Holding university entrance exams earlier seems like a recipe for disaster that would hurt disadvantaged students the most. This may be just my experience, but the older you get, the more time you get to catch up with students from better families. Coming from a working class background, I only started to study actively in high school (the culture I grew up in discouraged and actively mocked boys who read books or liked maths) which means that had the entrance exam be held at the beginning of high school, I would not have done as well as I did at the ned of high school.
The problem with building a meritocratic system is that everyone wants capable kids from poor backgrounds to raise to the top, but the elite doesn't want their average kids to fall down in society to their expected rank. One of the jobs of the elite schools is to prop us these average kids and to make them seem smart to outsiders: anyone who has studied in an "elite" university has a story about the rich kids who spend their days partying, intending to only pass the easiest classes in the school because that's all they need - their parents have already arranged an entry-level job for them.
That culture is everywhere in schools, not limited to poor people, also in middle class. These kids are suffering, and thus culture needs to be fought. Instead teachers and society are lazy and say "lol whatever boys will be boys, let's just let this kids suffer and waste more time until they are grown ups and then maybe the bullies catch up academically"
Is that what you are proposing?
There isn't much meritocracy in the system, at least as far as I can see. In Czech we have a saying "the wolf has eaten, but the goat remained whole" for situations like that.
The American elite wants to be seen as anti-racist, which means elevating at least some kids from the ghettos to the Ivy Leagues etc. At the same time, the American elite is still mostly white and does not want to jeopardize future of their own offspring, and many of those offspring are indeed average.
It seems to me that the current way to square those two interests is to raise tuition really high, combine it with legacy admissions (even an average kid of rich parents will be able to thread the needle there) and raise higher admission obstacles for Asians who would otherwise qualify in high numbers on knowledge alone.
Yes exactly. And also dumb down public schools by not teaching advanced classes and getting rid of magnet schools like the Democrats are doing in multiple states. While of course still teaching those classes at the private schools that upper middle class and above can afford. Gotta keep those smart poor people in their place.
This is fairly new. Magnet schools and accelerated classes for smart poor people used to be something that we considered good, because we want at least a few smart people getting educated. Now that "smart poor people" generally means "people of asian descent," we're changing course and getting rid of all of those programs.
A disproportionate percentage of the US elite is also Jewish. Yet they, as a society, seem to have mostly overcome the tensions that have plagued Jews and white non-Jews in Europe for a very long time. What makes you think that the US "melting pot" culture cannot overcome other obstacles (currently IMO mostly exemplified with the rising Asian "elite")
Well, I think it definitely can and probably will; for example, given how hard the Asian children tend to be driven by their parents, I expect them to occupy a significant part of the elite in 2050, bringing with them very different perspectives, too.
(The same process, albeit on a much smaller scale, is taking place in the Czech Republic. We have a Vietnamese minority that began as convenience store owners, but their children are rising fast into the educated elite of the country.)
But that process will be fraught with a lot of conflict and will likely require abandonment of any efforts to pre-balance student bodies by ethnicity.
The elephant in the room is culture, of course. The relative freedom of the American economic system ensures that any group with strong “meritocratic” cultural values will eventually come to occupy a disproportionate share of the economic elite.
The obvious advantage of Jewish culture is (in part) its ancient tradition of demanding literacy from everyone. East Asian cultures also place a high value on literacy, and the Confucian emphasis on social harmony tends to promote an ideal of “self-cultivation”.
I think the real challenge here is that within the American “melting pot,” one particular group has a tragic history of cultural devastation, and no amount of money or assistance from outsiders can rebuild a strong culture—it can only come from within. In fact, outside interference is likely to obstruct this process.
"Fresh" African immigrants are quite successful and I believe that Nigerian Americans have the highest share of PhDs of all groups. Selective immigration will do that.
