Is democracy bad for education?

[marshwiggle]

Here's the type of comment that's come up numerous times:

Our students are generally well-prepared, but a number of them have skated through HS just being smart and not having to study much, and a lot of our international students are used to just rote memorization, so the fist exams in college come as a real shock to some.

Since in most Western nations, high school completion is more or less "guaranteed" to everyone, this is the result; in order to make sure the weakest students can "succeed", it means having a system where decently strong students can breeze through without much work, and thus they develop lousy work/study habits. Is there a remedy to this? I feel like it's a third-rail topic that can't really be discussed.

[downer]

Some high schools make their students work hard. It is probably related to how rich the district is. But yes, plenty of high schools just graduate the students so they don't have to see them again.

I thought this sort of topic had been discussed ad nauseam in books, editorials and discussion boards.

[Hegemony]

It's not really democracy that sets this up, is it?  That is, it's not having an elected system of government.  The truth is, I don't think any system of government has an educational system in which only the brightest succeed at education. Or are granted education.  The American (and Western world) system provides secondary education for all; the alternative systems, elsewhere in the world, restrict secondary education to those who can afford to pay for it.  That doesn't do anything to guarantee that the students will be dedicated, or that the teachers will only give good grades to the accomplished students.  If anything, the pay-for-play system may lead students to demand good grades "because we're paying your wages!", as we've sometimes seen in university education.

I think what you're getting at, Marshwiggle, is that in some regions in which education is not free, and hence is rare for poor people, many of the poor students are desperate to succeed because their education is a sacrifice on the part of the family, and often their only hope for climbing out of poverty.  I don't know anything about whether those systems have grade inflation or teachers that give students an easy pass. 

What's probably needed to give students more incentive to study hard is a system where studying hard makes a genuine and noticeable difference in future prospects.  Of course we see the down side of such a system in places like Japan and China, where a leg up is gained by private tutoring — often by mothers, who then can't have careers because their intensive tutoring doesn't allow time for a job. And where the pressure is intense and can lead to breakdowns.  An intermediate system might be something like England, where the results of GCSEs (at around 16) and A-levels (at around 18) can make a big difference in career direction and university admission.  Once again you get the problem that underfunded schools and disadvantaged students don't have the same opportunities to do well.  I went to an inner-city school in the U.S., and when the teachers themselves were illiterate, how are the students expected to learn and "better themselves"?  The only reason I succeeded was that I came from a stable, book-reading, middle-class family.  Many of the other students would have accomplished something, given half a chance, but they were not given half a chance.  So it's a bigger problem than free high school, or nominal system of government.  Many many factors.

[marshwiggle]

It's not really democracy that sets this up, is it?  That is, it's not having an elected system of government.  The truth is, I don't think any system of government has an educational system in which only the brightest succeed at education. Or are granted education.  The American (and Western world) system provides secondary education for all; the alternative systems, elsewhere in the world, restrict secondary education to those who can afford to pay for it.  That doesn't do anything to guarantee that the students will be dedicated, or that the teachers will only give good grades to the accomplished students.  If anything, the pay-for-play system may lead students to demand good grades "because we're paying your wages!", as we've sometimes seen in university education.

I think a real problem is the assumption that virtually everyone should be able to succeed in the same amount of time. Decades ago, students could fail and then retake courses (which is arguably not as good as simply having longer to complete, but that's another matter). Many, of course, would simply drop out. But instead of trying to adapt the system to allow weak students to take a couple (or more!) extra years to graduate, while allowing the brightest students to finish in a couple fewer years,  the powers-that-be just decreed that with the appropriate "supports" (educational assistants, individual education plans, etc.) any student could complete in the prescribed time.

(I "blame" democracy since any action taken by government must cater to public opinion. And no-one wants to think that their kid may need a few extra years to graduate.)

[Puget]

Here's the type of comment that's come up numerous times:

Our students are generally well-prepared, but a number of them have skated through HS just being smart and not having to study much, and a lot of our international students are used to just rote memorization, so the fist exams in college come as a real shock to some.

Since in most Western nations, high school completion is more or less "guaranteed" to everyone, this is the result; in order to make sure the weakest students can "succeed", it means having a system where decently strong students can breeze through without much work, and thus they develop lousy work/study habits. Is there a remedy to this? I feel like it's a third-rail topic that can't really be discussed.

