[MichaelRo]

I dunno, maybe it differs by country/location but my perception is that school was never capable to educate beyond some basic mediocrity level. Mostly it's an institution imposed by the state to process the children while parents are working. And the way to actually teach your kids something never really changed since the times of the elite few versus the mass of peasants: private tutoring.

Now it's true that with basic access to education for masses, a few more poor smart kids that would otherwise become fishmongers or something, now have the chance to raise above their starting condition. But the reality never changed and never will: the vast majority of people are not very bright. And making it easier for them to be dumb and get away with it doesn't help (smartphones and now AI).

[intended]

Schools can educate well beyond that level, provided they are resourced. Bloom’s 2 sigma problem comes to mind (1).

Education also ends up suffering because its seen as a support role, teachers are not valued, and “He who can, does; he who cannot, teaches".

Education is also political today. Science based education is an outright target. Increasing government spending to improve outcomes is also a contested issue, and in America this is met with arguments about bad teachers, unions, and privatization/vouchers.

There is much that can be done to improve educational outcomes, but like everything, it is contested.

(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem

[spwa4]

This is true, but only in the way that no manager, private or government will ever fix. What happened to give good teachers in the 1980s (who kept working afterwards) is ... a large economic crash.

Which created a relatively large supply of people from capable, respected positions, in the hard/positivist sciences who suddenly lost their job. They always had the ability to displace teachers, but never wanted to. Then, suddenly, they had a strong incentive.

Managers, or government committees, to point out what they mostly were, were utterly baffled at this happening. They had spent decades making the demands to become a teacher easier, because they were in the situation we have now: they couldn't find people willing to work for the wage, for the (lack of) respect/status. They didn't change the wage, because status: they will never accept that teachers have a status above theirs. But suddenly, that didn't stop a lot of capable people from becoming teachers.

So this cohort of fired people blew through the requirements, fixed the shortage and even displaced quite a bit of teachers. Some never left. Some are still there. They were also used to getting respect in their jobs, and so they demanded that from government, from kids and parents (with the good ... and the bad that that brought, for example giving teachers the right to exclude troublemakers from education). They built a power base and lifted education, including increasing the demands on new teachers.

This in turn resulted in an enormous cohort of relatively well-educated people coming out of schools.

But the economy came back. A lot of these teachers left and of course the unions and government changed the rules so they themselves would be secure against a repeat of this. Displacing teachers, should anybody again suddenly want to, is a lot harder now (ironically unions thought the government would stand by them, but now the government is in constant saving mode, so they want to replace existing teachers by the cheapest labor they can find and so they're killing off those rules).

But the economy came back. To have capable teachers, schools would now have to outbid the private sector again. Which means government committees would have to vote their own status, their own pay, down. The way FANG managers have been forced to do: they'd have to accept that at least some of the people under them have more status, and more money, than they do. Needless to say, governments utterly refused this, because when such trivialities as the future of society conflict with their own money, their own status, the vote always goes the same way ... and here we are.

It's again not that well-educated people have disappeared, in fact there's more than ever before, it's that they, like in the 60s and 70s, will not accept the deal the government is offering, and the government doesn't want to offer even that deal.

But this all started happening 30 years ago and really pushed through 15 or so years ago. A whole generation has been educated already by teachers that just don't measure up to the teachers that came before. This new generation ... doesn't measure up and of course finds this situation very unfair, they never had a chance, and it really isn't their fault. Government explicitly chose to create this situation. Or to put it very bluntly: there are suddenly a great deal of young MAGAs, growing every year. The same goes for Europe too, especially since most countries have now decided they'll just outright stop education in a bunch of fields, killing off and defunding university department after department (so much cheaper to have Turkey, or China, or ... educate doctors and engineers), which then of course meant that most or all people in high positions are not locals, which means the path to high status that education used to be is a lot narrower now.

