“Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”
Conservatism would actually be encoding the differing treatment for the in-groups vs out-groups directly and explicitly into the law.
For example, under Jewish law a Gentile who commits theft against another Gentile is liable for the death penalty, whereas it is not a capital crime when a Jew commits theft against another Jew.
Liberals cannot even conceive of such a thing since it contravenes the basic premise of liberalism so they can only conceptualize it in the way you outlined.
And by the way, this means that this in-group vs out-group thing (“two-tier justice system”) happens under liberal regimes, it just doesn’t get acknowledged officially.
We’re talking about a basic human sociological reality that is modeled incorrectly by liberalism.
> Conservatism would actually be encoding the differing treatment for the in-groups vs out-groups directly and explicitly into the law.
No. You can get the benefits in many ways: without a justice system, by encoding it into law or by in group agreement.
The disadvantage of not having a justice system are obvious, the disadvantage of putting it into law is that it very clearly and easily can be pointed out as discriminatory. And most people want to feel like they are good people.
So by doing through in group agreement, the members can simultaneously hold moral cleanliness subjectively while objectively benefitting from a two tier system.
We are all equal, but some are more equal than others. If you want to quote someone clever about it
What we’re talking about is the notion of what constitutes good or “being a good person”.
Within the Liberal frame “not discriminating” or at least “not being seen as discriminating” is good and the opposite is bad.
You’re still approaching this from the Liberal frame. It is very hard to transcend this because it is the totalizing predominate ideological substrate of the modern world.
In reality there is nothing inherently wrong with discrimination itself, only with particular forms of it. Types of discrimination which are considered non-controversially acceptable would be people’s choices of mate, who they hire into their company according to their skillset and “culture fit”, who is invited to a birthday party, or allowed into a home, things like this. These are forms of discrimination. The term itself in common usage has a negative valence which means “bad forms of discrimination”, “bad” according to Liberal/modern sensibilities.
We are talking about modifications to what constitutes bad vs good forms of discrimination.
If someone is still struggling with this, consider the semantics/valence of the phrase “I have a very discriminating taste in art”. This doesn’t have negative valence but the basic idea of discrimination is being invoked here.
I'm not sure it is true that "discrimination = bad" is a "liberal frame".
On the opposite, I feel that this idea is quite common amongst non-liberals who misinterpret liberals. A liberal would say "this is discrimination, this is bad", and the non-liberal would hear "this is discrimination, all discrimination is bad, this is bad". But similarly, one could say "this is sharing private information, this is bad". Does it mean that the conclusion is that sharing private information is always bad? Even when you share info with your family? Or when you open up to your partner? The mistake done by the liberals is that they assume the context is obvious. They assume that it is obvious for everyone that "that particular discrimination" is one of the bad ones.
(and, sure, I'm sure some liberal people also don't get the distinction and fall into the mistake of thinking that all discrimination is bad. My point is that it is not particularly a "liberal frame")
There is a good way to estimate if a discrimination is "the normal one" and "the bad one". A discrimination is bad if the real principal objective is to favour the in-group and disfavour the out-group.
People use that criteria themselves unconsciously. If I say "I'm not giving this to Steve because I know they don't like it", people will just think it's fine. If I say "I'm not giving this to Steve despite the fact he deserves it but I don't like him", people will notice it's unfair. I think liberal people just assume this is obvious, or even not realise it themselves.
This criteria works well. For example, in the examples you gave, none of these actions have been done because "we don't think the people we excluded from the advantage don't deserve it for not being our in-group".
But it is also true that when it comes to conservatism, there are elements where the discrimination is made to exclude the out-group not on fair principal reason, but for the principal reason that it is advantageous for the in-group and the out-group is arbitrarily considered "not worthy of it".
I would say generally speaking under Liberalism the notions of different registers or rings of “collective” are illegible. There is only the individual and the collective, not different types of collective with different rules and protocols.
This is why even ideas like the nuclear family are hard to define or defend within Liberalism.
Remember that Black Lives Matter had on their website a declaration that they rejected the notion of the nuclear family.
Along the same exact lines the notion of what makes someone a citizen of a Western country is very hard to define or discuss. In some sense every person on earth is basically an American, they just haven’t been officially granted citizenship yet. No one can actually define what particular qualities qualify someone to become an American citizen or not, everyone just has vague notions and some ad hoc mishmash of various financial or political interests.
This makes discussions around illegal or legal migration in the West very difficult to have, purely on an intellectual level in terms of the categories.
Well, yes, liberalism is often pushing against building a society where we have "clans" or "groups" that exert authorities on individual actions.
