Reader Joe Munson sent me this thoughtful message. Reprinted with his permission.
Dear Bryan,
It occurred to me the other day that many high schools and even colleges will basically waive certain subjects for you if you have even moderate learning disabilities (or can get a psychologist to say you do). Foreign languages, gym, even math can basically be waived (I know, because math and foreign languages were waived for me).
This is strange, if these subjects were so crucial, you would think schools would want to force the people with learning disabilities to spend more class time on them, not less.
Moreover, my university would actually let you test out of foreign language classes and get the credits for taking them– just as long as you paid them for the knowledge you already knew (tons of people did and do this, and thought it was super reasonable)
I just thought I would email you because I think it may be particularly convincing to some people, because rhetorically, if you want to defend the status que, you either have to say disabled students won’t succeed anyway, or concede that the subjects are not important.
It’s also so strange that the Ken Robinson talk is the most viewed TED talk and it argues that school creates a massive negative externality by killing creativity. If he is right then schools are really much worse than basically everyone realizes.
I just thought it might add to the persuasiveness of your education as 80 percent signaling theory, which seems so profoundly correct to me.
Best,
Joe
P.S. Hope to see you at Capla-Con Austin!
READER COMMENTS
John Hall
Jun 9 2021 at 11:59am
“Moreover, my university would actually let you test out of foreign language classes and get the credits for taking them– just as long as you paid them for the knowledge you already knew (tons of people did and do this, and thought it was super reasonable)”
At my university, we had the option to test out of the foreign languages, but we didn’t have to pay for the credits. We just got the credits. No different from if we took AP Spanish and got a high score.
Mark Brophy
Jun 10 2021 at 3:21am
I had a roommate in college who was from Haiti and French was his first language. He took French classes so that he could earn easy credits.
JFA
Jun 9 2021 at 4:38pm
I will jump for joy if my kid can get out of taking foreign language.
Dylan
Jun 10 2021 at 8:51am
Out of curiosity, why?
Foreign language was my worst subject in high school, the only one that I never really got. But also one of my biggest regrets that I didn’t work harder at, or, even better, start much earlier than high school. Not knowing a 2nd language has been limiting professionally and personally and I think would have helped me understand English at a much more fundamental level.
If your objection is more along the lines of, one hour a day when you’re 16 or 17 is a horrible way to learn a language and bound to be ineffective, then I think we’re much more aligned.
JFA
Jun 10 2021 at 9:54am
I think learning a second (or more language) can be a great thing if you travel a lot or work internationally or regularly encounter others who speak a different language. My issue is that the way foreign language is taught in the US (that’s my context) is worthless. If you want to learn a language, immersion is the best way to do it. My son (in kindergarten and on the autism spectrum) has Spanish once a week (in middle school, I had foreign language once or twice a week and each year it was a different language). It’s easily his least favorite time of the week (they have had to remove him from the class several times due to behavioral issues arising from the fact that he “doesn’t understand what the teacher is saying”). If my kid wants to learn a foreign language, I’ll be happy to support that, but I’d probably jump start it over a summer with daily (or twice daily) conversations with native speakers with elementary grammar and vocabulary lessons every day and then end the summer with some travel to a country that speaks the language (or at least sending him to an immersion language camp).
I honestly have no regrets about not learning a foreign language. I don’t need to speak one in any of my even occasional interactions, and when I travel, everyone speaks English (at least, well enough). If I had learned a language, I would have forgotten most of it by now anyway.
Dylan
Jun 10 2021 at 11:09am
Thanks for the reply.
All 3 of those describe me. If I was fluent in another language they would likely describe me even more, as I would love to live and work internationally, but the language limits where I could move.
Totally agree that the way we teach language in this country makes it pretty useless. I grew up in Hawaii and had some language lessons about once a week for like an hour, and we switched languages a few times. A way to give a little bit of a flavor of all of the different cultures on the islands, but that was about it.
I get that your situation and son can be different and it’s not a one size fits all solution, but the problem with letting your kid decide on their own is by the time they know they want that, it can already be too late to master a language. That was certainly the case for me.
