This was not my experience as a very smart kid in mediocre schools. Other kids were turned off by my being smart (luckily for me I'm big and a good athlete, so I was mostly left alone with few friends instead of being bullied), but teachers were mostly accommodating and supportive. For example, successive elementary teachers let me simply read through most of the morning when i didn't need the lessons. Middle school algebra teacher took corrections from me and the smartest girl in class in stride. It's anecdata all around but maybe this is more a feature of Swedish culture than modern schooling?
Couldn't agree more though that teachers' salaries should be 4-5x increased, maybe paired with the end of public unions. The best teachers should be earning $500k with summers off. No smart kid should go into rent extraction (finance, mgmt consulting, etc) for the money.
>>This was not my experience as a very smart kid in mediocre schools.
I think kids who are only very smart will mostly do decently. It is the kids who are both very smart and too aspie too communicate who get real problems. A only very smart kid would probably be capable of communicating verbally with the teacher before being sent to special education.
Child 1 has mostly been well treated by his school. For example, he has been allowed to study math at a very rapid pace. He has been taking university courses in math for a year, in parallell withbis high school studies. His teachers and the school as a whole have only supported him in this.
Our local high school really does support smart kids. Whenever it understands them.
“How did we end up in such a state of petty lack of toleration?“ It’s more than “highly social people who have congregated too intensely with each other for too many years.” Toleration is a precondition for imperfect people to live stably together. But the idea of imperfection strikes at the heart of the progressive project, which sees man moving inexorably toward perfection. Further, toleration is inherently judgmental and must therefore be grounded in moral convictions, which in the prevailing view are merely subjective, will to power. In the US, parental activism to curb wokeism has turned school policy into a wedge issue for overturning progressive rule. It’s a tough fight. Good luck to you.
Meeting a teacher who doesn’t berate outstanding children is unusual. I had the luck to have a few, and many other teachers got tired of being corrected so I could be excused to read. Essays were always up-in-the-air events. However because I scored perfectly on standardized tests and the school could claim Merit Scholars and SAT results much was hands off.
I’ve worked in Sweden and Holland (Dutch Nationalized). Northern European countries seem to have a culture, not just in teaching, of consensus conformity. Perhaps that’s also part of the mix?
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?
> 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.
The majority of teachers do not make rules or set curricula. America's Next Generation Science Standards, for instance, were generated by a variegated multitude ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next_Generation_Science_Standards ); teachers teach to these standards without generally having had the slightest input into their development - and often, I suspect, with only the dimmest comprehension of their contents.
But there's a deeper problem with your remarks. Social people - meaning extraverts - make *better* teachers, which is very much in line with the general findings of the Holland Hexagon (see https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s10648-018-9458-2.pdf ). Teachers really should be drawn primarily from more social people, whether they are going to actually teach skills, or (as now) their primary role is to transmit the desired cultural values to their charges.
> Yes. All that talk about how-to-fix-school is tiresome. The relevant question is: What should young people be doing all day?
This is something I often talk to my own children about. It's always hard to know the best way, but I believe younger children should, most critically, be playing together outside. High school for Generation X in America was a bit like what your Child 1 is experiencing, and after going through that, I sincerely believe recess is the ideal subject, with PE a close second.
So getting younger children to go to a centralized day care every day for simple, short lessons that break up extensive, minimally-supervised play on the playground would be extremely welcome. But No Electronics Allowed. I would also give them some of the responsibility for cleaning and maintaining the school (as I understand is common in Japan). Best of all would be sneaking in history, geography, and anthropology through games and novels when the weather is not good enough to go outside.
Granted, more aggressive education would probably be reasonable eventually, so around the age of 15, I would give children tests for personality and ability so that they could be variously sent on to apprenticeships, given training for a specific profession, or else (say for the upper 10% of testees) prepared for university. Oh, and if your Child 1 is worried about Idiocracy, he could use the tests to limit the number of children every graduate will be allowed - though he would have to be prepared for endless headaches as everyone insists to him that individuals with obviously negative traits like low Honesty-Humility or high Emotionality have the right to fill the Earth with their totally wonderful and not at all hypersensitive or egocentric offspring.
(I realize this may sound like a few ideas breezily thrown together on the spur of the moment, but though I haven't made a careful scientific study of the topic, and there may well be serious problems with this strategy, I am very serious about all of the above. If I were given my way, the majority of children and adolescents would be more or less Unschooled, just in a way that places them in one another's company, and gets them out of their parents' hair for four or five hours a day.)
>>If I were given my way, the majority of children and adolescents would be more or less Unschooled, just in a way that places them in one another's company, and gets them out of their parents' hair for four or five hours a day.
It feels a bit uplifting to talk to an American who is not homeschooling. I can't homeschool because the law of my country most clearly forbids me. But I don't think I would have liked to also if it was allowed. Arranging almost every experience my kids will have until they go to university sounds a bit claustrophobic to me.
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.
This is some of the most pathologically Swedish shit I've ever read. Your son has my utmost sympathy.
Plz can you upload the full essay of your child 1 on fairness. I like to read it very much. It's very nice
>Who is T.P.
Did your child write "Thomas Pickety" in full in his essay or just "T.P."?
If the latter, then I can understand his teacher's response.
He wrote "Thomas Picketty".