I don't think it means that "ideas like the nuclear family are hard to define within liberalism". I think they define them as clearly as in conservative circles (if not better, in conservative circles, these notions are often "gut feelings").
And I don't think liberalism is trying to ban things like nuclear family. People can still have as much nuclear family as they want, as long as it does not impact people who don't recognise their arbitrary authority or who are not part of one (willingly or not).
For example, Black Lives Matter is a good example, as they never rejected the nuclear family itself, just said they don't recognize its authority when this structure is restricting the solidarity potential between individuals.
Same with citizenship: it is not true that liberalism struggles with this notion. Liberalism is just trying to find a fair balance and avoid cases of unfair restrictions on people whose only crime was to be born on the wrong side of an imaginary line. It does not mean citizenship is rejected in itself, but it means that you cannot arbitrarily invent rules that favourise the group you are part of.
> This is why even ideas like the nuclear family are hard to define or defend within Liberalism.
> Remember that Black Lives Matter had on their website a declaration that they rejected the notion of the nuclear family.
The definition of nuclear family is incredibly easy to explain. And BLM rejecting its enshrinement in certain political and legislative situations doesn't make its definition any harder?
Like if you are a kid brought up by your aunt, or grandma. Or if one parent is dead, or divorced etc having limited legal protections is silly. We already cover this with the concept of a legal guardian, but its limited and complicated and offers only partial protection.
The nuclear family is a cold war political tool designed around car centric suburbs and civic design red lining. It didnt even make sense at the time, when many children had their dad leave for Korea and later Vietnam. And with women working, the primary caretaker being secondary family members.
And that is entirely within the framework of white, suburban middle class america.
> This makes discussions around illegal or legal migration in the West very difficult to have, purely on an intellectual level in terms of the categories.
Only if you pretend that you do not understand what people are talking about, the context of certain discussions and the situations or problems being addressed or discussed.
Categories are context dependant and humans are very comfortable making and working with categories, even universalising them. But there is no perfect enclosure so categories NEED to be context dependant, this is equally true in pure Maths as it is in human realities.
>A discrimination is bad if the real principal objective is to favour the in-group and disfavour the out-group
Come on, the outgroup is indefinitely big and the resources are limited. You buy icecream for your kid and not for the random kid. You favour the wellbeing of human race to that of aliens. Presumably you understand the will of Sentilese people to not share the island with strangers. Does it matter whether they think "we have to do this to protect our existence" or "we fucking hate white people"?
I think if you try to define what forms of favouring the ingroup are justified and what it means for Steve to deserve X you'll end up with something like "discrimination is bad when it violates the liberal moral intuition". Don't get me wrong, I love meritocracy and the world it built, but I don't think we can navigate millenia worth of social constructs with a simple rule of thumb.
I (and probably the large majority of people who are labelled "liberal" within this discussion, not sure if it includes me or not) perfectly understand the origin of the need of building in-groups.
When I buy icecream for my kid, I don't pretend that it is because my kid is more worthy of icecream than the random kid. My objective is not to "favour my kid": I don't think of the icecream as something that my kid should deserve more than a random kid.
My point is that when you see a liberal person saying "it's a discrimination. it's bad", it is, in the large majority of the case, a discrimination where the principal motivation is "conflictual", where the principal motivation is based on "there is us, and there is them, and we want to end up with us having X and them not having it".
As proof, it is obviously not true to pretend that when you buy an icecream to your kid, the majority of liberal people will come at you and say you are discriminating.
I agree that liberals don't think all discrimination is bad. I understand they're mostly opposed to what they consider unfair bigotry, I just think you fail to define it.
>there is us, and there is them, and we want to end up with us having X and them not having it
There is your family, and different families, and you want to end up with your kid having the last icecream rather then some other guy having it.
>My objective is not to "favour my kid"
But you are favouring your kid, and it would become conflictual if someone demanded your money for his kid.
> There is your family, and different families, and you want to end up with your kid having the last icecream rather then some other guy having it.
I guess there are 3 possibilities:
1. You believe all discrimination are bad. But in this case, it also means that buying a icecream for you kid is bad, because you gave it to your kid and not someone else. By extension, it basically means a large fraction of our human interactions (each time the interaction profit to someone else than us) are discrimination, and therefore bad.
2. You believe no discrimination are bad. But society obviously disagree with that. If, as a group, we decide that neuroticnews25 should be treated badly and differently of someone else not based on objective reasons but just because we feel like it, it is pretty clear that it is universally recognized as an unfair situation.
3. You agree that some discrimination are ok, and some discrimination are not ok. But in this case, you need to have a relatively objective criteria.
I gave you what I believe to be a relatively good criteria. Not perfect, but way sufficiently good that I cannot "cheat" and cherry pick the discriminations that I like as "ok discrimination" and the discriminations that I don't like as "bad discrimination".