The funny thing about that is, the reason you can get by with English in most places in the world, is because most countries put a lot of emphasis on teaching it early. One counter-example to people don’t learn much in school is how well the people in countries where English is emphasized can speak English vs. those where it isn’t. Think of the difference in English skills between those in Belgium and those right across the border in France, it is night and day (and even better in the Netherlands where English is given a lot of emphasis)
We benefit a lot from English being the dominant language of the world, but that position can and will change, and it can be pretty difficult if you’re slow to recognize the change coming (see again France).
JFA
Jun 10 2021 at 12:45pm
“the problem with letting your kid decide on their own is by the time they know they want that, it can already be too late to master a language.”
I don’t think so. I picked up German relatively easily my freshman year in college (could have continued with it but I didn’t (I recalled enough to help someone at a subway station in Prague during my junior year study abroad)). It’s not clear how the decision on what language should be taught if travel and international work are the reasons for learning a language (for someone in the US). If you had talked to someone in the 1980s, they might have told kids to start boning up on their Japanese. For the US, Spanish seems the most reasonable language to learn, but Chinese is also something to consider. But it’s still unclear why my school district’s high school offers French.
I don’t see English as the lingua franca disappearing anytime soon. Is everyone gonna learn Chinese or Hindi? No. Thank goodness for switching cost!
Dylan
Jun 10 2021 at 1:55pm
I spoke too absolutely, but studies show that after the age of about 12 it becomes difficult to get to native level of fluency. Particularly if you’re trying to learn a language that is very different than your native tongue, sometimes you just can’t get your mouth to make the right sounds so speaking without an accent. I know I certainly see that with a lot of people I know that moved here in college, who decades later still have a noticeable accent.
Definitely a difficult call. For the U.S., Spanish seems like the fairly obvious choice at the moment. Good because in many places you should be able to use it without having to travel to another country, but also pretty great for the ability to migrate to large portion of the world if you know Spanish and English.
Me neither. Very lucky for me, and I’m old enough where I don’t need to have multi-decade predictive powers. I’m less certain that will be true over the life of your child (who will hopefully outlive me by at least a century)
JFA
Jun 10 2021 at 8:11pm
“who will hopefully outlive me by at least a century”. Thanks for the well wishes and the pleasant exchange.
Mark Bahner
Jun 10 2021 at 10:54pm
I have no knowledge at all about the current state of the technology, but can’t a modern smartphone handle translation between English and common European languages?
That is, couldn’t one speak into the smartphone in English, and have a passable translation into a foreign language? And then the person speak a European language in reply, and have a passable translation back into English?
Dylan
Jun 11 2021 at 12:49pm
Thanks JFA. I enjoyed the conversation as well.
Dylan
Jun 11 2021 at 1:03pm
@Mark
Those apps are amazing and certainly make being a tourist easier. My wife also used them in a job she had where one of the guys only spoke Spanish to supplement the little Spanish she knows.
They’re not good enough if you want to work outside an entry level job though. Try being in sales and not speaking the native language. Or consulting. Or pretty much any job that has you interacting with other people.
I got my MBA in the Netherlands, partially because the level of English proficiency there is higher than any other country in Europe. Almost everyone speaks English, many of them better than I do. And you can get a decent job in the Netherlands without speaking Dutch, but it is still hard. A classmate is an American who lives in the Netherlands because of his wife’s job. He’s employed, but desperately looking for a new job there. He’s smart, accomplished, leads a large, global team in his current role, yet he’s had a ton of trouble finding anything else, which seems to primarily come down to his lack of Dutch fluency (he can speak it conversationally, but not at a business level).
Pat
Jun 11 2021 at 10:04am
The reason I’m against foreign language instruction in k-12 schools is because it just doesn’t work. It’s totally unsuccessful, no one achieves any fluency.
Dylan
Jun 11 2021 at 1:04pm
100% agreement in the U.S. Other countries have more success though.
Joe Munson
Jun 9 2021 at 4:59pm
I should add that not all math subjects were waived for me, the math class I would have taken in senior year of high school was waived for me (I dont remember what its name is, presumably whatever math came after algebra 2 and taught matrixes).
