Genetics, Human Capital, and the Thomas Theorem

In this short presentation on "Genetics and Society" (video), Gregory Cochran points out an obvious incompatability between human capital theory and empirical findings in behaviour genetics: Human capital theory proceeds as though differences in human capital were solely the product of environmental influences, and especially decisions made by parents, but this is known to be false. Cochran goes on to say this has an impact on a point made in human capital theory concerning the quality-quantity tradeoff: The standard view is that you can have many kids and low investment per kid, leading to relatively low human capital in each kid, or you can have many kids, invest heavily in them, and expect them to exhibit high human capital. To the extent that human capital is influenced by genetics, and to the extent that it is not influenced by parents, this tradeoff does not exist. For example, IQ shows practically no response to differences in parental behaviour, hence your kids' expected IQ is independent from your investments, hence independent from the number of kids you have.

But that's a normative point. Empirically, how much people plan to invest in their kids and how many kids they hence choose to have, should be influenced not by the truth itself, but by what people believe to be true. Belief in genetic influences on people's characteristics decreased ca. 1920-1950 and is now low. While research results from the 1970s onwards have shown the popular view to be wrong, these results are not widely known and believed. Hence, decreases in the number of kids people have might still in part be explained by the above-mentioned aspect of human capital theory, if it is combined with the Thomas theorem: "If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences."

The Best Blog Posts of 2013

It's about time, so here.

As usual, brackets are appended to each link to indicate whether the post is Long, Medium lenght or Short; High-Brow, Mid-Brow or Low-Brow, and Funny or Not.

For other years' lists, use the tag.

15. Offsetting Behaviour: "Social Costs and HPV", by Eric Crampton

14. Discover: "Why Race as a Biological Construct Matters", by Razib Khan (L; HB; N)

13. The Power of Goals: "Home Sweet Home", by Mark Taylor (L; MB; N)

12. Crooked Timber: "New Tools for Reproducible Research", by Kieran Healy (S; MB; F)

11. German Joys: "The Metamorphosis (US Summer Movie) Elevator Pitch", by Andrew Hammel (S; MB; F)

10. Code and Culture: "You Broke Peer Review. Yes, I Mean You", by Gabriel Rossman (L; MB; N)

9. EconLog: "The Homage Statism Pays to Liberty", by Bryan Caplan (M; MB; N)

8. Scatterplot: "Annals of Self-Refuting Tweets", by Jeremy Freese (S; MB; F)

7. Overcoming Bias: "Future Story Status", by Robin Hanson (M; HB; N)

6. Gulf Coast Blog: "Defamiliarization, Again for the First Time", by Will Wilkinson (L; MB; N)

5. Armed and Dangerous: "Preventing Visceral Racism", by Eric S. Raymond (L; MB; N)

4. Askblog: "It Is Sometimes Appropriate . . .", by Arnold Kling (M; HB; N)

3. EconLog: "Make Your Own Bubble in 10 Easy Steps", by Bryan Caplan (M; LB; N)

2. Armed and Dangerous: "Natural Rights and Wrongs?", by Eric S. Raymond (M; HB; N)

1. Falkenblog: "Great Minds Confabulate Like Small Minds", by Eric Falkenstein (L; HB; N)

Thanks and congrats to all above.

Why So Few Private Schools in Germany?

One of those many things that, for quite some time, I had been wondering about in the sense that I had stored it in the folder "phenomena not understood by me", but not in the sense that I had taken steps to transfer it into the "phenomena understood by me" folder is that Germany has so few private schools, compared to the U.K. and the U.S. Now there seems to be an obvious hypothesis. That is, Germany has a tiered (tracked) school system, while the U.K. and the U.S. do not. Hence, in order to separate your kids from the riff-raff, you don't need to send them to a private school if you're in Germany (provided they manage to get into a first-tier school).

That obviously entails the hypothesis that untracked school systems bring about private schools. If you compare countries, you'll want to adjust for the right variables. Someone else do it!

Writing about Educational Achievement Requires Basic Maths Skills

In NPR, Samuel A. Abrams writes about what the U.S. need to do to improve the performance of their schools (via). As is standard procedure, he looks at how the Finns do things differently. That's because the Finns outperform the U.S. (and almost everybody else) on the PISA test. Abrams' reliance on the test as a measure of educational performance is kinda weird, given that he also suggests standardized testing is a bad idea, but never mind. He discusses a number of ways in which the Finnish system differs from the U.S.'s and suggests making American more like Finnish education would improve U.S. performance.

