I nod my head agreeing with much of what Tyler Cowen says and writes, but the points where he is off are not minor. Here he is a few weeks ago, on a new RCT banning smartphones in the classroom showing (very) modest improvements in grades:
Note with grades there is “an average increase of 0.086 standard deviations.” I have no problem with these policies, but it mystifies me why anyone would put them in their top five hundred priorities, or is that five thousand?
He also points to an older trial from Norway, which had similar results. Cowen frames the bans as tiny gains for unknown and potentially enormous cost. And student comments like the following he found worthy enough to repost:
As an academically successful student in a pretty well ranked high school my recollection was that the entire experience was horrible and torturous and essentially felt like being locked up in prison. The pace of teaching was also so slow that the marginal value add of being in class was essentially 0 when compared to the textbook reading I would do after school anyway.
So… yes it was nice to have a phone and I don’t care if it distracts stupid students from learning.
And here is Rana Foroohar in this morning’s FT, under the headline Trump’s war on America’s schools:
[Randi] Weingarten, those of you reading outside the US could be forgiven for not knowing, is the head of America’s second-largest teachers’ union. In her new book, Why Fascists Fear Teachers, she lays out some of the history of authoritarian backlash against public education and its teachers, from the post-civil war Reconstruction era in the US, to Europe in the 1930s, to Vladimir Putin’s justification of crackdowns on teachers and universities in Russia (“wars are won by . . . schoolteachers”).
She also quotes the Canadian psychologist Bob Altemeyer, who found that a lack of “critical thinking” made people more receptive to authoritarian leaders. As he put it, “the very last thing an authoritarian leader wants is for his followers to start using their heads”. Or, as Trump so memorably put it after a 2016 primary win: “We won with poorly educated. I love the poorly educated.”
Reading is going out of fashion, but I would urge the student above, and Tyler Cowen, and everyone else who thinks eaking out marginal gains for top-performing students is worth the cost of “distracting stupid students from learning”, to (re)read Ursula K. Le Guin’s short story The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas or — if they have more time — Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov which served as an inspiration with this passage in particular:
“I challenge you: let’s assume that you were called upon to build the edifice of human destiny so that men would finally be happy and would find peace and tranquility. If you knew that, in order to attain this, you would have to torture just one single creature, let’s say the little girl who beat her chest so desperately in the outhouse, and that on her unavenged tears you could build that edifice, would you agree to do it?”
And some may agree (I don’t)! But of course the equilibrium is not in focusing all of the world’s misery into a single person, as it tends to spread out, and you can’t lock up those exposed in a dank basement like the citizens of Omelas did. Rather, those people get to vote, and not in a way you may like.