Charlie Kirk Symptom of an Education Crisis
I find myself in the camp of people who would hope it goes without saying that I condemn the murder of Charlie Kirk, as easily as I can condemn the content of most of what I've heard Charlie Kirk ever say.
In particular, on the one hand, I would hope it unnecessary for us to all check whether laws against murdering people should continue to be the law that governs our society, and on the other hand the content of Charlie Kirk's publicized speech I condemn as moronic.
That's about as much as I wish to say about the particulars of what I see as merely symptomatic of an education crisis I just don't think we've even begun to address.
Answers vs Understanding
"57" is the answer to the question, how old is Patricia Arquette. That this number signifies a measure of orbital journeys the Earth has taken around the sun since she was born, is to understand how we arrive at this answer.
I choose to make sense of the social world I live in, by entertaining the notion that one simply need answers to graduate from a tertiary education, answers suffice, understanding is optional.
Nor is this a dichotomy, where someone who can recite answers cannot demonstrate understanding, and that understanding is some meaningless artefact that cannot produce answers.
I suspect for numerous reasons, answers are the spine of our education and subsequent labour market.
Imagine if you can, handing out 30 copies of Hermine Melville's "Moby Dick" and then testing 30 students as to whether they understand it.
The best way, would be for a competent instructor to sit down and discuss the text with each and every student, and then accredit or discredit the student on their ability to comprehend a book about a whale that kills pretty much everybody.
Not only would a competent teacher find this assessment a considerable drain on their resources, but states would quickly find competent teachers in short supply.
So just due to sheer scarcity of resources, I understand how post-industrial revolution we could end up with an education system that treats recitations of answers as good-enough-proxy for understanding.
But that is only one factor as to how our education system permits people to apply effort to discovering the answers. Rather than generating their own answers through their own cognitive efforts.
Merit Systems
I'm a recent fan of Yale Law Professor Daniel Markowitz, who breaks down "merit" into three components:
1. Natural ability.
2. Effort.
3. Education and Training.
(I think) Natural ability is widely perceived more-or-less correctly to be distributed almost randomly among the population. Effort is also going to be largely genetic and thus distributed somewhat randomly, and crucially effort is incumbent upon an individual.
Education and training is where someone can put dollars to work for their child. And I think as economies rapidly grew in the 20th century, it is the sheer appeal of this intergenerational advantage that did not see education moving away from a gameable answer-based system to an intensive understanding-based system.
To obsess over Moby Dick like Captain Ahab, I think the marking workload is managed not only through class sizes but by attempting an objective grading formula. Where a teacher can mark the student by counting the quotations per-paragraph and then simply checking that the sentences are somewhat coherent.
3 quotes per paragraph in a two page essay = A+, 1 quote per paragraph = C+.
(I must confess, I do not have the teaching experience to know how a secondary teacher and upward grade an English essay. What I do have experience with was scoring Debates, where subjective though it is the process was largely a simplified method of grading participants relatively. The DAV standard practice was to give each kid a 75 then add or subtract points for basically whatever. One of my fellow adjudicators felt a kid was so shit at debating, they awarded them 0. This was a behaviour that earned them a "please explain" but on reflection, a score of 0 in debating should not just be theoretically possible, but probably considering how often students neglect to actually debate the issue at hand, or argue complete fallacies, particularly at the junior levels. The sport is, probably more failure than success.)
Crucially, this means there will be a market for study guides, that outline formulaic approaches to essay questions on Moby Dick in the same way one might approach quadratic equations.
For quite some time now, our schools could have been sending out report cards with really useful information like "tohm is highly competent at solving simultaneous equations with high level algebra but has nothing to say worth hearing by anyone."
Such a report could have been a collaborative effort between my Maths and Studio Art teachers.
I've heard Jonathon Haidt claim, several times, that critical thinking has been determined to be unteachable, hence education systems generally don't bother. My parents generation claims they had a subject that did indeed instruct them in thought, and perhaps it can't be taught, or perhaps one gets rusty without exercise, just as I'm sure I couldn't resit my high-school exams and still get into university.
The claim is increasingly striking me as suspicious, like all the evidence I've seen that claim diet and exercise do not work for weight loss, which I know, personally, to be untrue. I am going to guess there may be a complicating factor, 60 hour work weeks and an economy based on feeling anxious all the time in the case of weight loss, and possibly that all the other subjects students are taught emphasize answer-based assessment for which thinking is costly and risky.
Until the late 20th Century
What people largely now call "AI" I have found eye opening. Chatting with a friend I mentioned that I looked up how to get rid of Gemini "AI Summaries" in my google search results, and that I must be part of a sizeable demographic because Google had (and continue) to now have a distinct results page "web" (as opposed to "all") that replicates pre-knowledge panel Google search.