Then he senses that this kind of analysis may not be all that trustworthy:

The reflexive critique of comparing the Finnish and U.S. educational systems is to say that Finland's PISA results are consequences of the country being a much smaller, more homogeneous nation (5.3 million people, only 4 percent of whom are foreign-born). How could it possibly offer lessons to a country the size of the United States? The answer is next door. Norway is also small (4.8 million people) and nearly as homogeneous (10 percent foreign-born), but it is more akin to the United States than to Finland in its approach to education: Teachers don't need master's degrees; high school teachers with 15 years of experience earn only 70 percent of what fellow university graduates make; and in 2006, authorities implemented a national system of standardized testing. The need for talent in the classroom is now so great that the Norwegian government is spending $3.3 million on an ad campaign to attract people to teaching and, last year, launched its own version of Teach for America in collaboration with Statoil — called Teach First Norway — to recruit teachers of math and science.

Moreover, much as in the United States, classes in Norway are typically too large and equipment too scarce to run science labs. A science teacher at a middle school in Oslo told me that labs are unfortunately the exception, not the rule, and that she couldn't recall doing any labs as a student a decade ago. Unsurprisingly, much as in 2000, 2003, and 2006, Norway in 2009 posted mediocre PISA scores, indicating that it is not necessarily size and homogeneity but, rather, policy choices that lead to a country's educational success.

I highlighted the bits about immigrants that I found particularly iffy. I found them particularly iffy because (i) here in Germany, it is received wisdom that a high number of immigrants in the classroom is going to drive down achievement (which is plausible on both compositional and contextual grounds), (ii) 10% is 2.5 times as much as 4% and (iii) Norway's foreign-born rate is much closer to the United States', which is 12.9%, so the "nearly as homogenous" argument doesn't hold water.

Let's run a simple linear bivariate regression to further assess the claim. I calculated overall PISA scores by adding the scores for the three fields reading, mathematics, and science, taken from Abrams' link, and regressed them on the rate of foreign-borns. This yields the following equation:

SCORE = 1691.1 -16.8*(% FOREIGN-BORN)

In this equation, each percentage point increase in the foreign-born population decreases the score by 16.8%. If we take this result at face value, we should expect, on the basis of differences in immigration alone, Finland's result to be 143.3 points better than the United States'. That's almost exactly what we observe (1631 vs. 1489 points). This nice fit is unsurprising given that the regression statistically explains almost 94% of the variance.

Of course, I would not want to present this regression as a good measure of the causal effect of immigration on test scores. I would like to point out, though, that if you cannot distinguish the numbers 4 and 10, or think that 10 is closer to 4 than to 12.9, perhaps you should not try to teach others about educational attainment. Abrams unfortunately is writing a book on the matter. I think I will pass.

Around the Blogs, Vol. 91

Is openness to experience responsive to environmental conditions? (Gwern)

All hail Wisconsin! (Tyler Cowen)

The Metamorphosis (elevator pitch) (Andrew Hammel)

How much do economists really agree? (Dan Klein)

"The average middle-class American is driven about 90% by a desire for more money, and most of these people will come right out and tell you that. A similarly-situated German will be motivated 40% by money, 20% by job security, and 40% by the desire for officially-bestowed, external signs of high social status -- especially involving education or heredity. However, they will only admit the desire for job security, and will half-heartedly deny or rationalize the other motivations." (Andrew Hammel)

Innovation: Do incentives play a noteworthy role? (Tyler Cowen)

Note to journalists: Asking expert can help get stuff right. Assuming that's what you're after. (Jason Kottke)

How to be persuasive (Eric S. Raymond)

Now that's what I call paternalism! (Jason Kottke/Laura June)

The Growing Social Gradient in U.S. Educational Attainment and the Shadow of Meritocracy

Here's from a New York Times article by Jason DeParle John Cohen links to:

Poor students have long trailed affluent peers in school performance, but from grade-school tests to college completion, the gaps are growing. With school success and earning prospects ever more entwined, the consequences carry far: education, a force meant to erode class barriers, appears to be fortifying them.