... and then Trump did the same in America. And yes, where Europe did it slowly, limiting damage, Trump decided to take a chainsaw (or what he actually used, as it turns out: a really bad LLM) to the US equivalent.

It always come back to the same argument: being inclusive, respectful, having authority, friendly, ... all of this matters. But having teachers capable in the hard sciences, is table stakes, and that is expensive. If you have a disrespectful teacher that has an excellent grasp of the subject, kids get educated. If you have a teacher that is inclusive, respectful, has authority, the friendliest person you've ever met, but limited grasp of the subject, kids don't get an education. NOT the other way around. You HAVE to start with teachers with excellent education and today that means you pay for it. But government refuses.

And yes, that's not much of a problem for the wealthy, who are educated and just educate their own kids, if need be, they do it themselves. Or they get tutors that they pay well. The rich are not the problem here. You will not fix this situation by sabotaging the rich's efforts to educate their kids. It's that government has decided they can spend just a little bit more money now if they close off the path that education provides. And the cohort of people that already got educated so much worse than people 10 years older ... they want revenge and so this is exactly what they want government to do.

Any study on education will always say that educating someone is comparable to a process of diffusion. The kids top out at the level of their teachers, no matter the process. Humans learn 99.99999% or more through imitation, so the subject grasp of the teacher is effectively the limit for the kids. At that level learning slows to a crawl at best. Imitation is the cheap, fast way humans learn (for obvious reasons if you've done even a little bit of machine learning. Think of how much information a teacher giving you the answer to a problem gives, and then about how much information an experiment gives)

It is of course true that students can exceed the teachers. But that is a very slow, very expensive process that takes years to learn even relatively simple things. And that requires providing resources directly to the students.

Resources matter ... but not laptops. I mean, by all means give teachers the resources they require. But first you must enforce a quality level in the teachers. That's table stakes and nothing will help until that's in place.

[intended]

In the American historical example shared, education got lucky because of economic downturns.

If education is not valued by a nation, then this is not a surprising outcome. Do note, Americans as a whole tend to be extremely sensitive about critical discussions on the “way things are” in America. It’s a trait that results in a sort of “nothing can change” point of view, and hostility when it’s pointed out that other countries do better.

America has so far been able to attract that talent to their economy, but given the instability in place currently, that engine is reversing.

This means that investments in education are going to be needed. Right now teachers make their own print outs, teaching material, and the education system is generally underfunded.

Stating that it’s not a resource allocation problem, when resource allocation is what is required to attract talent, is inaccurate. Many people would prefer to work for meaning and to teach, even if they have talent and can be paid better. Given a livable wage, the super ambitious types will do the risky entrepreneurial things they should be doing. Others will be happy to teach.

Some of the smartest people I met in America chose to teach. America can change things, and it can enjoy the benefits.

[tonyedgecombe]

>I dunno, maybe it differs by country/location but my perception is that school was never capable to educate beyond some basic mediocrity level.

You just need to look at educational league tables between countries to see there is a spectrum of results and some places are much better than others.

Personally I think the problems are rooted in inequality. If the elite all send their children to private schools then why would they care about the poor state of public schools. The country that regularly comes out at the top of the league table for educational attainment has almost no private schools.

[Tanjreeve]

There are a few people with a powerful platform in terms of money and influence for whom it would be much simpler if the majority of people were not capable of pointing out BS or seeing how they're getting screwed. Purely coincidentally I'm sure the loudest media voices constantly declare various versions of how we should throw in the towel on educating the majority of people while also funding initiatives to enshittify public education and it would be better for most people to go into the trades and not worry their little heads about how the wider world works.

Meanwhile those people's own children are getting educated at schools with no technology allowed and are not going into trades. So it seems it's both possible to educate people given enough effort and a lot of people are capable of tertiary+ education given the right intellectual capital.

[nativeit]

We could pay teachers even half of the median salary for HN users, and then see if outcomes improve?