My friend was surprised, seemingly, that I do not find the AI summaries useful. This I in turn find surprising that anybody does.
I experience them (AI summaries) as sucking an entire thrift-store into a gas-powered wood chipper, taking all the debris then sticky taping it back into something that looks uncannily like a t-shirt, when I can just go into a thrift-store and buy a t-shirt.
What was enlightening was that my friend suggested I was a natural "researcher" or something, and while it may not describe my AI summary using friend, it opened up the possibility of people who had gotten where they are in life, by simply figuring out what answer the teacher wants.
A feat that can be accomplished without understanding.
Up until the late 20th Century, we could get away with an education system that largely trains people to imitate smart people. Which I suspect is why "AI" chatbots have proved to be a kind of Rorschach test, where people who find it useful see it as a perfectly good imitation of knowledge, which is all that possibly has ever been demanded of them. (I hope my personal bias is clear, regarding LLMs and as such if you feel I am calling you an idiot, you can use that bias to dismiss me handily).
As such, education is, possibly, dare I say even probably, by design highly gameable. And it is but an entrée to gaming a job market through credentialism, among other things.
One of my favourite pieces of commentary on our education system is "B-5 got the dinks" from greatest TV show ever The Wire:
The student has figured out the answer by observing the behaviour of the teacher, not by understanding basic arithmetic.
Krusty Brand Imitation smart-people works when you can somewhat control what content is going in, where you can be sure your aerospace engineers are learning their physics from Da Vinci, Newton and Einstein and not Eric Weinstein on Joe Rogan podcasts.
By the time the dot-com bubble bursts in early 2000, there's been a massive overinvestment in internet infrastructure allowing India and Bangladesh to become tech-hubs and people to call internationally pretty much for free. From there, it seems likely that all control of information inputs, has been lost by the state. This includes not just propaganda, but also quality control.
The Last 10 Years
The last ten years I feel I've been watching how we do education getting its skull smashed in by Tumblr, Buzzfeed and Reddit.
Increased polarization seems like a pretty uncontroversial claim at this point. Though election results in both the UK and Australia may belie how severe it is.
My feeling is, that we've had a disastrous run on successfully disseminating rhetorical tricks.
In this case, I'm suggesting rhetorical tricks allow people to "win" arguments while achieving no understanding, just as brute-force rote learning answers to an exam can get you a desired grade with no understanding of the subject you obtained the grade in.
I'll illustrate what I mean by rhetorical tricks with examples from either polar extreme.
"Virtue signalling" is a useful idea, but somewhat redundant, we have other well-known words for the same behaviour like "lip-service" "all talk" or "hypocrite" but as a rhetorical trick, you first identify somebody you dislike, maybe they have blue hair, wear a rainbow flag patch or don't eat animal products. You then simply wait for them to assert some positive-value, then you accuse them of "virtue signalling" and they get flustered and confused BOOM! you "win".
"Mansplaining" is a useful idea, though the author of the collection of essays from which the meme is derived points out "you don't defeat condescension with condescension" or something to that effect. I see no reason "mansplaining" can't be appropriated and generalised to refer to all instances of a) explaining someone's own expertise to them as an amateur or b) defending the status quo as inevitable (such as Youtube channel Economics Explained, could all be described as mansplaining) but as a rhetorical trick it works thus - wait for anyone male to speak, attack them for mansplaining to you, they get flustered and apologetic BOOM! you "win".
The trouble being, the point of arguing isn't to win but to get at knowledge by having our own beliefs tested. Alas, I've been struggling with an intrusive and misanthropic thought of late which is...
That Most People Cannot Argue for Shit
This is a big problem. I mean, like I'm not confident most people can tell the difference between an argument and an assertion.
I however experience this more in the form of you want to have an argument with me about the existence of griffons, this is just an example because I don't need to single out any actual example of unpleasant arguments I've had with friends and loved ones.
You open up the debate with "I think griffins really exist." To which I reply "What do you mean griffons? Like the mythical creature or maybe the fossils of reptillian dinosaurs that possibly inspired the myths?"
While this might seem innocuous, I'm happy with the example, because in my experience the argument has already, and the relationship too, deteriorated beyond repair. A rapid fire of micro-expressions is exchanged via faces between just these two lines and as such allow me to articulate the subtext.
"So are you going to let me win an argument for once?" "You can win an argument whenever you like, but you haven't done even rudimentary homework, this is a waste of both our time."
And clearly, I'm fucking up, because this keeps happening to me but I'm starting to suspect that most people don't even realise that there is homework to be done.