“Everyone wants to think of education as an equalizer — the place where upward mobility gets started,” said Greg J. Duncan, an economist at the University of California, Irvine. “But on virtually every measure we have, the gaps between high- and low-income kids are widening. It’s very disheartening.”

The growing role of class in academic success has taken experts by surprise since it follows decades of equal opportunity efforts and counters racial trends, where differences have narrowed.

Class an increasingly good predictor of academic success after decades of equal opportunity efforts? That's just what my theory of the changing relative importance of external resources and personality predicts.

The article presents a laundry list of possible influences on the phenomenon, all of which probably explain some of the variance. My theory suggests that a nonnegligible portion of the growth of the gap is explained by growing differnces in the personality characteristics that you need to succeed academically. And indeed:

Income has always shaped academic success, but its importance is growing. Professor Reardon, the Stanford sociologist, examined a dozen reading and math tests dating back 25 years and found that the gap in scores of high- and low-income students has grown by 40 percent [...].

Reasons given for this: The rich provide more "enrichment" and enjoy an "advocacy edge". Again, that probably plays some role, and data is cited to the effect that lower-class students finish college less often even holding skills constant. But I don't think you can understand that kind of phenomenon unless you look at past meritocracy, and acknowledge that children will tend to resemble their parents no matter what.

I predict that we're going to see a lot of handwringing like this in the coming years and decades. As societies stay relatively meritocratic, class will become a better and better predictor of education. This will lead to more pressure to tackle the remaining deficits in meritocracy. This will only help to solidify the phenomenon it was meant to rectify. And so on, and so forth, civil war.

Poverty and Life Outcomes: A Theory of the Changing Relative Importance of Resources and Personality

Why do the poor experience low-quality outcomes in areas such as health, education, and crime? Bryan Caplan has recently been arguing "that social scientists need to search for factors that cause both poverty and irresponsible behavior. Such as? Low IQ, low conscientiousness, low patience, and plain irrationality" (also here and here; critical comment here). The position he is disputing is what you might call the Trading Places interpretation: low-quality outcomes are the consequence of the social situation called poverty. According to this view, there's a big fat causal arrow running from poverty to outcomes such as those mentioned above. In Caplan's model, there are two big fat causal arrows from a summary variable you could call "personality" (which encompasses low IQ, low conscientiousness, etc.) to both poverty and other outcomes of interest (a textbook "third variable" explanation).

I'm ambivalent about Caplan's position. On the one hand, his actual line of argument is deficient bordering on the ridiculous - among other things, it suggests he's never heard of opportunity costs, which would be kinda surprising for a professor of economics. On the other, I agree with the conclusion that both social scientists and laypeople are much too quick to interpret a correlation between poverty and some problem outcome as a poverty effect, and that much more weight should be put on personality as an alternative explanation. Sociological work is perhaps particularly bad in this respect.


My own model is a bit more nuanced. Let's start by imagining we had found a way to partial out those bits of the poverty-problem correlation that are due to poverty as a consequence (e.g., you become unemployed, and hence poor, due to bad health). It seems to me that 100% of the remaining correlation can be explained by "personality" (Caplan's focus) plus the structural restrictions brought about by poverty (standard sociological focus). It follows logically that the portion of the variance explained by one of those two factors must go up when the proportion of the variance explained by the other goes down, and vice versa.

My model applies to societies that today are relatively affluent and meritocratic, such as the USA, Germany or Japan. Back in the day - let's say 150 years ago - the common explanation for the poverty-problems correlation used to be in terms of "personality", but actually much of the reason for its existence was structural. Then structural explanations became more popular, and with it efforts to tear down the structural impediments to better life outcomes. These efforts were effective to a large degree: opportunities actually became more equal. This is another way of saying that the portion of the correlation explained by structural restrictions went down, which, in turn, means that the effect of personality must have gone up.

If true, this implies a neat "perverse" effect (in the sense in which the word is used in sociology): the more one type of explanation for the poverty-problems correlation is believed, the less true it becomes. 

So far my argument may have brought to mind programmes that allow young people from low-income families access to universities (and hence better-paying jobs), for example. But there's more to it, namely intergenerational transmission and the shadow of meritocracy.