Parrhesia
Jun 9 2021 at 10:56pm
Something somewhat related that I though of a while ago. Consider these:
1. Going to Harvard is primarily a signal of conscientiousness, intelligence and conformity.
2. For certain groups, standards of admissions are lowered and as a consequence individuals of lower conscientiousness, intelligence or conformity are admitted to Harvard.
3. The fact that affirmative action is taking place and certain groups have lower admission criteria is well known by employers.
It would follow that the signal is discounted, reducing the value of A.A. If affirmative action by popular belief is overstated, then A.A. will possibly be actively harmful. If it is understated, then A.A. could potentially have the positive effects. I do believe that maybe the effect of discounting is surpassed by an employers desire to engage in their own A.A.
It seems reasonable to suspect that signaling at Harvard is likely greater than 80% if the relevant comparison is against another prestigious but lower ranked college. It seems that we might need to consider an “inter-university” signaling. I suspect this number is higher than 80%. I could imagine some skills better prepare students that are not ivy league, so signaling may come at the price of human capital.
Phil H
Jun 10 2021 at 9:54am
I don’t think this constitutes an effective form of argument. It’s just a basic “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation.
There exists a certain standard. If it is enforced particularly harshly, there will inevitably be many edge cases that look unfair. If some exceptions are allowed to soften the impact, then it looks like unequal treatment, or maybe the standard shouldn’t have been like that in the first place…
The fact is, *any* rule system throws up absurdities. There are two questions to ask. (1) If we scrapped the rule system, would things be better? (To which the people on this website will often want to answer yes) (2) Would a different rule create less absurdity?
Just pointing out the absurdities that exist under system X is not a complete argument for anything else. If you want to make a complete argument, you’re going to have to give some indication of what life would be like without system X (I’m struggling to picture a world without standardized academic qualifications, but I’m open to suggestions); or some reasons why you think system Y would be better.
Duncan
Jun 10 2021 at 8:19pm
Interesting post. If we assume “there are no solutions, only trade-offs” then reductio ad absurdum is indeed not as useful as it first appears.
Infovores
Jun 11 2021 at 1:24pm
This is a great comment. While this post raises some interesting questions to ask about our current system, we should be circumspect in the conclusions we draw about what do next. It is all too easy to implicitly compare an imperfect system with nirvana and there is definitely some ambiguity about what would happen in Bryan’s ideal world.
Ike Coffman
Jun 11 2021 at 8:28pm
I was a public school teacher at the high school level for over a decade, and I really feel like I need to speak out about the experiences I had. This is probably going to sound pretty harsh, but I feel like nothing I can say is going to be harsh enough. There are certainly other issues involved, but I believe that providing accommodations for disabled students in normal level classes has created enormous damage to our schools and to education itself.
We have created a system with different knowledge and performance requirements for different students, and this has resulted in lower expectations and lower achievement for most students.
I understand we want all students to have a chance to receive an education, and that we do not want to discriminate against any student population, but I feel like we are not doing a proper cost/benefit analysis. It is impossible to have different standards for different students in the same classroom and be able to maintain high standards. Kind of like entropy, the natural order is for everything to seek the lowest energy state. That lowest energy state in our schools has resulted in almost automatic granting of a completion credential regardless of the effort students put in to achieve that credential, or the knowledge level actually gained. If some students do not have to work as hard (by law), then almost no student will want to work hard, and we don’t require them to.
I want to note that there are exceptions. I have never taught a class that did not have at least some students who were willing to work hard, and were motivated to achieve the education the system promised to provide. I have also never taught a class that did not have students who were unwilling to work to learn, who believed education was not relevant to their lives. Sometimes these students were content to just be passive, to put forth minimal effort, but other students were actually motivated to disrupt the educational process in general, and would actively work to deny educational opportunities for other students. Because of the accommodations teachers are required by law to provide, teachers have very few tools to deal with these disruptive students. Over time, the lack of the ability to make students work to achieve their own education has become the cultural norm in our schools. Even worse, it makes it structurally impossible to deal with any achievement gap. It makes it look as though the achievement gap is an opportunity gap when the reality is that the achievement gap is actually mandated by law.
David S
Jun 17 2021 at 4:38am
To me this is pretty simple. If you subsidize/incentivize disability, you get more disability.
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