get an entry-level job designed for normies. I am trying to not let that happed for my kids, but outside of cronyism what is there?
Our boy #1, now 28, seems rather like you, though he is highly verbal rather than arithmatical. A few months after he started at school, at 5, his school referred him to a psychologist who reported he had a 4 std deviation range in his WISC IQ subtests. Through school he caused a fair bit of consternation, sometimes getting academic prizes while other teachers despaired of him. He went to Uni to do stuff like design and media studies, but bombed so went to work at an equestrian centre looking after horses. His younger siblings have done Computer Sc and last year he returned to do Cybersecurity. 18 months in, he is doing pretty well (average grades), though I still fear for him.
the trick is to marry well
I feel I married well. My wife thought she was marrying well, though she seems content with the reality she got.
28 is the best age to find a medical doctor as spouse
Is Nate Silver right?
file:///C:/Users/Home/Downloads/links/The%20flight%20of%20the%20Weird%20Nerd%20from%20academia.pdf
Sadly for boy#1, he doesn't date. I married in my mid-30s, though not to a Dr (medical or otherwise).
my wisdom is a lack too
I think cronyism is the key. For that reason, Anders and I are preparing some options for businesses that our kids can run if everything else would fail for any of them. Just waiting for life to begin year after year is a terrible option.
I think _cronyism_ may not be the word you want.
Okay. But we might have to re-brand cronyism as a type of mentoring.
I went through all of this while at school myself, And this is why my kids are home schooled
From your essay, Tove, and those of other substackers, and your discussion with Laura in the comments here, I am becoming convinced of Peter Turchin's "Elite Overproduction" theory. The teacher should not have been awarded the credential allowing her to teach at sixteen-year-old level; and, yes, there are far too many like her.
It feels like society is about to go the way of the Norwegian frigate, KNM Helge Instad. The people in charge are too busy being social to do their jobs, which they don't really know how to do anyway.
The American science fiction writer Jerry Pournelle said something that seems apposite:-
"Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: those who work to further the actual goals of the organization, and those who work for the organization itself. Examples in education would be teachers who work and sacrifice to teach children, vs. union representative who work to protect any teacher including the most incompetent. The Iron Law states that in all cases, the second type of person will always gain control of the organization, and will always write the rules under which the organization functions."
His Iron law applies to large corporations as well as government, this needs underlining. Indeed we can target the exact types who carry out the organizational empire building, they are primarily narcissists and psychopaths. And we all must police them, in particular we must police those who appear to be on our own side. Leaving the blame only on 'teh bureaucracy' is bad world-building. The people who are "those who work to further the actual goals of the organization," are worlding in a good way, but if they do not also police those who do their damnest to suit themselves, and set up structures to suit themselves, then the world will be seriously stuffed.
There are two problems. One is that the goal-oriented people have a naive faith that everyone means well and also wants to further the goals of the organisation. The other is that goal-oriented people are busy working towards the goals of the organisation, and do not notice what is happening in terms of structure.
The type specimen for the Iron Law is the reverse takeover of Boeing by McDonnell-Douglas. Formally, Boeing bought McDonnell-Douglas, but because Boeing had an engineering culture while McDonnell-Douglas had a political management culture, all of Boeing's people were pushed out and its systems dismantled, with the result that Boeing's planes are now falling out of the sky, and whistleblowers mysteriously die suddenly.
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/04/06/new-study-says-narcissistic-students-thrive-under-narcissistic-professors
"I told the school as nicely as I could that logical, rationalist reasoning is not a mental illness." I laughed out loud in a doctor's waiting room when I read this.
I wonder what role the previous teaching style had on the way the current crop of teachers turned out. Any thoughts on that?
I suggest that your son read Thomas Sowell. Professor Sowell has the gift, rare in academia, of writing simply and clearly on difficult subjects. One rarely loses the thread of his argument.
If his instructors still object to his work, there’s no help for them.
Per your great recommendation of Dr Joyce Benenson’s book “Warriors and Worriers: Survival of the Sexes,” women are generally more social and more socially conscious of the group think in which they find themselves. The female dominated profession of education, especially K-6 with something like 96% female, has taken this to a new level where the brightest are not challenged in a meaningful enrichment sense but in being antagonized for thinking outside of the box. And everything is being watered down, including college requirements. If you look into it, the lowest SAT scores by major are education majors so they are intimidated by the highest performers and are living out their fantasies of rescuing these kids from high expectations.
There are family friends whose child wrote a brilliant essay about the Japanese economic thought process leading to Pearl Harbor. It had nothing to do with excusing anything but simply sought an understanding of the economic necessities and how Japanese leadership realized they would be sunk if they didn’t change things dramatically and get the oil they needed. The female teacher could not process this as an objective, rather coldly analytical approach to mere economics. Instead, she gave what should have been an A or A+ paper a low grade as she inferred that the child somehow supported the Japanese war effort because they didn’t include details of Japanese atrocities! We are ruining future great researchers and historians because the midwits can’t process anything not on their standards checklist or they’ve never heard before.
I am both amazed and slightly jealous that high school kids in Sweden get to write Substack-like essays for school. In Poland, all writing in high school is part of the 4-year crash course in history of literature. All essays one ever gets to write are like 'Compare how the theme of envy etc. is shown in book X and book Y', and the main purpose of that is to confirm that one has read and understood the books. This is also the main mandatory part of our SAT-like high school exam.
“Bullshitting around fluffy subjects is very important. It is so important that everyone must learn to bullshit roughly the same way, so everyone can understand each other’s bullshitting. Higher education and professional life is only for people who have learned to bullshit as expected. Teenagers need to be reformed until they learn to think like us.”
This quote looks like straight from David Pinsof. I believe that one of the things school should teach kids is to know and follow social norms. The above would make sense if the ability to bullshit was critical to succeed in academia, work and/or personal life in Sweden. Is it?
You mentioned that teaching is no longer a high-prestige occupation. I think this is the key driver of the negative selection of low IQ and/or lazy people who become teachers for whom Child 1 essays are "not understandable".