But the fact that they share the same skin color with African-Americans is unlikely to help the latter. Common color does not mean common culture (as any white American traveling around Ukraine or Caucasus Mountains can find out quite easily) and rich and educated Nigerian-Americans live in a different world than descendants of slaves.
Paradoxically, a color-based affirmative action may help the already advantaged fresh immigrants at the cost of reducing the chances of one group it was supposed to help.
Yes the American elite is mostly white. Do you expect that to change over night when they have had the majority of the wealth since the dawn of the nation? White people still are make up ,I believe, ~60% of the population so even if far more minorities become successful for a very long time they will still be the majority.
These things take time to change and real progress didn't really get going until the 90's. Everyone wants instant change NOW but fails to realize things do take time.
>The problem with building a meritocratic system is that everyone wants capable kids from poor backgrounds to raise to the top, but the elite doesn't want their average kids to fall down in society to their expected rank.
I disagree with the second half of this. I think it simply creates an arm race that the wealthy win. A rich family looks at what it takes to get their kid into Harvard and they do what they can, no matter the cost. A poor family simply can't compete on an otherwise equal footing. Even if we socialize all the advantages that the rich currently have, they simply do even more in response.
The real problem with a meritocratic system is that rich people from good schools with private tutors actually get a better education, that's what all the hubub is about. Poverty leads to worse education and worse educated people are less prepared for the more difficult course load of college. Through no fault of their own, they are less ideal candidates. That's the injustice.
It's cognitive dissonance to simultaneously recognize that injustice but not recognize that poor students are actually substantially less prepared for college at 18.
This just doesn't fit the evidence. I've wanted Freakonomics or similar to cover this for a decade but haven't really seen/heard seen anything...
If getting into top (TOP!) universities correlated with education/aptitude alone, the wealthy would pay more to get thier kids educated but the best teachers. But they don't do this, they pay to dollar for their children to get educated by the "best" schools. But what makes them the best schools is their ability to get more kids into better universities. If education were the critical component of these schools, they'd pay premium rates for the best teachers, but often the teacher salaries at these private schools are lower than those at the public schools they compete with in the area. That suggests that it isn't the education provided by the teachers that's the most important component of these schools. There's a whole stew of other factors that these schools rely on to get kids into top placements that had nothing to do with actual education.
> If getting into top (TOP!) universities correlated with education/aptitude alone, the wealthy would pay more to get thier kids educated but the best teachers. But they don't do this, they pay to dollar for their children to get educated by the "best" schools.
Simple! People receive a benefit from peer group connections (status) and quality-based assessments (in economic terms, reputation). If you are well educated and intelligent, on average, you will have access to more resources if you are also associated with high-status institutions, such as prestigious schools and high ranked universities.
The good news is that, under competitive conditions and provided that everything else is equal, being "good at something" (reputation) eventually leads to high-status attainment. So, if you happen to receive a good education but graduate from a less prestigious university, you have an opportunity to eventually recoup the difference in resource availability (on average & assuming that your production translates to the market).
Likewise, if you're a less prestigious institution, providing a superior education and employing people who do "good research" will eventually increase your prestige.
It can be difficult to overcome initial conditions and shine if you are locked out of the best opportunities. The bimodal outcomes for law school graduates are a good example. That’s not how the whole economy works, but it is a potential failure mode.
> That’s not how the whole economy works, but it is a potential failure mode
There are others. E.g., if you're line of work doesn't allow for high-status recognition (e.g., a blue collar job), being good at what you do will likely not allow you to benefit from reputation -> status transfer.
Friends of mine work at these private schools for lower salaries than public schools. The reality is the job sucks a lot less. You get ~100% engaged students, supportive parents, and a school administration with minimal perverse incentives. Struggling students and discipline problems get filtered out and sent somewhere else. There a loads of qualified teachers, and really plenty of very capable teachers. There is no need for the schools to pay a premium to get the best teachers.
Imagine if 99% of programming jobs were on Win32 native apps using tools from 1998, and 1% of them were using modern tools on a modern Unix-derived stack? Would the 1% really have to pay a premium to get top 10% developers?
