Category: Human Behavior and Cognitive Science

PRIVATE SCHOOLS (NEIGHBORHOODS) PREVENT BADS

— “The critical problem with private schools, is that you admit intelligent kids but how have you changed them?”— Grant Wiggin (Education Author)

Well this presumes a few falsehoods.

1) It isn’t clear at all that we can improve critical thinking skills. We can only prevent the adoption of bad habits.

2) It isn’t clear that you can improve a child’s future through education, you can only prevent something from going wrong if you don’t educate him or her.

In other words, despite all objections to the contrary: IQ, Conscientiousness(Industriousness), and Stability(neuroticism), determine the intellectual capacity of your child, and his or her lifetime potential. Your job is to give him or her the same tools as everyone else, while doing as little damage as possible.

3) Public schools, at least since the relaxation of discipline in the 1960’s, produce a lot of environmental ‘bads’. In particular the reduction of physical movement, exercise, and competition.

4) So the purpose of private schools is not to produce any particular good, but to prevent the many, many, BAD things that are a byproduct of the public education system.

The same is true for schools, neighborhoods, cities, and nations: the problem is not in producing goods. It is in eliminating bads. And the bads are quite easy to find: they’re the people who do bad things.

Among these people are the majority of leftists who want to outsource the cost for one another’s lack of agency rather than rid the neighborhood, school, polity, and nation of those who lack it.

This is the fundamental difference between aristocracy and priesthood: The action/aristocratic reduction of the underclasses and the upward redistribution of aggregate reproduction empowering their profiting from advancing meritocracy, and the gossiping/priestly-casts reduction of the middle classes and downward redistribution of production empowering their profiting from advancing equalitarianism.