The simplest theory I can concoct is a life-long learned habit of simply looking answers up as opposed to generating answers through cognitive effort. As such, once you have the google machine, for many, lacking an understanding as to why their teachers are authorities, everyone is a teacher.
Further muddying the waters, is that you can probably get through education courses in the social sciences and arts, by rote learning whole arguments you don't understand, and simply regurgitating them onto the page.
For example, if you got the essay question "Chomsky concedes that US military intervention was probably justified in world war II, why was that conflict exceptional?"
It's totally feasible to answer this in the same manner as a chatbot, with little (for a person) to no (LLMs) understanding of what you are saying. Where an LLM uses vast probability tables to form impressively coherent sentences, a student may simply answer:
"The US had a strategic interest in the European theatre of war that aligned with humane moral obligations, due to this alignment FDR's using the attacks on Pearl Harbour as pretext to military intervention in Europe was an exception to most nations track record of foreign direct intervention as an exercise in imperial power." or something, the thing is, that if we assumed in this made up example that we had sufficient resources to cross-examine my example answer, I could probably concede that the suggested alignment was not exceptional, and rather it probably was more exceptional in the cooperation between Soviet and British imperial powers to defeat the upstart empire of the Third Reich or something.
But our educations assessment capacities don't permit cross examination. Maybe in a history subject some fact checking can be done. (In year 7 I tried to fudge an essay on Nero used to being able to bullshit my way through humanities subjects by claiming Nero burned down Rome. A factual claim so egregious my SOSE teacher gave me an F)
I probably cannot emphasise, how much of my conversations with people, involve someone repeating what they heard. In part this is to be expected, knowledge is collaborative. What I would emphasize is how much is just people repeating what they have heard.
This results in phenomena where it is a cheap and dirty trick to ask someone "what's Capitalism?" "what do you mean Wokeism?" "what do you mean god?" "what do you mean by patriarchy?"
Such requests for clarity, are perhaps so poorly received and so often countered with indignation to suggest something everyone is talking about needs defining, that it can be missed that all the above examples are ideas either so broad or so vague that the invoker can't explain them to an educated adult, let alone a 6 year old child.
Taking the last one, about 5-6 years ago, awareness probably reached critical point to drive a rhetorical strategy extinct which was "it's not my job to explain it to you."
While the argument is on the surface sensible, if somebody is complaining about oppression under a system of patriarchy or whatever, then it increases the oppression via the cost of having to educate oppressors as to the nature of their oppression. It's just kind of strategically, a dead-end. Beneficiaries of the status quo have little immediate incentive to raise-their-own consciousness.
The only sense in which it is not a strategic-dead end, is to make dialogue impossible which can provide cover for simply not understanding the issues at hand.
I don't wish to single out and dump on feminism, rhetorical tricks are not something anyone has a monopoly on. Australia's worst unincarcerated export, Ken Ham founder of "Answers in Genesis" and "The Ark Experience" for example quite intuitively relies on "you weren't there, God was there and I have a special book that says what God says is true."
Ken Ham is kind of literally a very sad joke and while I am making sweeping statements, allow me to say that maybe, just maybe we are living in a world where we have allowed far too many people to gain credentials without understanding.
An Incomplete List of Examples
The first is heinousness creep. This has involved the appropriation of terms used to describe accurately specific heinous behaviour and applying it to behaviour that may be unpleasant but is perfectly acceptable. A popular one is "gaslighting".
Gaslighting was probably popularised by Brene Brown in reference to a movie where gas lights were used to create a real phenomena that was denied by a conspirator to convince a lady she couldn't trust her own senses. It is useful to describe the specific and heinous behaviour of deliberately attempting to convince someone else that they are going insane.
The term I feel, I can defend, was quickly appropriated to describe behaviour as banal as contradicting someone or lying. For example, in the final season of "You" The screenwriters have Kate, Joe's wife declare that she won't let him "gaslight" her anymore. I would struggle to think of a single example of Joe gaslighting Kate and the screenwriters have given us omnipotent insight into Joe's own state of deluded rationalization.
In 2016 an English teacher Nora Samaran wrote a blog post on "gaslighting" that cited as examples, just everyday lies that caused her to doubt her reading of non-verbal behaviour. Her example of gaslighting:
I phone a close male friend I’ve known for many years. I’m upset, and I’d like to vent, maybe hear some supportive loving words and maybe ask advice. This friend sometimes feels physiologically overwhelmed by emoting, and sometimes finds it brings him closer to people and welcomes it. In this moment, he snaps “I can’t talk right now, here,” and tosses the phone to his female partner, who enjoys these kinds of conversations.