I was about to compose this exact comment… thanks for saving me the trouble. In K-12 education, and especially elementary level, the job is at least as much about daycare as it is education. And well-socialized children makes the daycare part of the job a lot easier, so less stress = less demand for financial inducements (compensation).
Best answer and a good metaphor. Paying more only goes so far in attracting talent. You need the job to be manageable, the environment needs to be at the least not actively hostile, and the system the job exists within to not be completely broken.
You are only considering salary and not overall quality of life. As one of my teachers at private school said, "you get paid a little less, but you don't have to worry about being robbed by your students in the parking lot."
Innate intelligence is a huge factor in education. Rich parents can prepare their children very well, but it’s only changing the minimums. This is why elite schools always have an easy track to graduate they don’t want to dispel the illusion that their actually elite schools, but they also don’t want to turn away the children of billionaires etc.
> Rich parents can prepare their children very well, but it’s only changing the minimums.
If you need an example of this, take a look at the admissions scandal with Lori Laughlin, et al. No denying they were rich, but despite how rich they were, they could not tutor their kids way to a good SAT score and had to resort to outright cheating that was so blatant that they had to go to prison.
Might be good for society as a whole if the elite has at least to study hard. (not in terms of equality, but outcome compared internationally). A failed state is where the kids of rich ppl flunk school and still become leaders.
Poverty leads to fewer social connections and that follows the rest of the outcome.
People in a cohort fall into a bell curve. “Social lubricant” is why the dumb or less capable kid in a rich suburb ends up being some sort of professional in a nebulous job where the smart kid from a poor neighborhood feels like Starbucks or an LPN is a life changing job.
The article misidentifies education as a zero-sum positional good, whereas what's often zero sum is credentialing, and often a rather peculiar kind of credential that doesn't reflect much real-world usefulness. Reduce the impact of these credentials, and people will feel less of a need to wastefully compete for them.
> What if the gaokao (and similar tests) were held earlier in a pupil’s career? If these exams truly test the knowledge required for university, they must be held just before university starts. But if such tests mostly serve as filters, sifting better students from worse, they need not be held so late. An aptitude test at 16 years of age, say, will probably generate a similar ranking as one held two years later. The tests would remain stressful. But an earlier gaokao would save families a year or two of costly cramming, shortening “the obstacle course”, as Hirsch put it, without much changing the results. Such tests will always have high stakes. But they need not require such high effort.
I was somewhat "late" in terms of some aspects of my development, and so there's a chance I'd have been put on a particular track simply because my peers were more biologically mature. I won't pretend to know the solution here (though I'm interested in the research around "mastery-based" learning), but I do know that sometimes a system is in a deeper local optima than you expect, and making small changes like the one suggested here isn't enough to get it out.
One big problem across the developed world, which was later replicated in Asia is that high school exams morphed into university entry exams.
A person can have god knows how much more educational, and work experience in between high school+few years in instutute, and a proper graduate education.
This is basically right. Quite a lot of education is a waste, it's window-dressing actual learning.
For instance, you might have spent some time getting exam prep advice: read the instructions, skip questions that are hard and come back later, try to memorize this or that formula / molecule / map / argument, if it's multiple choice strike out obviously wrong answers, look for hints to part 2 in part 1, if you can't figure out the integral guess that it's 0 or 1 (LOL a lot of high school integrals are elegant).
You have to spend real time learning this kind of sharpening exercise in order to do exams, or you will get less than what you should get, given what you actually understand about a subject.
There's no value to this time. You'll never need to remember how to reverse a linked list, because in real life when it comes up, you will just find it in a browser. Similarly with most things that require a precise answer, the effort in sharpening the answer is way more than what might reasonably be worthwhile in a real-life setting. Eg. I needed a Bessel function at one point in my career. Could I write down its form from having seen it at uni? No, of course not. Did I spend time doing just that at uni? Yes.