I agree with Hegemony that this isn't about democracy. Note that marshwiggle left unbolded and uncommented upon the part where I note this being a particular problem with international students, who are largely Chinese students (i.e., not from a democracy)-- it's not that they aren't smart, or haven't had to work hard (indeed, they have worked really hard in high school), it's just that what worked in HS and what works in their new US college environment don't match, because rather than just memorizing, our assessments ask them to do things like synthesize and apply concepts which they have usually not been asked to do before (my understanding is that there are efforts to change this in the Chinese education system).

For our US students, the problem is slightly different. Because we are highly selective, they all come in used to being at the top of their classes. Many worked hard to be there, but some were able to get away with suboptimal study skills and/or limited study time because they could just figure things out on the fly. Then we throw all those students together, with commensurately higher expectations,  and they can't all be above average anymore-- what used to produce As produces Bs and Cs, and they are shocked ("surprised and confused" is used so often it has become faculty shorthand for the student suffering the first B of their life ungracefully).

Again, I don't think this has anything to do with democracy. No matter how high the standards are for high schools, there is going to be a distribution, and if we then skim off the top of that distribution into a selective college there's going to be an adjustment period where they need to recalibrate their study techniques and effort to the new standards.

[Hegemony]

And "lousy study habits" come in multiple types.  At my low-to-mid-tier R1, a number of students come in without any real interest in education. They probably have been told that a college degree gets you a better job, a higher income, etc., but it all seems distant and abstract to them.  The thing that especially surprises me — being a moderately ambitious type myself — is that they simply don't care if they fail.  You give them an F on a paper; they grumble and roll their eyes, but do nothing to improve their habits, and even fail to come in to office hours as requested or to submit a revision for a higher grade if offered.  Then they fail the course, and they don't care about that either.  Then they fail out of the university, and sometimes they get raked over the coals by their parents, but the actual part about failing doesn't seem to bother them much one way or the other.  They just drift on.  I don't know what might light a fire under these students — if I knew, I'd be lighting it.  For whatever reason, in my experience most of them are male.

[spork]

Some high schools make their students work hard. It is probably related to how rich the district is. But yes, plenty of high schools just graduate the students so they don't have to see them again.

I thought this sort of topic had been discussed ad nauseam in books, editorials and discussion boards.

Back when a literate population -- at least the white population, especially the male portion -- was regarded as an important public good, and income inequality (among whites) wasn't as great as it is now, a K-12 system under local control, funded via property taxes, worked pretty well (for whites). Now you can pretty much identify how bad a high school is by looking at the percentage of non-white students.

So I would say that a root cause is lack of democracy, not the converse.

[Hegemony]

I have my grandmother's school yearbook, from 1906.  The elementary-grade classes are large, maybe 45 or so (that might have been more than one classroom).  Every year the number goes down — 9th grade has maybe 15 students — until by 12th grade you have 6 students.  It's probable that those remaining 6 were fairly motivated.  If we still had jobs that could be well performed by people with an 8th grade education (or with what an 8th-grade education covered in 1906, which undoubtedly had much less science!), we could have that system again.  But.

[ciao_yall]

I have my grandmother's school yearbook, from 1906.  The elementary-grade classes are large, maybe 45 or so (that might have been more than one classroom).  Every year the number goes down — 9th grade has maybe 15 students — until by 12th grade you have 6 students.  It's probable that those remaining 6 were fairly motivated.  If we still had jobs that could be well performed by people with an 8th grade education (or with what an 8th-grade education covered in 1906, which undoubtedly had much less science!), we could have that system again.  But.

Still, it seems that with the advances in science and technology and mathematics and all, someone with an 8th-grade education was pretty far along with all the knowledge in the world to do most jobs out there. Farmers, factory workers, even accountants and doctors and lawyers and scientists didn't have as much to learn 100 years ago as they might today.

Does this make sense? Or am I not giving 100 years ago enough credit?