This is the important point: even if the criteria is not perfect, the important point is that the criteria is not hypocritical or opportunist: the criteria is not built to justify what I like. This is the case because the criteria is based on a logic independent of what I personally like or dislike.
This criteria is: if the discrimination is mainly, principally, based on a wish to create advantages to the in-group and/or create disadvantages to the out-group, it is bad.
Obviously, it is not the case when I buy an icecream to my kid. At no point in my mind, when I buy an icecream to my kid, I even think "what about the other kids". They are not in the picture. "other kids" would not even exist and the situation and decision would be the same to me. And my wish is to provide an icecream to my kid, not to make sure the other kids don't have one (if they end up having one, it does not matter to me).
But when you look at situation where people point out discrimination as bad things, this is the case. When people want to "not allow black people in the front of the bus, or at universities", the whole argument _needs_ the existence of black people to even exist in the first place. The argument is not "discriminating by side-effect", the argument is "discriminating on purpose", the goal is to have different situations for the two groups.
And what I'm saying is that when people are saying "it's discrimination, it's bad", it is based on this criteria (it does not mean people who said that cannot be wrong, or that we cannot discuss if indeed this criteria is fully satisfied or not). I was answering to a comment that was implying that people who say "it's discrimination, it's bad" don't have any criteria and just considered all discrimination as bad.
> But you are favouring your kid, and it would become conflictual if someone demanded your money for his kid.
But it is not the main motivation.
If Bob said to Alice they will pick them up at the airport, if Bob's car has an engine problem and Bob is unable to pick up Alice, then the consequence is that Alice is not driven back home.
If Bob said to Alice they will pick them up at the airport, if Bob drive to the airport, see Alice, slow down and make a rude gesture at Alice and drive away, then the consequence is that Alice is not driven back home.
But people will not judge Bob equally on these two situations.
It's the same here: people say "it's discrimination, it's bad" only when people created a "bad" situation, a situation where the main argument for their decision was "there is us and there is them". This is what makes it bad.
But don't you think the motivation for favouring your race/country/tribe/religion is often very similar to that of favouring your family or your friends? Maybe there are counterexamples when it's really about resentment and symbolic superiority and whatnot, but I don't think actionable definition should be based that much on intention, or purity of the heart, or how much negative thoughts you had about the discriminatee, when the outcome is the same.
First, you can of course do "bad discrimination" when it comes to favouring your family and friends. That's for example the case with nepotism.
But, I don't know about you, but when I do something nice for my family or my friends, I don't have them compete with non-family or non-friend in my head. I'm never in a situation where I think "oh, X will get this, but I prefer to have my friend having this". This is a horrible situation: friendship is not a zero-sum competition where you reward your friends and punish your non-friends.
If I have the choice of giving a job to my friend or to a foreigner, I will give the job to the most qualified.
And, yes, I can "favour" my country: for example, I may support a national sport team. No discrimination there. But if I have to make a choice between two countries that deserve it equally and that this decision has bad consequence for one country, I will certainly not pick the country I like the most just because I like it the most.
So, again: there are "ok discrimination" and "bad discrimination", both can be about country/family/...
A more realistic case might be education. I was told last week that there are too many high performing kids in my daughter's cohort and they don't have enough resources for her to get any support despite being multiple years past her curriculum. In fact, there are apparently at least enough high performing kids to fill an entire classroom. From other parents I've learned that this has been an ongoing issue for years, so it's not some surprise that the school has never had to deal with.
Now to me, there's an obvious solution to that problem. For the school, it is apparently quite non-obvious to put the smart kids together. My impression is that this comes down to "discrimination" despite the fact that the advanced kids are probably also better behaved and can have a worse teacher to student ratio, so lower resources if anything. In fact, I think they would thrive just being in a room together with a babysitter and some creative toys they could play with with each other and maybe 30 minutes a day of instruction. But for some reason we can't segregate kids by ability and need every classroom to span the entire range (presumably because "segregation" is also axiomatically bad).
My general impression is that people who self-identify as Liberal are more likely to defend this than people who self-identify as Conservative (this is probably a very US-centric categorization since the words don't at all follow their meanings; "Liberals" tend to be extremely illiberal and "Conservatives" tend to not be very conservative).
You are saying that your daughter is in a class composed of, let's say, 10 "average-performing" kids (AP kids) and 10 "high-performing" kids (HP kids), and that because there is 10 HP that require specific support, they don't have enough resources to get any support to her. You also say there are enough HP to form one classroom, so let's say there are 2 classrooms with both 20 students, 10 of which HP and 10 of which AP. But then you are saying that the obvious solution is to split differently, with 20 AP in one classroom and 20 HP in another classroom. But it is not clear to me how it would free up resources.