The real damage is we end up not educating people. We give them a bunch of answers to memorize and never test them on how the question is important. Did anyone ever examine you on why complex numbers are a big deal? Or what the big gap between classical and quantum physics was? I bet you only had exam questions about how to do the calculations and derivations. Get a number or a formula, that's easy to test. Whether this formula makes sense to use, that's hard.
The part about education being positional is also important. There's quite a lot of jobs that could be done by someone with no degree at all, including mine. My first boss in the City still has no degree, and didn't need it despite options trading having a reputation for being mathematical. All that's happened is nobody wants to not go to uni, and nobody wants to hire a non-degree holder to trade options anymore, because both groups think that going to uni signals that you're smart. Neither group actually thinks you need any of the actual skills you learn in uni, though.
For essay subjects as well, there's a way about writing the exam essay that isn't what you'd do if you wrote an essay for a magazine or a book.
I wrote quite a few economics essays according to a bland template: introduce the question, arguments for with authors, arguments against with authors, conclusion.
> I wrote quite a few economics essays according to a bland template: introduce the question, arguments for with authors, arguments against with authors, conclusion.
Doing this over and over is a learning exercise in and of itself.
Basically what I came here to say. "Education" gets far too much benefit of the doubt. Most of it is worthless, or even harmful, teaching unhelpful and dependant patterns. Very little of the content aside from the basics is validated to be worth its ROI.
> needed a Bessel function at one point in my career. Could I write down its form from having seen it at uni? No, of course not. Did I spend time doing just that at uni? Yes.
From someone without formal education: you knew about the concept and what to search for. I have to waste a lot of time every time digging for this.
It seems as if the author is convinced that in the German system children are assigned to different high schools based on their skills/intelligence/talent/whatever. But the fact is that you will hardly find an upper class kid in a hauptschule and similarly poor immigrant kids are underrepresented in gymnasiums (and even middle class kids with foreign parents have been historically underrepresented).
Maybe the point should be guaranteeing that all jobs pay enough to live a decent life. Germany is much better than the UK on this, which is probably the reason why the education rat race is less of a problem there.
The thing is that upper/middle class parents value education more than lower class parents (on average). Unless you take the kids completely away from their parents (horrible thought, was somewhat tried in the GDR), the former kind of parents will find a way to give their kids valuable lessons, even if it is just sitting on the sofa and reading a book.
I recently met a woman that brought her son to the first day of school. Not only did all her manners signal "lower class" when she talked to the teachers, but also she explicitly mentioned that she thought the kid would not fare well in math. I also saw the boy and he did indeed not behave like the brightest, but who knows what lies under the surface? That mother basically made it very hard, if not impossible, for her kid to ever reach higher education. She won't search for tutors, even if she would not need to pay it. She will be content with bad results. It's really sad to see, but I think there really is no way to fix this inside the school system.
> The thing is that upper/middle class parents value education more than lower class parents (on average).
I don’t know if I’d agree with this. It might be true in some contemporary societies but I don’t think it is universal. But I do agree with your other point, which is that culture will always dominate other factors in determining how much education parents seek for their children.
The specifics aren't as relevant as the acknowledgment that there are cultural factors and feedback loops that are generally not part of the discussion (and might be omitted specifically due to concerns about stereotyping and bias).
How involved in your kid's education can you be if you work 60+ hours a week with a 90 minute commute each way? How do you expect kids to focus or even care about school if they come from a violent neighborhood or a broken home?
Regardless of class considerations, my point is that the education rat-race is prevalent in places where an average job doesn’t guarantee a good standard of living and/or where there are strong winner-takes-all dynamics, so everybody has to play the winner-takes-all game from the age of 6. I know people in London who have become catholics so they can get their child in a catholic school (for whatever reason they are considered better than others), the rat-race for them started before the child could even attend preschool.