[marshwiggle]

I have my grandmother's school yearbook, from 1906.  The elementary-grade classes are large, maybe 45 or so (that might have been more than one classroom).  Every year the number goes down — 9th grade has maybe 15 students — until by 12th grade you have 6 students.  It's probable that those remaining 6 were fairly motivated.  If we still had jobs that could be well performed by people with an 8th grade education (or with what an 8th-grade education covered in 1906, which undoubtedly had much less science!), we could have that system again.  But.

Still, it seems that with the advances in science and technology and mathematics and all, someone with an 8th-grade education was pretty far along with all the knowledge in the world to do most jobs out there. Farmers, factory workers, even accountants and doctors and lawyers and scientists didn't have as much to learn 100 years ago as they might today.

Does this make sense? Or am I not giving 100 years ago enough credit?

From the numbers, it's more a question of "Would the top 1/3 of those who finish grade 8 be able to do much?" I'd bet those 15 students going into grade 9 were way ahead of our average grade 9 students because the bottom 2/3 were eliminated. All of the classes could move at a faster pace when it's not the school's responsibility to get everyone through.

I agree with Hegemony that this isn't about democracy.

Note that marshwiggle left unbolded and uncommented upon the part where I note this being a particular problem with international students, who are largely Chinese students (i.e., not from a democracy)-- it's not that they aren't smart, or haven't had to work hard (indeed, they have worked really hard in high school), it's just that what worked in HS and what works in their new US college environment don't match, because rather than just memorizing, our assessments ask them to do things like synthesize and apply concepts which they have usually not been asked to do before (my understanding is that there are efforts to change this in the Chinese education system).

You're right; probably the word I should have used is "egalitarianism", which, in principle applies to communist countries as well. However, to the best of my knowledge, Western democracies seem to be much more ambitious at promoting the idea that "anyone can be anything they want to be".

For our US students, the problem is slightly different. Because we are highly selective, they all come in used to being at the top of their classes. Many worked hard to be there, but some were able to get away with suboptimal study skills and/or limited study time because they could just figure things out on the fly. Then we throw all those students together, with commensurately higher expectations,  and they can't all be above average anymore-- what used to produce As produces Bs and Cs, and they are shocked ("surprised and confused" is used so often it has become faculty shorthand for the student suffering the first B of their life ungracefully).

This is, at least in part, because of pushing everyone through the system. To use the numbers above, if only 6 people graduated from your school, and the numbers got smaller each year, you'd probably expect university to weed out even more.

Furthermore, with "social promotion", where kids are advanced even when they're not up to it in order to keep them with their peers, we reinforce the idea that academic performance is secondary to social life. When  they get to university, and choose partying over studying, they get it! They've internalized the message perfectly.

Again, I don't think this has anything to do with democracy. No matter how high the standards are for high schools, there is going to be a distribution, and if we then skim off the top of that distribution into a selective college there's going to be an adjustment period where they need to recalibrate their study techniques and effort to the new standards.

If students were streamed into classes of similar ability all the way through, then there wouldn't be that mindset because the brightest students would only be in classes with other bright students, (and which would move at a pace which challenges them), so only the extreme outlier would breeze through.

But doing that means admitting that academic ability, like athletic ability, varies a lot and no amount of infrastructure can make it disappear.

[polly_mer]

I have my grandmother's school yearbook, from 1906.  The elementary-grade classes are large, maybe 45 or so (that might have been more than one classroom).  Every year the number goes down — 9th grade has maybe 15 students — until by 12th grade you have 6 students.  It's probable that those remaining 6 were fairly motivated.  If we still had jobs that could be well performed by people with an 8th grade education (or with what an 8th-grade education covered in 1906, which undoubtedly had much less science!), we could have that system again.  But.

Still, it seems that with the advances in science and technology and mathematics and all, someone with an 8th-grade education was pretty far along with all the knowledge in the world to do most jobs out there. Farmers, factory workers, even accountants and doctors and lawyers and scientists didn't have as much to learn 100 years ago as they might today.

Does this make sense? Or am I not giving 100 years ago enough credit?

This makes complete sense to me.  As Marshwiggle just wrote, egalitarianism is more a problem than democracy.  I can think of several factors, some of which have been mentioned by others, that have changed in my lifetime and continue to change in ways that make the same checkbox credential for everyone a terrible idea that undermines education.