In order to demonstrate the logic of the argument, let's first point to the fact that children tend to resemble their parents (their personalities are positively correlated). Let's also note that societies can vary in the degree to which they are meritocratic. One could say - non-normatively - that some people "belong" at the top (the intelligent, industrious, etc.), while others "belong" at the bottom (the dull, lazy, etc.). "Belong" here means simply that we would expect these people at certain positions in society, and these expectations should be the stronger the more meritocratic a society is. But we cannot predict the degree of "fit" we observe simply by looking at how meritocratic a society is now. We also need to look at the past: If a society has been highly meritocratic for a long time, children will tend to already start out in the place of the social structure where they "belong". This is due to the positive correlation between children's and their parents' personalities.

This view, if true, has a number of implications.

(i) You cannot judge the degree to which a society is currently meritocratic by looking at the social mobility which it exhibits. Holding current meritocracy (and parent-child resemblance) constant, we would expect societies with a long tradition of meritocracy to exhibit less mobility. Hardly anybody who talks about this topic understands this.


(ii) We should expect a lower "fit" between personality and social position in those groups who can't have benefited much from past meritocracy, such as recent immigrant groups.


(iii) If you make a society more meritocratic, you should expect the biggest movements right away. For example, programmes that allow children of low-income parents access to univerity will be most effective shortly after their introduction. After a few generations, there won't be so many many highly talented kids left among the potential beneficiaries.


(iv) Caplan's model is more true today than it would have been 150 years ago, because it became unfashionable.


The model also explains why the left (as in "people who favour lots of social mobility") used to like IQ tests, now don't.


An illustration: the social gradient in health
In the 19th century, when these things were first measured, it became apparent that the poor experienced worse health than the rich. In the middle of the last century, it was expected that this poverty-health correlation would soon disappear in affluent western countries due to improvements such as clean drinking water for everybody and universal healthcare (doesn't apply to all nations). Dirty drinking water-type illnesses did indeed disappear, but the social gradient stuck around. These days the leading causes of morbidity and mortality are too much food, alcohol and nicotine. According to some (standard citation), the continuing significance of socioeconomic status as a predictor of health is due to high socioeconomic status allowing access to a multitude of varied resources, such as money, networks and knowledge; access to such resources will be beneficial no matter what the specific causal channels from status to health are. Others contend that individual behavioural choices are important, and according to Linda Gottfredson's theory, the actual fundamental cause is not socioeconomic status, but general intelligence, which correlates positively with the former. My view is that Gottfredson's focus on intelligence is too narrow; that you must also include factors such as high time discounting and preferences for risk taking and that these personality factors are more important now than they used to be. Note how nicely this is in line with the change in the leading causes of poor health: dirty water then, too much to drink now.


Odds and ends
(i) Very careful readers may have noted that my dynamic general model of meritocracy and intergenerational mobility made an unspoken assumption; namely, that the personality traits that were beneficial for parents will also be beneficial for children. The less true this is, the more intergenerational mobility we should expect, holding all else equal.


(ii) I made a clean distinction between "structural" and "personality" influences. But the former may influence the latter. For example, Daly and Wilson (scroll down to p. 1271) hypothesize that growing up in a neighbourhood where life expectancies are low causes people to discount future consequences of actions more (they also present some evidence, but it's low-quality). If this type of explanation is true, it is not crystal-clear whether to model time discounting simply as a personality variable or a consequence of structural disadvantage. Which solution you choose will depend on the exact question you're asking, but take this as a note of caution to give it some thought.


Where credit's due
With a bit of inspiration from Thilo Sarrazin and Steven Pinker not otherwise acknowledged.

Around the Blogs, Vol. 83: Braces Special

Andrew Gelman writes about the perils of before-after comparisons and writing research articles

The Marginal Revolutionaries find evidence of women responding to incentives* and Germans having humour**.

Bryan Caplan informs us about the behavioural genetics of saving money and clarifies the relationship between views on education and predictions about online universities (my take on the latter here).

______

*I'm inclined to buy it.

**To really appreciate this one, you need to know that Chemnitz used to be called Karl-Marx-Stadt.

The Discrimination Fallacy

In public discourse you will often hear an argument of the following type; let's call it the popular logic: Group B is discriminated against, as can be seen by the fact that group B achieves less with respect to desirable outcome O than group A. Q.E.D. This is a fallacy. Why?

Another way of asking the same question is this: Which conditions would have to be fulfilled for the above argument to be sound? As far as I can see, the following suffice:

1. Members of B are as motivated as members of A to achieve a lot with respect to O, given the prerequisites for doing so.