From my experience of Germany and of the UK, I’d say that a mediocre job in Germany gives you a much better quality of life than it would in the UK. So you don’t have to get your child into the super-fancy Montessori nursery with the highest rate of alumni attending <German-Oxbridge>.
Foreigners always think the German school system (Hauptschule, Realschule, Gymnasium) is 30/30/30 but in reality it's more like 5/15/80. Almost every student is going to the gymnasium by default nowadays. If you are not a total dimwit then you can get in and as a result, the standard of education is not great. I remember I had a student in my senior year English class who couldn't even deal with the simple present and still got a B. The discrepancies in performance between students on a Gymnasium is probably greater than between Gymnasium and Hauptschule. While the average education on a Gymnasium may be better than on a US high school, the US high schools are actually much better for capable students because the AP system allows them to get away from the window lickers like the Gymnasium was initially intended to do. The Realschule then is for all the people who _could_ go to a Gymnasium but their parents didn't let them. Finally, you have the lowest 5% in the Hauptschule who are practically outside of society. They are functionally illiterate or have such grave behavioural problems that many of them are unsuitable for even the most simple menial labor jobs (think stealing, regularly skipping school, arriving hours late for a job interview, assaulting classmates and coworkers, etc).
Since Gymnasium is already so easy that almost everyone can get in, the only people who end up at a Hauptschule are those who grew up "outside the system" in an environment that practically prevents any kind of education. They live in a ghetto where everyone receives social security, are often immigrants with parents and friends who don't speak the language, have to deal with domestic abuse and bullying everywhere... you get the gist. Even the bright students among them who initially do well are continuously put down by their parents and peers while the teachers are hopelessly overwhelmed just trying to keep the worst of them from literally killing another.
28% of precollegiate students, which includes preschool and grade school... If you only consider secondary education then Gymnasium and Gemeinschaftschule account for 60% of students.
> Germany’s custom of placing children on different tracks at age ten or 11 also invites an interesting thought experiment. What if the gaokao (and similar tests) were held earlier in a pupil’s career?
I failed my 11 plus and ended up at a high school where they didn't even tell us about university. At school, I found bullying and sadistic teachers completely overwhelmed the educational aspects; my only goal was to get through each day without being hassled.
The only circumstances where I would consider supporting streaming would be if it was continuous, and people could move between streams at any point in their education.
Putting all emphasis on a single test, taken on a single day at age 11 is like something out of the hunger games. I still recall breaking down in tears when my headmaster called out "Time's up!" at the end of my 11 plus. I knew I hadn't done very well.
Now I am a professional programmer (the only non-graduate in the company), shipped video games on my own, and have had writing published, so obviously the education system's estimate of my abilities was far from accurate.
My partner is from Essex and I thought she was kidding when she said she did the Eleven Plus. We learnt about it in high school history class in Scotland! The module was on the foundations of the British Welfare state and it was discussed as a barbaric practice from the past.
I wonder if the same logic could be transferred to other parts of the economy. Mutual disarmament for the amount of “growth”, for the amount of consumption, for the working hours, etc. I feel that people would be much more eager to cut back on some things if they knew that they would not be outcompeted into dirt if they did so.
It’s a society-wide prisoners’ dilemma, but I think most of the proposed cures are worse than the disease.
I don’t want to rule out the possibility for someone to decide to work harder/achieve more if they want or to try to compress their working life into 10 instead of 40 years.
It bothers me that this article from the economist fails to recognize the deleterious impact that lack of antitrust enforcement has had on life outcomes and thus on the educational arms race. The article mentions that competitive goods like housing and social status drive the push for education. Before the last 50 years of industrial consolidation there were more opportunities to succeed in more cities, creating a greater range of available competitor goods in those places. Now everyone has to be competing globally for status and to a great extent for housing (as people consolidate into a few cities) and career opportunities (as fewer companies mean fewer paths to high achievement). It’s a nice idea to discourage unpleasant competition among Hugh school students. But fixing other parts of the economy could help address demand for this activity, and improve aggregate outcomes in many other ways.
