Andy Matuschak: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, no worries. So one question I have is historically, and maybe even to the modern day, it seems like improving education has been a very intractable problem. And you did reference this earlier when we were talking about gearing towards median student versus whatever percentile you're working with. But I don't know. Do you feel like there's been progress even in the percentile you're gearing your stuff towards? And if not, what is the explanation for the relative stasis? I mean, this is something you talked about. We have so many new tools with IT. What explains the broader sort of stagnation here? The funny answer to your question is actually there's been a ton of progress. Actually, things are pretty good. I think the stat is that in 1900, 6% of teenagers graduated high school in the US. Now, that doesn't mean that 94% didn't have an education that we would regard as a high school education, but it roughly means that. Now, these people are homeschooled. It's also the case that a high school education meant something lesser back then. A substantial fraction of high schoolers now study AP courses and complete them in high school. That's at the high end. On the low end, illiteracy was a very live situation 100 years ago in the US and is emphatically not now. Now it is the case that something like 10 to 15% of adults, depending on which polls you use, maybe would struggle to perform simple kinds of number manipulation or reading or writing kind of tasks, but our bar is basically moved. It used to be like, can you read it all? These tasks are maybe a little artificial. They're maybe not relevant to their day to day, and that's actually why they're experiencing this. The number of people, the fraction of the population who graduates at 17 or something, knowing a particular amount of stuff has basically moved up monotonically. And this is mostly about the bottom portion of the population. It used to be the majority were effectively uneducated past age 10 or something other than informally and in their trade. And really the story of the 20th century has been in part one of mass education. Part of why we have a service economy, an IT economy, is that basically all of our population is educated to a particular level. If you look at the national tests of fourth, eighth and 12th grade math and language proficiency, you'll see really pretty slow movement in the 75th percentile and practically none at all in recent decades. But you'll see absolutely enormous movement in the bottom quartile. And so in some sense the story, especially the last 20, 30 years, has been closing what's often called the performance of achievement gap where certain groups, part of underfunded schools, or who might have households that are unsupportive, or difficult, were just not having anything like the educational attainment of their peers. And that story has changed. One thing I'm curious about is that every other part of the distribution has been moved upwards. Has the ceiling been raised significantly?…

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