2. Members of B are as able as members of A to achieve a lot with respect to O, given the prerequisites for doing so.

3. There are no noteworthy influences of chance that lead to a disadvantage of members of B relative to A with respect to achieving a lot with respect to O.

It seems to me that you have to first exclude possibilities 1-3 before applying the popular logic. I'm willing to typically disregard 3, as chance will tend to even out. It should also be noted that, empirically, all four influences may operate together. I am aware that such a buzzing, blooming confusion is too much for some brains to handle. It's not that four independent variables is too high a number; it's that some of these variables are owned by good people, while others are owned by bad people. They can't be at work at the same time, can they?

Confound Alert! Human Capital Formation, the Euros, and GCSE Performance

"Student effort and educational attainment: Using the England football team to identify the education production function" (via) is a recent paper by Robert Metcalfe, Simon Burgess and Steven Proud that looks at a commonsense question. Every two years, either the World Cup or the Euros coincide with portions of the English exam period; does that have a detrimental effect on the test results? Yes, say the authors. Here's the abstract:

We use a sharp, exogenous and repeated change in the value of leisure to identify the impact of student effort on educational achievement. The treatment arises from the partial overlap of the world’s major international football tournaments with the exam period in England. Our data enable a clean difference-in-difference design. Performance is measured using the high-stakes tests that all students take at the end of compulsory schooling. We find a strongly significant effect: the average impact of a fall in effort is 0.12 SDs of student performance, significantly larger for male and disadvantaged students, as high as many educational policies.

They compare the differences in the differences in results between "late" subjects (the exams for which overlap with the tournaments in tournament years) and the "early" subjects (the exams for which do not overlap). Note that the 0.12 SDs result is for all students, including those who don't care about football. How much is 0.12 SDs?

For example, the “Literacy Hour” intervention in England raised reading attainment by 0.06 SDs (Machin & McNally, 2008). A unit SD increase in teacher quality raises test scores by around 0.15 to 0.24 SDs per year, 0.27 in England (Rockoff, 2004; Rivkin, Hanushek and Kain, 2005; Aaronson, Barrow, and Sander, 2007; Kane and Staiger, 2008; Slater, Davies and Burgess, 2011). The effect of major “early years” programmes such as Head Start is 0.147 SDs in applied problems and 0.319 in letter identification (Currie and Thomas, 1995; Ludwig and Phillips, 2007). Crawford et al (2007) have shown that a student’s month of birth has effects on GCSE outcomes: students who have spent their entire school careers as the youngest in the class (Augustborns) score on average 0.116 SDs (girls) or 0.131 SDs (boys) lower than the oldest in the class (September-born students). Substantial effects on pupil progress have been found in “No Excuses” Charter schools, of between 0.10 - 0.40 standard deviations increase per year in mathematics and reading (Abdulkadiroglu et al, 2009; Angrist et al, 2010). More closely related to our focus on effort, Fryer (2010) and Levitt et al (2011a) show that incentivising students to raise their effort (inputbased student incentives) have an effect size of about 0.15 SDs, and Levitt et al (2011b) show that incentives on the day of a test can increase test scores by around 0.2 SDs.

I was a bit knackered when I read the paper, and didn't put all that much effort in it, but even so I am somewhat dismayed that I couldn't find anything wrong with the statistics. I can quibble with the interpretation, though. The authors assume (but do not measure) that the lowered test results are a consequence of students spending less time on preparation. Another possible explanation is that during tournaments, there are more instances of pupils coming to the exams hung over. I don't have a Nobelish-prize winning theory to back it up, but common observation suggests that being hung over has a detrimental effect on test performance, holding everything else constant. That's what really explains the results. Try proving me wrong!

Around the Blogs, Vol. 75

1. Bryan Caplan makes the case against (subsidizing) education (and also).

2. According to Wikipedia, Nobel Prize Sperm Bank recruiter Paul Smith "traveled throughout California, focusing mainly on college campuses, in search of volunteers", which suggests awkward conversations in Berkely men's rooms. But Henry Harpending reveals evidence to the effect that they simply sent a letter.