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

And when the outcomes don't improve because money isn't magical, we could double the salaries again! And again!

Seriously, how do you think that will work? Are you suggesting that the teachers could improve outcomes now, but are holding out as some sort of negotiation leverage? Or that there's some secret corps of millions of super-teachers who could educate the nation's children, but who would rather be network technicians and underwater welders because they need that half-median software income?

[OkayPhysicist]

> Or that there's some secret corps of millions of super-teachers who could educate the nation's children, but who would rather be network technicians and underwater welders because they need that half-median software income?

That basically is the suggestion. The world is not an RPG, where being good at one thing necessitates you being bad at everything else. On the contrary, aptitude in one task is pretty well correlated with being good at any task. When we talk about intellectual tasks, we call this IQ, when we talk about physical feats we call this athleticism, and when we talk about social maneuvering, we call it charisma. And all three of those are positively correlated.

With that in mind, it's not at all unreasonable to believe that somebody who would make a great teacher (or at least a substantially better than average teacher) might have other aptitudes that we choose to reward more, even if they'd be relatively much better at teaching. Right now, you'd have to take a ~$50,000 pay cut to choose to be the highest paid teacher in the median California school district compared to being a median Californian software developer.

It's like any other job. If I'm offering $80,000 a year for software developers in CA, I might find a few talented people overlooked by the rest of the job market, or someone exceptionally stoked to work at my particular company, but I'm far more likely to end up with someone well below mediocrity.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

>That basically is the suggestion. The world is not an RPG, where being good at one thing necessitates you being bad at everything else. On the contrary, aptitude in one task is pretty well correlated with being good at any task.

We need, for a nation the size of the United States, millions of teachers. Quite literally. The process that somehow selects not one good (or more literally, very few, just so the pedants don't complain) teacher now, but will select mostly/all good teachers if we were to implement it is 15% raises across the board? 40%? Never mind that doing that could only possibly attract something like 5-10% of personnel change... and I'm supposed to believe this is about increasing the quality of education instead of pandering to a voting bloc that will help you to enact your non-education agenda? No thanks.

>With that in mind, it's not at all unreasonable to believe that somebody who would make a great teacher

Blah blah blah, I've already moved past that. No need to try to make the sale here.

[OkayPhysicist]

Are people really arguing that there are few good teachers? In my (admittedly anecdotal) experience, most people can list a mix of good and bad teachers they had over their educations. The goal is just to increase the proportion of good teachers, and hopefully raise the floor of the how good the worst teachers are.

Increasing pay probably won't raise the ceiling on how good the best teachers are. If they've got that strong a passion for teaching, they're probably already doing it.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

> Are people really arguing that there are few good teachers?

Yes, in general, people from both the left and right argue this, though they quibble over details. And people like you chime in with "we could get better teachers if we paid them more", which strongly implies that you don't think that the current batch are sufficient.

If they're already good, then why do you want to pay them more? I don't see extraordinary outcomes that deserve extraordinary pay. And in any even, even if you do see extraordinary outcomes, the pay they're receiving is sufficient, because they agreed to accept it.

>most people can list a mix of good and bad teachers t

Sure. And one or two truly bad teachers can spoil a child for their entire school career. Hell, here in the United States, they don't have multiple teachers per year until 7th grade, give or take... one bad teacher can truly fuck that kid up. Even later on though, they can do alot of damage. I don't think the "there only one little turd in your soup" defense holds up when it comes to education.

>The goal is just to increase the proportion of good teacher

Let's just double pay to have 0.4% more good teachers, huh?

[mlrtime]

Nope, it's been tried before and it had 0 affect on student outcomes. I'm not saying that teachers don't "deserve" more, but it is not going to help students one bit.

[gscott]

It's more about passion then money.

[mietek]

Why don't you try paying your bills with passion and report back.