I guess some people would prefer "the French economist Thomas Picketty" or something like that. But still, it is a matter of taste.
Fair. I also hear schools have a much harder time with neuro atypical kids than simply smart kids.
This was not my experience as a very smart kid in mediocre schools. Other kids were turned off by my being smart (luckily for me I'm big and a good athlete, so I was mostly left alone with few friends instead of being bullied), but teachers were mostly accommodating and supportive. For example, successive elementary teachers let me simply read through most of the morning when i didn't need the lessons. Middle school algebra teacher took corrections from me and the smartest girl in class in stride. It's anecdata all around but maybe this is more a feature of Swedish culture than modern schooling?
Couldn't agree more though that teachers' salaries should be 4-5x increased, maybe paired with the end of public unions. The best teachers should be earning $500k with summers off. No smart kid should go into rent extraction (finance, mgmt consulting, etc) for the money.
>>This was not my experience as a very smart kid in mediocre schools.
I think kids who are only very smart will mostly do decently. It is the kids who are both very smart and too aspie too communicate who get real problems. A only very smart kid would probably be capable of communicating verbally with the teacher before being sent to special education.
Child 1 has mostly been well treated by his school. For example, he has been allowed to study math at a very rapid pace. He has been taking university courses in math for a year, in parallell withbis high school studies. His teachers and the school as a whole have only supported him in this.
Our local high school really does support smart kids. Whenever it understands them.
I like this paradigm a lot. It might be quite helpful for some kids.
“How did we end up in such a state of petty lack of toleration?“ It’s more than “highly social people who have congregated too intensely with each other for too many years.” Toleration is a precondition for imperfect people to live stably together. But the idea of imperfection strikes at the heart of the progressive project, which sees man moving inexorably toward perfection. Further, toleration is inherently judgmental and must therefore be grounded in moral convictions, which in the prevailing view are merely subjective, will to power. In the US, parental activism to curb wokeism has turned school policy into a wedge issue for overturning progressive rule. It’s a tough fight. Good luck to you.
#1 elegant logic in your child, job well done.
Meeting a teacher who doesn’t berate outstanding children is unusual. I had the luck to have a few, and many other teachers got tired of being corrected so I could be excused to read. Essays were always up-in-the-air events. However because I scored perfectly on standardized tests and the school could claim Merit Scholars and SAT results much was hands off.
I’ve worked in Sweden and Holland (Dutch Nationalized). Northern European countries seem to have a culture, not just in teaching, of consensus conformity. Perhaps that’s also part of the mix?
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.
Values are not facts and facts are not values. They should be taught separately. Just my 2c
>>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?
> 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.
The majority of teachers do not make rules or set curricula. America's Next Generation Science Standards, for instance, were generated by a variegated multitude ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next_Generation_Science_Standards ); teachers teach to these standards without generally having had the slightest input into their development - and often, I suspect, with only the dimmest comprehension of their contents.
But there's a deeper problem with your remarks. Social people - meaning extraverts - make *better* teachers, which is very much in line with the general findings of the Holland Hexagon (see https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s10648-018-9458-2.pdf ). Teachers really should be drawn primarily from more social people, whether they are going to actually teach skills, or (as now) their primary role is to transmit the desired cultural values to their charges.
> Yes. All that talk about how-to-fix-school is tiresome. The relevant question is: What should young people be doing all day?
This is something I often talk to my own children about. It's always hard to know the best way, but I believe younger children should, most critically, be playing together outside. High school for Generation X in America was a bit like what your Child 1 is experiencing, and after going through that, I sincerely believe recess is the ideal subject, with PE a close second.
So getting younger children to go to a centralized day care every day for simple, short lessons that break up extensive, minimally-supervised play on the playground would be extremely welcome. But No Electronics Allowed. I would also give them some of the responsibility for cleaning and maintaining the school (as I understand is common in Japan). Best of all would be sneaking in history, geography, and anthropology through games and novels when the weather is not good enough to go outside.
Granted, more aggressive education would probably be reasonable eventually, so around the age of 15, I would give children tests for personality and ability so that they could be variously sent on to apprenticeships, given training for a specific profession, or else (say for the upper 10% of testees) prepared for university. Oh, and if your Child 1 is worried about Idiocracy, he could use the tests to limit the number of children every graduate will be allowed - though he would have to be prepared for endless headaches as everyone insists to him that individuals with obviously negative traits like low Honesty-Humility or high Emotionality have the right to fill the Earth with their totally wonderful and not at all hypersensitive or egocentric offspring.
(I realize this may sound like a few ideas breezily thrown together on the spur of the moment, but though I haven't made a careful scientific study of the topic, and there may well be serious problems with this strategy, I am very serious about all of the above. If I were given my way, the majority of children and adolescents would be more or less Unschooled, just in a way that places them in one another's company, and gets them out of their parents' hair for four or five hours a day.)
>>If I were given my way, the majority of children and adolescents would be more or less Unschooled, just in a way that places them in one another's company, and gets them out of their parents' hair for four or five hours a day.
It feels a bit uplifting to talk to an American who is not homeschooling. I can't homeschool because the law of my country most clearly forbids me. But I don't think I would have liked to also if it was allowed. Arranging almost every experience my kids will have until they go to university sounds a bit claustrophobic to me.
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