I keep thinking of the three-part series of hipsters on food stamps at The Last Psychiatrist.  One paragraph in particular keeps resonating:

But Gerry already had a living wage-- he spent it on the University of Chicago, 41 years of food stamps in 4 years.  If everybody knew in advance the outcome was going to be unemployment and living wages, then why doesn't Frase challenge the capitalist assumption  that college is money well spent-- could have been used differently?  He can't.  This thought cannot occur to him, not because he is dumb, he clearly isn't, or because he is paid by a college-- money is irrelevant to him.  He can't because his entire identity is built on college, academia.  He is college. Take that away, he disintegrates. So in the utopia he imagines, college still exists AND people get living wages.

Source: https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2012/11/hipsters_on_food_stamps_part_2.html

A second paragraph useful to this discussion is

When we see a welfare mom we assume she can't find work, but when we see a hipster we become infuriated because we assume he doesn't want to work but could easily do so-- on account of the fact that he can speak well-- that he went to college.  But now suddenly we're all shocked: to the economy, the English grad is just as superfluous as the disenfranchised welfare mom in the hood-- the college education is just as irrelevant as the skin color.  Not irrelevant for now, not irrelevant "until the economy improves"-- irrelevant forever. The economy doesn't care about intelligence, at all, it doesn't care what you know, merely what you can produce for it. 

<...>

It's hard to accept that the University of Chicago grad described in the article isn't employable, that the economy doesn't need him, but it is absolutely true, but my point here is that not only is he not contributing, the economy doesn't need him to contribute.

Source: https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2012/11/hipsters_on_food_stamps.html

We don't need everyone who can get a checkbox college degree by going through the motions to get one.  And yet, we have jobs that need doing that we don't have people willing or able to do and that's not just true of picking fruit.

I was in a small rural high school when the state law changed requiring attendance until age 18 or graduation.  Prior to that time, a noticeable fraction of people left at age 16 for a job or the family farm.  Our middle school required everyone to take shop and home ec as useful life and job skills.  In high school, one could select various unofficial tracks (i.e., no one was prevented from mixing and matching classes, but some sets of classes are more typical to group together) that included:

• an apprenticeship track with various local businesses for those who were not planning college
• an industrial arts track for those planning to enter a formal apprenticeship program with one of the area CCs or join the family farm
• a business track for those who probably were going to join a family business with perhaps some CC certificate immediately planned
• a general education track for those who were unsure of their future but probably military
• a college prep track that used the requirements for admission to the University of Wisconsin-Madison as guidance

The smallest enrollment was in college prep, but we really were ready for college when we got there.  Because other good options existed for non-academic minded students and most of the town had gone through those tracks themselves, students picked the tracks that resonated with them.  We didn't have a big division in perceived personal worth by choosing one path over another.  Indeed, we had strong music and arts programs; enrollment in those classes were generally across all tracks.  Band met during first lunch in part to accommodate the afternoon apprenticeship schedules. 

That "perceived personal worth" by choosing academics or not then means people who aren't particularly interested or even very good at academics choose the socially acceptable route instead of a good-for-them-personally route.  For example, in my kid's public school system, there's really only 3 tracks: elite college, state college, and concurrent enrollment in community college for EMT/nursing certificate.  A fourth track with an internship with the largest employer in town technically exists, but usually the elite-college-bound kids take it as a jumpstart on their STEM career, not the more average kid working as an apprentice with the skilled crafts or back office business folks.

A huge change in the past 20-30 years is how automation has eliminated jobs for a good enough, diligent enough person who can follow instructions.  We no longer have large secretarial pools because everyone, except the top executives, does their own word processing.  The back business office at a huge company doesn't have dozens of accounting clerks; it's got a couple accountants doing high-level work and a couple of people who answer questions about how to enter one's own information into the system.  At my current job, we laugh sometimes about how the cost accounting works so that the company just spent $500 to $1000 of engineer time to fill out the travel request to ensure we won't be committing fraud at $100 by booking a non-standard flight.