I feel this is one of the obscure benefits of a universal income and/or reducing wealth inequality.
Once you accept that every human deserves a basic level of economic comfort, you need to structure society to actually harness their talents.
If you can make your child's life easier by waving a wand and making everyone in your society dumber and/or worse educated, then that would be a terrible temptation, and that's basically what we have now. Imagine a world where the simplest way to your kids and grandkids being healthy and wealthy was to maximize the human potential of the population.
This is the promise of meritocracy, but we seem to already have hit the limits of that, with everyone jockeying to keep other people's kids out of the good schools. Why don't we just build another good school? Oh, because it's not about what they learn, or how much they could learn, it's about dividing the population into winners and losers.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 118 ms ] threadThe problem with building a meritocratic system is that everyone wants capable kids from poor backgrounds to raise to the top, but the elite doesn't want their average kids to fall down in society to their expected rank. One of the jobs of the elite schools is to prop us these average kids and to make them seem smart to outsiders: anyone who has studied in an "elite" university has a story about the rich kids who spend their days partying, intending to only pass the easiest classes in the school because that's all they need - their parents have already arranged an entry-level job for them.
The American elite wants to be seen as anti-racist, which means elevating at least some kids from the ghettos to the Ivy Leagues etc. At the same time, the American elite is still mostly white and does not want to jeopardize future of their own offspring, and many of those offspring are indeed average.
It seems to me that the current way to square those two interests is to raise tuition really high, combine it with legacy admissions (even an average kid of rich parents will be able to thread the needle there) and raise higher admission obstacles for Asians who would otherwise qualify in high numbers on knowledge alone.
Like really, not every educated black rose from ghetto.
(The same process, albeit on a much smaller scale, is taking place in the Czech Republic. We have a Vietnamese minority that began as convenience store owners, but their children are rising fast into the educated elite of the country.)
But that process will be fraught with a lot of conflict and will likely require abandonment of any efforts to pre-balance student bodies by ethnicity.
The obvious advantage of Jewish culture is (in part) its ancient tradition of demanding literacy from everyone. East Asian cultures also place a high value on literacy, and the Confucian emphasis on social harmony tends to promote an ideal of “self-cultivation”.
I think the real challenge here is that within the American “melting pot,” one particular group has a tragic history of cultural devastation, and no amount of money or assistance from outsiders can rebuild a strong culture—it can only come from within. In fact, outside interference is likely to obstruct this process.
But the fact that they share the same skin color with African-Americans is unlikely to help the latter. Common color does not mean common culture (as any white American traveling around Ukraine or Caucasus Mountains can find out quite easily) and rich and educated Nigerian-Americans live in a different world than descendants of slaves.
Paradoxically, a color-based affirmative action may help the already advantaged fresh immigrants at the cost of reducing the chances of one group it was supposed to help.
These things take time to change and real progress didn't really get going until the 90's. Everyone wants instant change NOW but fails to realize things do take time.
I disagree with the second half of this. I think it simply creates an arm race that the wealthy win. A rich family looks at what it takes to get their kid into Harvard and they do what they can, no matter the cost. A poor family simply can't compete on an otherwise equal footing. Even if we socialize all the advantages that the rich currently have, they simply do even more in response.
The real problem with a meritocratic system is that rich people from good schools with private tutors actually get a better education, that's what all the hubub is about. Poverty leads to worse education and worse educated people are less prepared for the more difficult course load of college. Through no fault of their own, they are less ideal candidates. That's the injustice.
It's cognitive dissonance to simultaneously recognize that injustice but not recognize that poor students are actually substantially less prepared for college at 18.