3. Eric Crampton summarizes what economists (well, a panel of 40 specific economists) agree on.

4. Golden Krishna against the cutseyfication of software (via)

5. Gowers against Elsevier

Pebbles, Vol. 34

1. Making the unthinkable thinkable

2. What's it like to be a homicide detective?

3. Connoisseurship explained

4. Many kids are not cut out for school, but what are you going to do with them?

5. The disease load theory of intelligence (Steve Sailer comments)

6. Who are the most ruthless capitalists in the western world? (via)

7. Filmmakers diss filmmakers

8. Problems with microfinance

9. Free academic books!

A Weakness That May Be a Strength

Steve Sailer breaks down US results on the PISA test by race; perhaps more interestingly, he adds a useful discussion of the limitations of the test. Most notably (formatting omitted):

Third: how motivated students are to work hard on the test is a significant imponderable. Administrators and teachers are supposed to motivate the students, but not threaten them. So, at least in theory, PISA is a low-stakes test for students. Doing badly on it isn’t supposed to hurt them. Which means the temptation to slack off and "bubble in" some of the answers is always there.

This is, of course, a problem with many such tests. How much of a problem it is for PISA, however, depends in part on what you want to know. If motivation to do well on the test is a reasonabled measure of conscientiousness more generally, then the results may measure, in effect, an interaction between conscientiousness and academic ability. If your goal is to predict a nation's future economic well-being, then the actual results may be more useful than if the test measured academic ability only.

Of course, there are other factors influencing both test results and a nation's well-being above and beyond human capital.

Around the Blogs, Vol. 52

1. Seth Roberts has an idea for learning vocabulary.

2. Greg Mankiw reports how New York universities exploit the local rent control system.

3. Mark Palko expresses caveats concerning the interpretation of "randomized observational" studies of education. (via)

4. Arnold Kling pitches the idea of "competitive government".

The Ten Best Blogposts of 2009

Now, finally a "best of 2009" list about a universe that's so small the critic can confidently declare that we're not talking about "the best of the sample that I know", but the best, period!

Not qualified: Posts the strength of which is largely based on other people's work (sorry, BPS Research Digest; #s 7 and 2 are borderline cases) and work written for publication elsewhere (sorry, Bad Science; # 1 was close, but some discussion in New Zealand does not count as "publication").

Added: For your convenience, brackets behind each link indicate that the post is Long, Medium lenght or Short and High-Brow, Mid-Brow or Low Brow - low-brow meaning in this context that it's easily digested, not that it's somehow lowly.

So-

10. Jaltcoh: "The 2 Most Overused Chord Progressions in Pop Music Today", by John Althouse Cohen (L, MB)

9. Musselsoppans Vänner: "Danish 70s Interior Design Porno Style", by P - E Fronning (L, LB)

8. Scatterplot: "Great Moments in Student Course Evaluations", by Jeremy Freese (S, LB)

7. Political Scientist: "Viral Marketing", by Political Scientist (S, LB)

6. Scatterplot: "Maybe If I Added an Emoticon?", by Drek (S, MB)

5. Seth's Blog: "Will Like vs. Might Like vs. Might Hate", by Seth Roberts (M, MB)

4. Fly Bottle: "Big-Government Libertarianism vs. Limited-Government Liberalism", by Will Wilkinson (L, HB)

3. Bits & Pieces: "Random Thoughts", by Manish (L, LB)

2. Marginal Revolution: "The Inheritance of Education", by Alex Tabarrok (L, HB)

1. Offsetting Behaviour: "Sweatshops", by Eric Crampton (L, MB)

Thanks to Marginal Revolution and The Fourth Checkraise for pointers.

Around the Blogs, Vol. 24: It's Another Psychology Special

1. How much of a difference does teacher quality make for children's educational achievement?

2. Should you invest your money in companies that have simple names?

3. How dangerous is playing World of Warcraft? (pointer)

4. Of all the chick flicks in the world, which are the chickest? Or is it "chickiest"?

5. When will he finally run out of question marks? Now: Probably the coolest optical illusion I've ever seen! (pointer)

Die Chinesisch-Eltern

Aus einem Artikel in der Süddeutschen* (nicht online):

Wir hatten ein Jahr lang ein Au-pair-Mädchen. Zuzanna, genannt Susi, aus Tschechien. Sehr nett. Freunde fragten, warum denn nur aus Tschechien? Die kommenden Sprachräume seien Indien oder China. Das hatten wir nicht bedacht. Wir wussten nicht, das ein chinesisches Au-pair für unsere Kinder einen entscheinden Wettbewerbsvorteil darstellen kann. Die Globalisierung schläft nicht. Die Eltern versammeln sich regelmäßig, um die Entwicklung ihrer Kinder unter Globalisierungsaspekten zu besprechen.