If 1 HP needs 3 units of resource and 1 AP needs 1 unit of resource, you will have, before, one classroom that needs 30+10 units of resource, and one classroom hat needs 30+10 units of resource. Total: 80. And after your proposal, one classroom that needs 20 units of resource, one classroom that needs 60 units of resource. Total: 80.
If we have only one teacher per classroom, and a teacher can only provide 20 units of resource, and that the teacher was giving resource proportionally, it means that, in the initial scenario, your daughter will get 50% of what she needs, and in your proposal, 100% of what she needs. But it also means that a HP will get 50% of what they need in the initial scenario, and 33% of what they need in your proposal. In this context, it does look that you are asking for a change that profit your daughter while impacting negatively other kids. And that we went for a "balanced" situation where all kids get 50% of what they need, to a situation where some kids get more than others.
Of course, it is way more complex than this. For example, what is "equality": provide the same percentage of needed resource, or provide the same absolute value of resource independently of the need (cf. the famous picture of people of different height using wooden boxes to see a football game). Both of them are equality of opportunity, but with a different metric: one says they will achieve the same success if they provide the same effort, one says they received exactly the same treatment.
But at the end, I'm not convinced the situation is really "There is an obvious good solution (my solution) and the school is being bad for not recognizing my genial idea and having concerns around fairness. That is therefore the proof that people will reject good idea because they are obsessed with the diktat of 'no discrimination'".
1 HP does not need 3 units of resource. They need half a unit of resource. Anyone who has ever been a gifted child or worked with a gifted child knows this. Like, I've never given my kid more than a half hour of instruction in a day. I don't push her very hard. But simply putting her in school for the past six weeks has completely hamstrung her. She's too tired to want to do anything after being there for seven hours a day. She was making vastly more progress with what I could do with her during my lunch break, which is how she ended up years ahead.
I literally just want them to group with by ability and move at the pace of even the slowest HP. I was told there were literally at least 15 children who scored 99th percentile national on their first standardized test, and mine only scored 97th, so there's no chance that they'll be able to do anything for her. There are 5 classrooms, so quintiles seems reasonable enough, but like I said, I would actually be perfectly happy with e.g. 25-30 kids in my kid's class while the slower classes get 15. It is entirely about segregation. Her teacher told me that she has to devote her time to working with the kids who can't count to 4, and my daughter has told me at least one kid isn't fully potty trained and regularly wets themselves. I'm teaching my kid multiplication at home where I end up having to do all of her education myself anyway. She literally gets precisely 0% of what she needs, in the same way that putting a third grader in a kindergarten classroom gives them no benefit at all. Fortunately, I already anticipated that being the case, but it still annoys me that the only reason we're sending her to school is to meet other kids, and they're not putting her with the right group of kids, so even the social value is somewhat limited (she has, on her own, happened to latch onto the four smart kids in her class for recess/lunch. Go figure).
The average home in my area costs $1.5 million and somehow this is the state of public schools. As you might imagine, this sort of situation turns you into a NIMBY or pro-vouchers real fast. There's no resource problem; it's entirely intentional mismanagement.
But you were saying "there are too many high performing kids in my daughter's cohort and they don't have enough resources for her to get any support". If HP needs less resource, then I would think that the more there is HP kids, the more your daughter will get resource.
I'm still not sure of your argument. You are asking to split into two classes: one with 25-30 kids (the "smart" group), which includes your daughter, and one with 15 kids (the "dumb" group). But you choose the threshold so that your daughter makes it into the "smart" group. Would you also be happy if they decide to do one class with 25 kids and one class with 25 kids, and your daughter is in the "dumb" group? And if you had to choose between only two choices: either the status quo or your kid in the "dumb" group, will you prefer the second one for the benefice of kids in the "smart" group? It feels like you are asking to redistribute for the benefit of some kids only (and in particular, yours), even if it has bad consequences on other kids. I would not use the term "discrimination" in this situation, but I think it is a terrible state of mind. You need to understand that you are not special: if the school was applying your idea, other parents whose kids are hurt by this idea will come to them and complain like you've done, and if they accepted to change things for you, they have no reason to not accept to change things for them.
I also hear your explanation about how your kid progressed well when homeschooled and all that. But you seem to jump to the conclusion that the difference is due to failure of the school or the presence of lower performing kids. That does not seem obvious to me, especially when you explain that you were not giving her more than half hour of instruction in a day and that she is years ahead (not that it is bad, but that's probably a better explanation why she is not flourishing at school).