If getting into top (TOP!) universities correlated with education/aptitude alone, the wealthy would pay more to get thier kids educated but the best teachers. But they don't do this, they pay to dollar for their children to get educated by the "best" schools. But what makes them the best schools is their ability to get more kids into better universities. If education were the critical component of these schools, they'd pay premium rates for the best teachers, but often the teacher salaries at these private schools are lower than those at the public schools they compete with in the area. That suggests that it isn't the education provided by the teachers that's the most important component of these schools. There's a whole stew of other factors that these schools rely on to get kids into top placements that had nothing to do with actual education.
Simple! People receive a benefit from peer group connections (status) and quality-based assessments (in economic terms, reputation). If you are well educated and intelligent, on average, you will have access to more resources if you are also associated with high-status institutions, such as prestigious schools and high ranked universities.
The good news is that, under competitive conditions and provided that everything else is equal, being "good at something" (reputation) eventually leads to high-status attainment. So, if you happen to receive a good education but graduate from a less prestigious university, you have an opportunity to eventually recoup the difference in resource availability (on average & assuming that your production translates to the market).
Likewise, if you're a less prestigious institution, providing a superior education and employing people who do "good research" will eventually increase your prestige.
https://www.biglawinvestor.com/bimodal-salary-distribution-c...
There are others. E.g., if you're line of work doesn't allow for high-status recognition (e.g., a blue collar job), being good at what you do will likely not allow you to benefit from reputation -> status transfer.
Imagine if 99% of programming jobs were on Win32 native apps using tools from 1998, and 1% of them were using modern tools on a modern Unix-derived stack? Would the 1% really have to pay a premium to get top 10% developers?
If you need an example of this, take a look at the admissions scandal with Lori Laughlin, et al. No denying they were rich, but despite how rich they were, they could not tutor their kids way to a good SAT score and had to resort to outright cheating that was so blatant that they had to go to prison.
People in a cohort fall into a bell curve. “Social lubricant” is why the dumb or less capable kid in a rich suburb ends up being some sort of professional in a nebulous job where the smart kid from a poor neighborhood feels like Starbucks or an LPN is a life changing job.
> What if the gaokao (and similar tests) were held earlier in a pupil’s career? If these exams truly test the knowledge required for university, they must be held just before university starts. But if such tests mostly serve as filters, sifting better students from worse, they need not be held so late. An aptitude test at 16 years of age, say, will probably generate a similar ranking as one held two years later. The tests would remain stressful. But an earlier gaokao would save families a year or two of costly cramming, shortening “the obstacle course”, as Hirsch put it, without much changing the results. Such tests will always have high stakes. But they need not require such high effort.
I was somewhat "late" in terms of some aspects of my development, and so there's a chance I'd have been put on a particular track simply because my peers were more biologically mature. I won't pretend to know the solution here (though I'm interested in the research around "mastery-based" learning), but I do know that sometimes a system is in a deeper local optima than you expect, and making small changes like the one suggested here isn't enough to get it out.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastery_learning#:~:text=Maste....
A person can have god knows how much more educational, and work experience in between high school+few years in instutute, and a proper graduate education.
For instance, you might have spent some time getting exam prep advice: read the instructions, skip questions that are hard and come back later, try to memorize this or that formula / molecule / map / argument, if it's multiple choice strike out obviously wrong answers, look for hints to part 2 in part 1, if you can't figure out the integral guess that it's 0 or 1 (LOL a lot of high school integrals are elegant).
You have to spend real time learning this kind of sharpening exercise in order to do exams, or you will get less than what you should get, given what you actually understand about a subject.
There's no value to this time. You'll never need to remember how to reverse a linked list, because in real life when it comes up, you will just find it in a browser. Similarly with most things that require a precise answer, the effort in sharpening the answer is way more than what might reasonably be worthwhile in a real-life setting. Eg. I needed a Bessel function at one point in my career. Could I write down its form from having seen it at uni? No, of course not. Did I spend time doing just that at uni? Yes.