Manufacturing, farming, and even some of the typical apprenticeships have changed so that these are no longer unskilled jobs that "anyone" can be trained to do in a couple months.  The automation means that the one human needs to be much better at dealing with the complex system including the underlying computer aspects than being able to learn once as a novice and then slightly expand every decade.  If anything, the slap-you-in-the-face-nearly-daily aspects of lifelong learning are much stronger outside of academic settings than anything my formal education prepared me to do.  That's fine for people who are very bright and curious who just aren't academically minded; that's a disaster for people who just want to get into a comfortable rut doing basically the same things month after month and be paid living-inside-and-eating-regularly money for doing so.  Even the family farm really only needs one or two people with modern, computerized equipment instead of as many warm bodies in the fields as we can get.

Thus, when I think about what I'd change if I had a magic wand, I'd go back to the K-12 system to ensure that people who would be successful at doing things that need to be done, but aren't particularly academic-minded had routes to being productive.  I again go back to college general education requirements and how they are probably undermining our ability to have enough good engineers and scientists by putting artificial barriers in the way.  Yep, it's vocational education to focus purely on the long path necessary to be competent in those areas. 

We're really, really short on people in jobs that require the longest paths and that's starting to hurt us as a society in ways that aren't visible to people who think in terms of "the system", not a series of choices and daily tasks by individual humans to keep things running. 

Let me say it again louder

We're really, really short on people doing things that keep modern American society running and have a very long educational path by virtue of everything that really, truly, no fooling' needs to be learned as a foundation. 

It's not STEM or STEAM; it's certain areas of engineering and other pursuits that either require partial differential equations and other advanced math as the only language that works and likely a computer is involved to solve the PDEs using other advanced math and require a mindset that can go forward in nebulous situations where no equations can be written yet.  Artificially winnowing the pool of these folks by insisting on probably-nice-to-have-that-probably-someone-could-benefit general education requirements in high school and college means hurting us all, especially when one considers that 70% of US adults don't have those nice-to-have-general-education experiences and somehow soldier on.

Being an excellent student is not particularly well correlated with success in these particular jobs; we would be much better off starting these folks on other paths as early as middle school--as is done in many countries often cited as doing it better than the US is.

[downer]

Which countries do it better?

This US NEWS list puts the UK at #1 and US at #2 for education. I'm pretty dubious about what measures they used.

The US is probably one of the least egalitarian countries out there by many measures, comparable to India. (Strikingly, top search results about egalitarian countries are about gender equality, which is not the focus of this discussion.) This Guardian article is more about egalitarianism in pay and quality of life. But the wealth or poverty of the nations is a complicating factor.

[marshwiggle]

Which countries do it better?

This US NEWS list puts the UK at #1 and US at #2 for education. I'm pretty dubious about what measures they used.

The US is probably one of the least egalitarian countries out there by many measures, comparable to India.

In practice perhaps, but the myth of "the American Dream" is what drives all kinds of policy and choices. Reality can't compete with wishful thinking.

[downer]

Which countries do it better?

This US NEWS list puts the UK at #1 and US at #2 for education. I'm pretty dubious about what measures they used.

The US is probably one of the least egalitarian countries out there by many measures, comparable to India.

In practice perhaps, but the myth of "the American Dream" is what drives all kinds of policy and choices. Reality can't compete with wishful thinking.

All sorts of things drive policy, but my impression is that most in the US just give egalitarianism lip service. If any policies start to look like they will make real changes to social structure in favor of equality, then those policies get changed or ignored. Obviously a  big generalization, but largely true since the Reagan era at least.

[marshwiggle]

In practice perhaps, but the myth of "the American Dream" is what drives all kinds of policy and choices. Reality can't compete with wishful thinking.

All sorts of things drive policy, but my impression is that most in the US just give egalitarianism lip service. If any policies start to look like they will make real changes to social structure in favor of equality, then those policies get changed or ignored. Obviously a  big generalization, but largely true since the Reagan era at least.

You sort of prove my point, by implying that most of the differences in outcomes are due to differences in environment and opportunity. Even if everyone had exactly the same environment and opportunities, there would be big differences in outcomes based on peoples' natural abilities and personalities. It's this reality that society doesn't like to admit, and that wastes all kinds of resources that would be better allocated helping people achieve what is reasonable and will be useful to them, rather than some amorphous "universal" ideal.