In short, I really don't think it is a good example that shows that people who tend toward NIMBY or pro-vouchers are reasonable people.
I didn't say that; they said that to me. The fact that HP needs fewer resources is precisely why it's insane. It's exactly my complaint.
And yeah even e.g. 28-22-18-16-16 would be better. I'm not claiming I'm special; I'm taking at face value what they told me that my kid is bottom of the pack of the smart kids (I'm actually skeptical of that claim, but I don't think it's particularly relevant to my point). You still have the question of why is this large cohort of smart kids in class with kids who can't count to four? Like, if we take at face value that there's an entire classroom worth of kids who are multiple years ahead of curriculum, why aren't we teaching them at their level? Even if my kid isn't in that classroom. The school is well aware that they have multimodal distribution in ability, so why aren't they designing the class composition around that? They know the statistics better than I do, so I'm sure that they could fit it much better than these numbers I'm throwing out, but even the numbers I'm saying would be a dramatic improvement, and again, I'm asking for fewer resources allocated to my child and more for the lower performing children.
You've done a fantastic job illustrating the type of person who thinks this is an unfair proposal (poor baseball field box analogy and all), and therefore everybody just has to move at the bottom 10th percentile pace, which is what the current system actually does.
> I didn't say that; they said that to me. The fact that HP needs fewer resources is precisely why it's insane. It's exactly my complaint.
This is not at all obvious from your explanation. But also, between you and them, if I had to bet, I would say that they are way better positioned to know about resources that you do. They are the ones providing the resources, they are the ones doing the "accounting", they see, with their own eyes, what needs resource or not. Did you even consider that maybe they are right on this point?
> You still have the question of why is this large cohort of smart kids in class with kids who can't count to four? ... why aren't we teaching them at their level?
Did you do some research on this subject? Apparently, there is a lot of academic research there, and the conclusion is that grouping by levels is not as beneficial or as an obvious good idea as it seems.
Especially in young children, skills can vary very quickly and "smartness" is not one dimensional. Apparently the best recommendation is to have mixed class but with the teacher aware of the level of each kids. Which can perfectly be exactly what your school is doing: in which case, they are doing the best for your kid and you are pushing them to adopt something that is worse.
On top of that, you said that they say HP requires more resource. If it is the case, it means that having them all in one classroom may be impossible to manage. So, it would _hurt_ the HP classroom and be dragging everyone to the bottom.
> and therefore everybody just has to move at the bottom
I don't understand why you are saying this. Nothing in my argument have been about "moving to the bottom for the sake of some minority".
In my first message, I have done some math showing that, in the context where HP require more resource, it looks to me that YOUR proposal is moving everyone to the bottom.
In my second message, I argue that your proposal is based on what will be best for your child, and that another parent will ask for something different. No "moving to the bottom" there either.
What is happening is that you don't know much about the subject, but you have _decided_ that splitting classroom is "obviously" the best way to go, you've _decided_ that you better how resources are divided than people whose job is literally to provide the resource.
YOU are the one who come with a simplistic "good idea" that people have tested in past, studied, and concluded that it brings everyone to the bottom.
I have very deep lived personal experience with being a gifted child and having gifted children. I know what sorts of resources they need. And I'm quite sure that if you ask pretty much any gifted person if they would rather be in a room with a bunch of other gifted children and minimal adult attention, or be told to sit quietly or participate in some activities targeted several years lower than their current cognitive ability all day, that they will tell you they would rather have been with the other gifted children and minimal resources.
Like her freshly three-year-old sister is at a level more advanced than the class, and is apparently more of a cognitive peer than most of the classmates.
I think at this point the failings of the education system with respect to phonics are widely known enough that you can just discount professional opinion entirely. We're talking mass incompetence and failure. A complete disaster.
It's crazy to me that you're now arguing that I don't understand enough about education to criticize professional educators when I'm wildly outperforming them as a layman dedicating a few minutes a day to the task. And just using some basic logic, how is a kid supposed to benefit from learning something they mastered when they were two years old? Before you say, oh well, maybe they could use additional practice. No, they mastered it when they were two years old. Literally, none of their day is spent at their level. So, how could a mixed classroom possibly be better for them? Why don't we put kindergarteners with 12th graders and only teach the kindergarten curriculum if mixed ability is so beneficial?
How does the current situation not bring everyone to the bottom when they literally don't teach past the bottom?
> I have very deep lived personal experience with being a gifted child and having gifted children. I know what sorts of resources they need.
The fact that you are explaining that because you have experienced TWO situations, you are in a position to know better than people wo have way more experience, with a way more diverse set, shows that the main problem is you acting like a "Karen".