The real damage is we end up not educating people. We give them a bunch of answers to memorize and never test them on how the question is important. Did anyone ever examine you on why complex numbers are a big deal? Or what the big gap between classical and quantum physics was? I bet you only had exam questions about how to do the calculations and derivations. Get a number or a formula, that's easy to test. Whether this formula makes sense to use, that's hard.
The part about education being positional is also important. There's quite a lot of jobs that could be done by someone with no degree at all, including mine. My first boss in the City still has no degree, and didn't need it despite options trading having a reputation for being mathematical. All that's happened is nobody wants to not go to uni, and nobody wants to hire a non-degree holder to trade options anymore, because both groups think that going to uni signals that you're smart. Neither group actually thinks you need any of the actual skills you learn in uni, though.
I wrote quite a few economics essays according to a bland template: introduce the question, arguments for with authors, arguments against with authors, conclusion.
Doing this over and over is a learning exercise in and of itself.
From someone without formal education: you knew about the concept and what to search for. I have to waste a lot of time every time digging for this.
Maybe the point should be guaranteeing that all jobs pay enough to live a decent life. Germany is much better than the UK on this, which is probably the reason why the education rat race is less of a problem there.
I recently met a woman that brought her son to the first day of school. Not only did all her manners signal "lower class" when she talked to the teachers, but also she explicitly mentioned that she thought the kid would not fare well in math. I also saw the boy and he did indeed not behave like the brightest, but who knows what lies under the surface? That mother basically made it very hard, if not impossible, for her kid to ever reach higher education. She won't search for tutors, even if she would not need to pay it. She will be content with bad results. It's really sad to see, but I think there really is no way to fix this inside the school system.
I don’t know if I’d agree with this. It might be true in some contemporary societies but I don’t think it is universal. But I do agree with your other point, which is that culture will always dominate other factors in determining how much education parents seek for their children.
How involved in your kid's education can you be if you work 60+ hours a week with a 90 minute commute each way? How do you expect kids to focus or even care about school if they come from a violent neighborhood or a broken home?
From my experience of Germany and of the UK, I’d say that a mediocre job in Germany gives you a much better quality of life than it would in the UK. So you don’t have to get your child into the super-fancy Montessori nursery with the highest rate of alumni attending <German-Oxbridge>.
Since Gymnasium is already so easy that almost everyone can get in, the only people who end up at a Hauptschule are those who grew up "outside the system" in an environment that practically prevents any kind of education. They live in a ghetto where everyone receives social security, are often immigrants with parents and friends who don't speak the language, have to deal with domestic abuse and bullying everywhere... you get the gist. Even the bright students among them who initially do well are continuously put down by their parents and peers while the teachers are hopelessly overwhelmed just trying to keep the worst of them from literally killing another.
Shame this guy's never heard of the eleven plus:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleven-plus
The only circumstances where I would consider supporting streaming would be if it was continuous, and people could move between streams at any point in their education.
Putting all emphasis on a single test, taken on a single day at age 11 is like something out of the hunger games. I still recall breaking down in tears when my headmaster called out "Time's up!" at the end of my 11 plus. I knew I hadn't done very well.
Now I am a professional programmer (the only non-graduate in the company), shipped video games on my own, and have had writing published, so obviously the education system's estimate of my abilities was far from accurate.
I don’t want to rule out the possibility for someone to decide to work harder/achieve more if they want or to try to compress their working life into 10 instead of 40 years.
Once you accept that every human deserves a basic level of economic comfort, you need to structure society to actually harness their talents.
If you can make your child's life easier by waving a wand and making everyone in your society dumber and/or worse educated, then that would be a terrible temptation, and that's basically what we have now. Imagine a world where the simplest way to your kids and grandkids being healthy and wealthy was to maximize the human potential of the population.
This is the promise of meritocracy, but we seem to already have hit the limits of that, with everyone jockeying to keep other people's kids out of the good schools. Why don't we just build another good school? Oh, because it's not about what they learn, or how much they could learn, it's about dividing the population into winners and losers.