Häufig liest man in der Presse Artikel von jungen Eltern, welche z. B., wie im oben zitierten Text, Bilanz ziehen, nachdem ihr Kind vier Jahre lang die Grundschule besucht hat. Ob Stern, Zeit oder Süddeutsche - der Leser kann sich darauf verlassen, dass in dem Artikel abschätzig derjenige Typus Eltern erwähnt wird, den man in Anlehnung an obiges Zitat die Chinesisch-Eltern nennen könnte. Niemals habe ich einen Artikel gefunden, in dem ein Vater oder eine Mutter argumentiert, dass es für den jetzt noch jungen Nachwuchs später einmal von großem Vorteil sein werde, bereits als Kind Chinesisch gelernt zu haben - eine Position übrigens, die ja so absurd nun nicht ist. Die Chinesisch-Eltern scheinen in Deutschlands Presse nur in der dritten Person zu existieren.

Ich bezweifle nicht, dass es diese Leute gibt. Träfe ich solche Personen, würde ich gern meine Meinung in das Gespräch einfließen lassen, dass es sich bei Kindern nicht bloß um Potentiale, sondern bereits um vollwertige Menschen handelt; Menschen obendrein, die sehr leicht unglücklich zu machen sind. Jedoch scheint die Häufigkeit, mit der die Chinesisch-Eltern in deutschen Zeitungsartikeln auftauchen in keinem Verhältnis zu stehen zu ihrem Auftreten in der Wirklichkeit. So kann man sagen, dass sie im kollektiven Bewusstsein den Platz des klassischen Spießers eingenommen habe, der abends beim Bier, unter der Darstellung eines röhrenden Hirsches sitzend, gegen Studenten und Ausländer wettert. Diese Menschen gab es bekanntlich auch, und es war grundsätzlich keineswegs falsch, gegen sie zu sein. Die Funktion der Figur des Spießers wie auch der der Chinesisch-Mutter oder des Chinesisch-Vaters scheint jedoch hauptsächlich zu sein, dass der Leser sich ohne größeren Aufwand überlegen fühlen darf. Das finde ich etwas billig.

*Gerhard Matzig: "Am Start: Vier Jahre lang Grundschule im staatlich apokalytischen bildungssystem, vier Jahre Zittern und Bangen und Hoffen: eine Bilanz", Süddeutsche Zeitung, 16./17. Mai 2009: S. V2/1

The English Tradition of Teaching

From A.S. Byatt's Possession, which I'm about 70 pages into and think I really like (p. 26 in my edition):

Blackadder [...] noticed and corrected a phletora of errors, accompanying this correction with a steady series of disparaging comments on the declining standards of English education. In his day, he said, students were grounded in spelling and had learned poetry and the Bible by Heart. [...] But in the best English tradition he did not consider it his business to equip his deficient students with tools they had not got. They must muddle through in a fog of grumble and contempt.

Don't know whether this attitude is particularly common in England, but anyway, this is remindful of the madness that is the method by which universities choose their teachers. Imagine car dealerships selecting their sales personnel on the basis of how good applicants are at accounting and you get a rough idea.

Around the Blogs, Vol. 11

1. Andrew Rilstone: "An Immodest Proposal"

2. What's the season for depression? Depends on which study you look at.

3. "Bill Gates ruinded my daughter's high school"

4. Distinguishing small from limited government

Should Literature Be Taught in School?

I used to be dead against it. Argument: Most pupils do not enjoy most of the stuff they have to do for school. So if they are forced to read literature for school, they come to see it as a chore rather than fun. Hence most people who become avid readers do so not because of, but in spite of school.

My sister, to whom I presented this argument and who used to work in a school which caters to a not-so-advantaged neighbourhood, disagreed. Most of her pupils, she argued, had only a vague idea of the book concept and needed to be told, for example, that there are books in which the author purports to tell the truth and/or his or her opinions (nonfiction) as well as books in which the author told made-up stories (fiction). Hence, she said, it makes an awful lot of sense to teach literature to these kids.

If one accepts both sides of the story, this might lead to the conclusion that literature should be taught to disadvantaged, but not advantaged, youths. Discuss.

(Earlier: What should be taught in school)