> I think at this point the failings of the education system with respect to phonics are widely known enough that you can just discount professional opinion entirely. We're talking mass incompetence and failure. A complete disaster.
First, you realise the conclusions I've presented are obtained by studies in plenty of different countries. Are you saying that somehow every education system all over the world (including the ones that did not do the mistakes you pretend is the proof they are unreliable) are all incompetent?
> ... when I'm wildly outperforming them as a layman dedicating a few minutes a day to the task
How many children have you taught? Because from what you said, it was ONE. You have no idea of the diversity of students, you have never experienced student for which your approach crashes and burns lamentably.
But, yeah, you are an armchair educator on the internet, so, obviously you know wayyyyyy better. You even say something (which is: it's better to have classroom separated by levels) that a simple google search demonstrates is terribly simplistic, and even risk bringing everyone to the bottom.
> So, how could a mixed classroom possibly be better for them?
That argument is the level of "how can the earth be round, I see it flat around me".
I don't care about your specific kid. You base all your conclusion on this single data point. The studies are looking at thousands of gifted kids, and conclude that mixed classrooms are better, including for the high performing ones. Maybe not for your kid, but then you are asking to bring everyone else to the bottom just for your special kid.
Also, your kid is not even on the top of her class. There is no way that the teacher don't provide tasks also for the smart ones as they are a big fraction of the classroom. But you will tell me that you know exactly what the teachers are providing, despite not being in the classroom, just because "I know better than them".
It's not really two situations. As one might guess, my entire social network is also filled with gifted people. Most people I know have graduate degrees. I live in an expensive neighborhood where it's pretty normal for parents to be engineers, doctors, lawyers, etc. One of the other moms characterized her child as behind and felt he was in need of help because he was only 87th percentile.
Do you have any experience as a gifted child? Or are you an educator defending the system or something? It's incredibly easy to find stories about how much gifted kids hate school and how bored they get being in genpop classes covering the same topics over and over for a decade straight because their classmates somehow never learn it. Guidance from our state on identifying children with disabilities (which covers giftedness) literally talks about how gifted children have a risk of becoming bad students and developing behavioral problems because they get so checked out. This is not some unknown thing.
I'm telling you what the school communicated to me, and what's on the worksheets that come home with her. Like I said, I actually suspect that the ranking here is incorrect because the testing methodology is kind of poor (they basically measure who's extremely good at the first six weeks of kindergarten instead of who's operating at a 2nd-3rd grade level), but I'm taking their claim at face value, saying that my kid isn't top of the pack. Taking that for granted makes the entire system seem even more absurd since that means there's an entire class worth of kids that could essentially skip multiple grades for instruction while remaining together socially. So why don't they do that?
And I know they don't do that, because I know who the kids are in her class who scored at the 99th. I talk to the parents. They get a 30 minute pullout every other day, but still also participate in the same hours of math and reading instruction that everyone else gets (learning their alphabet or counting single digits). During the pullout time, my kid is told to sit quietly and color so the teacher can focus on helping the lower performing kids. I also know from the parents that this has been an ongoing issue for years. I know from the school that if you don't ask about it, they just won't even tell you, and even when you do ask, they stay pretty cagey. e.g., my kid scored a little higher on her reading than she did on math, when I asked what they do in the pull-out group, she mentioned that they do leveled readers (which I've come to learn from parents are at a lower reading level than my daughter is at), and just didn't mention the math group, which, again, I've come to learn does exist from talking to other parents. I asked whether they could at least give my daughter the same work that the other kids are doing while she sits quietly and she said no, but I could send her to school with a workbook or books from home that I provide. I asked if they would let her go to the library outside of the scheduled every-other-week time, and she said no. So basically, I can do the entirety of the work myself to figure out the curriculum to provide her, and the school will be useless in that area.
Which is what I already planned for. I've been through this system myself, so I know that they'll be useless, but at least let the smart kids sit and play games with each other or something. That's really the only reason she's there in the first place.
I already know that gifted kids are not at all prioritized, but it's just wild for me to see somebody in the wild defending this. Like if I told you that my kid were struggling to learn her alphabet when she's in third grade, and that they were saying they weren't going to try to get her any kind of help, and they were just giving her the same work as the other third graders that she has no hope of comprehending, would you have the same attitude? And if 20% of the school were operating at that level, and I said, hey, maybe let's group them all together so they can get the help they need since we don't have the resources for them to have individual attention, you would say that's not a good idea?
This is the level of insanity on display. I'm literally asking for discrimination in the sense that I am given less. I ask that fewer resources go to my child, and you push back on it. Because that's how deeply ingrained this idea of everybody being equal is within some people. You know she would do better, and you can't see that happen.