[japhyr]

As someone who earned "passion" money for a long time before ever earning anything remotely close to tech-adjacent money, passion does not pay bills anywhere near as well as money does. And struggling to pay bills, such as paying someone to fix a leaking roof, is not an enjoyable life for very long.

[red-iron-pine]

passion makes sense when people can afford the rent

[mschuster91]

> But the reality never changed and never will: the vast majority of people are not very bright

Nature vs nurture, the old argument...

Of course, you got what one might flippantly call "the inbreds from Alabama", or those whose parents suffered from substance abuse or other issues (obviously, for the mother the risk is much higher, but also the father's health has a notable impact on sperm quality). These kids, particularly those suffering from FAS (fetal alcohol abuse)? As hard as it sounds, they often enough are headed for a life behind institutional bars. FAS is no joke, and so are many genetic defects. That's nature, no doubt - but still, we as a society should do our best to help these kids to grow to the best they reasonably can (and maybe, with gene therapy, we can even "fix" them).

But IMHO, these kids where "nature" dominates are a tiny minority - and nurture is the real problem we have to tackle as societies. We are not just failing the kids themselves by letting them grow up in poverty, we are failing our society. And instead of pseudo elite tech bro children and nepo babies collecting millions of dollars for the x-th dating app, NFT or whatever scam - I'd rather prefer to see people who actually lived a life beyond getting spoiled rotten to have a chance.

[somenameforme]

Places like China and Vietnam are the ones rocking the test scores. These places operate on a tiny fraction of the $ per student of most places in the world, even PPP adjusted. And I think China's increasingly absurd achievements [1] make it clear that this goes beyond the test.

I think the nurture argument can still apply there - Chinese parent is a meme all its own, and for a good reason. But this isn't something that can be achieved with money or digital tech. It's a combined mix of culture and parenting within that culture. Perhaps if the people so invested in trying to improve the education of children were, themselves, having more kids - we might not have such a problem.

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47067496

[mschuster91]

> It's a combined mix of culture and parenting within that culture.

The problem is, that culture (and other more or less closely related Asian cultures) also produces an awful lot of psychologically awfully damaged adults - and many Asian countries are now facing the consequences of that, with hikikomori, women not finding suitable partners, rock bottom fertility rates and collapsing demographics.

And on top of that, you may get really obedient children, excelling at following what they know to do... but creativity? Thinking outside the box? Going against the script? Thrown into unfamiliar situations? Whoops.

It's getting better, slowly, no doubt, and we're seeing the results, but I'm not certain that progress comes fast enough to save some of the societies facing the demographic bomb the hardest (especially Japan, but China is also heading for serious issues). With China especially, it may also get interesting politically once a generation grows to adulthood that can see through the CCP propaganda.

> Perhaps if the people so invested in trying to improve the education of children were, themselves, having more kids - we might not have such a problem.

That assumes we have people actually interested in furthering the education of our children, and that is something I heavily doubt.

All we have here in the Western world is the contrary: we got austerity / trickle down finance ideologists that see education in general as a field ripe for savings on one side, then we got history revisionists actively trying to erase what children get taught about our past, and if all of that weren't bad enough we got the religious extremists trying to sell the gullible public that if you ban stuff like LGBT from even being mentioned in school books, children wouldn't turn out gay or trans - which is obviously bonkers.

[ThrowawayR2]

> "And on top of that, you may get really obedient children, excelling at following what they know to do... but creativity? Thinking outside the box? Going against the script? Thrown into unfamiliar situations? Whoops."

Usual Western racism, reassuring themselves they're better than those "uncreative" Asians, even as Asia continues to eat away at the West's technology lead in a variety of sectors.

One wonders if the Europeans ever told themselves that the backwards folk of the colonies could never catch up to the technological or scientific achievements of the continent's great centers of learning and industry.

[imtringued]

China has a mathematical surplus of men. I'm not sure I can trust the rest of your comment considering that you're acting as if the one child policy didn't exist.