I feel mildly hurt by the abruptness and since we’re all very close, I mention it to the partner, who relays that to him. He says from across the room “No no I’m not upset at all with you, I just am washing dishes and getting dinner ready, that’s all.” ~ Full example on her blog post here.
By this definition of gaslighting, every call center employee for decades is constantly gaslit every shift by men and women everywhere, every time someone tells them "I'm busy" when they actually mean "I don't wish to participate in this unsolicited call."
I assert, that the behaviour we might call "being short" with someone, and the behaviour of "lying" can simultaneously both be behaviours we condemn as falling short of ideals and virtue, but are banal rather than egregious. Nor do I accuse Nora of maliciously and deliberately skunking the concept of "gaslighting" to describe both egregious manipulation and abuse, and ordinary emotional incompetence. I think these rhetorical tricks are popular because they are intuitive.
So with heinousness creep, the rhetorical trick is to take something that is established as heinous and then expand the definition to describe quite ordinary, low-impact behaviour under that definition, so ordinary non-heinous behaviour can suddenly become heinous, like asking questions.
Similar but slightly different, is turning a useful construct into an ad-hominem. I'll switch poles to use "virtue signalling" again, where a dude sharing a feminist poem to express his feelings in the wake of a high profile murder of a woman in the streets who is known himself to be an abuser of women, is clear cut virtue signalling. A woman expressing the opinion "I believe women to be equal in dignity to men" is not, likely to be, virtue signalling unless they are a Supreme Court Justice about to overturn Wade v Roe.
Turning "virtue signalling" into an ad hominem is when you neglect to assess it based on some discrepancy between what people say they care about, vs how they act and what they invest most of their efforts in, and apply it simply as a marker of tribal affiliation. To signal, to one's own tribe that this person is an outsider and therefore is not to be listened to.
Perhaps the big one though, that the far-right Christian Nationalist tribe in the United States and seemingly UK are seizing upon but has firm foundation in the far-left or regressive left, is "speech is violence" which we can regard as perhaps the weaponization of "non-violent communication."
As a rhetorical trick, it is basically just censorship, where on the grounds of safety discussion can simply not take place. I recently witnessed a good-will attempt at this very tactic, a speaker made an appeal to their emotion "I'm not comfortable discussing this anymore." They were fortunately overruled on the grounds that the classroom was a safe space, that we were all adults and these ideas being foundational needed to be discussed.
And it is not that exposure to content, including speech, cannot be damaging, but this was a solved problem pre-internet. For example, if a parent took their 8 year old kid to see Nightmare on Elm Street III in the 80s, it was recognised by society, that that was on the parent.
In Eddie Murphy's Delirious (or maybe Raw, but chronologically I'm confident it is delirious) he points to a child in the audience and makes a joke about how they probably thought he'd be doing all his SNL characters that were clearly child friendly, and not talking about men getting aids from their wives kissing gay guys in the club and coming home with aids on their lips.
However, the itself-skunked-term "trauma" can be appealed to censor and shut down discussion for safety reasons, and it just cannot be legitimate.
As an easy example, the current president of the United States clearly gets upset emotionally and physiologically by any criticism of him ever. Most people on the left who employ this same rhetorical strategy would never concede that the media needs to be mindful of the harm they are doing to this clearly traumatised individual. I suspect most would feel, that such an individual is unfit to hold an office that necessitates constant scrutiny and criticism for public safety.
Yet, a similar principle is not employed when judging the fitness of people to participate in further education.
I feel it is legitimate for someone to say "I'm not comfortable with this conversation/where this is going etc." I feel it is incumbent on such an individual, to withdraw their participation from public discourse, on the most fundamental ethic - they cannot fail, they cannot lose an argument or even question and re-evaluate their own opinion. It is thus incumbent on others to accept the conclusions they have reached without justification. They are asserting their dominance.
Compounding Factors
One compounding factor making discussion and argument and subsequent knowledge difficult, if not impossible for many ill-equipped by an education focused on the industrious imitation of intelligent people capable of dealing with general novelty, is a strong interpretation of media effects.
Media effects are patently, observably weak. As Sean Penn portrayed Harvey Milk as saying "if its true we imitate our teachers we'd see a lot more nuns running around." and religion is one of the best examples of weak media effects.
Children have to be raised in a religious tradition, and religious communities often have to reinforce their messaging weakly at costly gatherings in order to sustain themselves. Religiosity declines with attendance and even with attendance we have numerous historical examples of persons no less immersed in a religious tradition than popes and bishops having illegitimate children right up to present day gay-homophobes.