Again, this is 100% armchair "specialist". If you want to know real expertise, you should _never_ listen to someone who said "I know, I've lived it". Living it does not make you an expert, it make you a biased person who think their particular limited experience can be generalised.
As a proof, you were coming with your genius idea "let's create per-level classroom". Did you even googled it? People have tried, with a scientific methodology, blind study and all, with absolutely no reason to lie and with different concurrent teams re-trying, hoping to gain from proving their competitors wrong, and yet reaching the same results. And their conclusion is that "per-level classroom" drags kids to the bottom and "mixed classroom" is just better for the kids.
You are telling me you have sooooo much expertise on the subject, but at the same time you felt head first in the first naive trap on the book.
The "I talk to parents", the "I've checked on the internet", the "I've asked ChatGPT", the "I've read a book", ... This is not expertise.
I pity the teachers who have to see you giving them lessons on things that they obviously know 100x better than you. Do you realise that when you were teaching 1-2 kids and talking to 5-10 parents, they taught HUNDREDS of gifted kids (you said yourself that in this school they have tens of those per year) and talked to HUNDREDS of parents. If what you went through gave you some expertise, then the teachers you have in front of you have 100x your expertise: they've done exactly what you've done, but 100x more than you.
As for the ending, it's so ridiculous. Why would I want to do something bad to your kid? We want the SAME thing: for the kids to get the best. You came and said "per-level classrooms are obviously the best answer". I quickly check and see "per-level classrooms is a stupid and naive idea, don't do that". Because I want to HELP your kid, I just say that maybe you should not assume you know all the answers (initially quite friendly, but the arrogance and the insults have slowly eroded that), when you apparently haven't read a book on the subject, assumed by default that the teachers are all stupid, and concluded that if anyone does not do as you say they are trying to hurt the children for no reason at all.
And this whole conversation has nothing to do with "discrimination". I SUPPORT organising classroom with the primary objective to be more useful for the students. I don't consider this being discrimination. The reason I don't think you are right is not because there would be "discrimination". I haven't said that anywhere. The reason I don't think you are right is because you are a parent with very limited expertise (a couple of children and some social network, that is all anecdotic data points) and you are proposing solutions that are naive and known to be stupid. But you are unable to even conceive that I'm not motivated by some kind of ideology. It tells so much about your capacity to analyse the reality.
> While the direct effect of high-achieving peers is positive, tracking benefited lower-achieving pupils indirectly by allowing teachers to teach to their level.
> Minorities gain 0.5 standard deviation units in fourth-grade reading and math scores, with persistent gains through sixth grade. We find no evidence of negative or positive spillovers on nonparticipants.
> we find positive effects on high-achieving students with no negative effects on low-achieving students, suggesting that tracking may increase inequality by raising the ceiling.
And yeah if I'm producing better results, I'm going to go ahead and characterize myself as having more expertise, evidently. This is also a known thing: homeschooled students (i.e. students taught by "non-experts") tend to do better than public schooled students even with very little time investment. They are, charitably, acting like "expert beginners." Less charitably, they refuse to do the correct thing, and fall into weird memes like when they explicitly told kids not to use phonics-based reading strategies for 20 years.
And when talking about science, you need to take a step back and think about whether what you're saying is even plausible. Your claim, basically, is that putting my child in a group of kids that is operating on a level several years beneath her somehow benefits her. That she would actually be pulled down by being in a group of peers that's at her level. What kind of mechanism would possibly produce that result? I can easily list mechanisms for the reverse. And just with some basic logic here, why do we let some kids take AP calculus and not keep them in algebra 1 over and over for years for their benefit?
Yeah, you googled "articles that say what I want to hear" and you've found some, and did not really understood what they say. Congrats, I will definitively change my mind now.
But obviously, you "forgot" the articles that don't go in your direction, such as <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1756-5391.2009.01032.x" rel="nofollow">https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1756-5391... (which is easier to find than one of the articles you quote, so you probably either did a search that target specific articles, or saw it and choose to ignore it). This is a meta-analysis (so it is not just one study), and it concludes that per-level classrooms does not improve high performing students while improving the low performing students. In other terms: it says that non-mixed classrooms will drag students to the bottom.
> And yeah if I'm producing better results, I'm going to go ahead and characterize myself as having more expertise, evidently.
You DON'T produce better results, you had ONE student, this is way not enough to conclude if you are producing better results.
> Your claim, basically, is that putting my child in a group of kids that is operating on a level several years beneath her somehow benefits her.
You said yourself that the class contains a big fraction of kids that are better than her (and, yeah, I know, you don't believe the experts, your kid is in fact sooooo smart). Even if your kid is smarter than them, it is a lie to pretend that your kid is in a classroom that has a level which is several years beneath her.