Not to bash the bishop too much, a commonly cited example of media effects is how little boys media content is all about adventuring - pirates, knights, astronauts encouraging them to go out into the world on heroic adventures. Yet, look around you and ask how many men grow up to be heroic or adventurous? Most are risk averse, opting for safe careers, safe partners and keeping their heads down.
Little boys often don't become pro-athletes because of media effects, but instead have risk-averse wealthy organisations swoop in on the few that demonstrate early proficiency and pump more resources into their development with mixed results.
It is comforting to believe that the levers with which to move the world are as simple as the stories we tell, hence in my experience people overreact to discussion of 'dangerous' ideas. I'm going to go out on a limb here, and suggest that if you (on the left) were to read Mein Kampf, there is zero chance you will become a fascist neo-nazi skinhead. I credit you with having at the least, the tribal insecurities that render you unpersuadable by such media exposure, let alone the critical faculties to recognize a fallacious boring polemic. And you (on the right) are not going to be moved at all if exposed to Ibram X Kendhi's anti-racist baby, for the exact same reasons.
The problem is actually the opposite, when people only read Mein Kampf, and only read How to be Anti-racist. Yet, we have this massive compounding factor present based on a poorly evidenced but comforting idea that media effects are powerful. Tribal people everywhere are intuitively trying to avoid exposure to novel ideas.
The degree to which this is conscious, I do not know. While generally I feel the memefication of discourse into rhetorical tricks is an adaptive strategy for those who have not been prepared by life to argue, I also suspect that many experiencing some kind of cognitive dissonance in being socially invested in ideas that are, at least to them, incoherent and unintelligible, do employ these rhetorical strategies in bad faith.
The other compounding factor, I would refer to as the "Iago" effect, after the Shakespeare villain, who destroys not just Othello, but everybodies lives by creating non-existing threats. This is a tactic whereby you take a behaviour that didn't harm somebody, and then "educating" them to find insult and trauma. A kind of perversion of consciousness raising.
Usiing a right-wing example, getting people worked up over "they/them" pronouns, even though they revere defunct pronouns like "thee/thou" used in their holy books that are third person plural pronouns, or new plural pronouns like "yous" used in Australian English. (Yes, the only thing in Judaism and Christianity that God bothered to commit to writing was "Yous shall not kill").
The distinction is, Iago is not consciousness raising but shit stirring. Now there genuinely is a question of how charitable to be to the people who seem to think raising the salience of race (for example) was a good way to somehow reduce racism, and "educating" people into taking offense at the notion of color-blindness, or humanism.
That's been a big compounding factor, in just making people more sensitive and readier to take offense has made the institution of discourse far more socially fraught, even if we are no less free to exercise speech.
The Punchline
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." -John F. Kennedy, assassinated by a lone nut-job.
I cannot find the specific one, but there was a great talk at Google by a guy talking about difficult conversation. He opened his talk by inviting members of the audience to turn to the person next to them and tell them how much they earn, how old they think the other person is and how attractive they find the other person out of ten.
The purpose was to cut straight to cultural taboos, and while taboo there's no real harm in the discomfort they cause for both speaker and listener.
Charlie Kirk's murder simply validates JFK's assertion. Now, this is how confirmation bias works, but I am betting that if we can't discuss, and more to the point of this post, can't think and can't argue, people will turn to violence.
"People with guns don't understand. That's why they get guns, too many misunderstandings." ~ Jerry Seinfeld, episode "The Little Kicks"
I feel it's important to emphasize my real conclusion. I am not saying that teachers don't try to teach students how to think. I feel the problem is our education system assesses students on their ability to furnish answers, and this does not require any understanding on the students' part.
This is the dark side of "what gets measured gets done" understanding is costly and tertiary places are scarce relative to demand. It is far more efficient for our students to simply brute force answers into their brains than generate them. It is also something money can easily buy and create more resource intensive forms of education with a narrower variation of results.
That was literally the secret sauce to my own secondary schools ability to have 30% of our year graduate among the top 10% of students state-wide. They handed us phonebook size print-outs of past exams and commercially licensed practice exams, so we could simply rehearse our final examinations until we all would get As.
They call this "spoon feeding" and I believe private (paid) school students have higher fail rates and drop out rates than public (free) school students, yet they obtain places at university in greater numbers than their hardier public school counterparts.
This is also, I feel, likely why we can graduate so many people, with so many qualifications that in practice are not well spoken, not great thinkers and can't argue for shit.
At the extremes, these people, unable to argue like a Cambridge student, eventually grab a gun and defend the honour of their tribe.
If you want to make the world a more peaceful place, get into an argument and start learning how to argue.
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