And again, a naive non-expert would have a naive intuition: "oh, if some students are not at her level, of course she will not learn as much new stuff at her level so of course it is not good". Experts know that this reasoning is naive: learning is not just force-feeding books in the kid's brain, and what works with kid X may not work with kid Y. At the end of the day, if what you were saying was true, it would be clearly evidenced in data. But it is not. Even if you can find some articles where they say high performing students in non-mixed classroom did a bit better, how do you explain that there are so many studies that say they don't see the clear gap that your reasoning implies? How do you explain that? Let me guess: they are all communists part of the strange conspiracy because they are afraid of how smart your daughter is.
(by the way, do you realise how stupid your argument is: neither me or my kids will ever have to compete with your daughter. And competition is not even about high-performer or smart people: the smart people often end up being uninterested in the stupid egomaniacal competition, they prefer fulfilling lives. The fact that your daughter is smart does not make her a threat to anyone, and if she is smart, the fact that she was in a non-mixed classroom will certainly not impact her opportunities. If it does, I guess it means she is not really as smart as you think she is)
This is yet another "armchair scientist" approach: in science, we know these kind of intuitions are very risky. You fall for it because you are not an expert, you are just a self-entitled "Karen" who got confirmation bias that they know better than everyone.
Again, maybe your kid (and the handful of your "social network") is one of these outliers who thrive in home-schooling or non-mixed classroom, but it does not mean it is true. It does not mean your "genius idea" is not something totally bad to apply.
I just searched for effects of tracking on high performing students. I'm not sure how you could ever quantify what's easier to find, but sure. Also the meta-analysis you posted basically just says that a bunch of these studies have methodological flaws and don't really show anything.
And again, you have to use logic here. If you don't teach kids, but still take up their time not teaching them, how are they going to learn things? The position you're putting forward is absurd. Literally illogical. Cannot happen. Like, yeah, if you don't let anybody take calculus, their math grades might go up. Because you stopped asking anything of them. They might also feel more confident? Which doesn't mean a whole lot if they actually want to do university math and find out they're way behind, and their school just never actually offered anything past what other kids were doing in middle school.
If you think you got a different result, the conclusion needs to be that you measured the wrong thing and you asked the wrong question.
I think I've been pretty clear that it's about 20% of the kids that are apparently operating at a very high level. I've been told that the median is around the national median, which is to say abysmal. I don't have a good picture of the distribution between the 50th and 80th percentile at our school. So yes, the class is operating at a level several years beneath her. And if I assume that 20% of her cohort are above her, then it's also operating at a level years beneath them. Again, this is just a basic logical inference granting the assumption that they told me.
I don't know where you get this idea about force-feeding books. I said I've never worked with her for more than about a half hour in a given day, and I think you'll find I said that I think the smart kids would thrive if you just put them in a room with each other with some educational toys/games, and maybe gave them about a half hour of instruction per day.
I also never suggested I'm competing with you or anyone or that anyone is a threat? The original context was about people having exactly the weird visceral reaction to tracking (or "discrimination" or segregation) that you display. I want her to learn about the world because life is interesting. The fact that you think it's unfulfilling to learn at the pace you're capable of instead of being made to artificially sit and wait is more of a statement about you.
And, yes, my kid is an outlier, as are these other kids I'm talking about. That was literally the start of the discussion. We are talking about how the score handles outliers. The statistics of our school are that the class has a large number of what would be considered outliers at the national level. Did you miss the part where I said at least 15 kids in the cohort were measured at the 99th percentile? Do you understand what percentile means? They are, by definition, outliers. Or stated that the school said my kid is at the 97th percentile on the test they gave? That's ~2.5 standard deviations. And then I threw out numbers that made it pretty clear that there are around 100 kids in the cohort. Obviously we are not a typical distribution. The school knows this, and doesn't attempt to accommodate it.
And in fact, the first step for them would be to notice that their test doesn't attempt to measure the relative position of outliers. It stops at the skill it's trying to measure, which is far beneath their level. I imagine that if you or I were given a kindergarten test, we would also place above the 95th percentile, but it probably can't say very much about our relative ability because it makes no attempt to actually measure where we're at, and we're likely both well above kindergarten level.
(Not that this is particularly germane to the discussion, but since you keep calling me an armchair scientist, I do actually have published work on modeling plasma physics from my undergrad. I'm familiar with science)
> I just searched for effects of tracking on high performing students.
What are the first results you get? I get an article on "engagement" (which is not really the subject), then a study that conclude "The results suggest that early tracking increases educational inequality. While less clear, there is also a tendency for early tracking to reduce mean performance." (aka dragging everyone to the bottom)
I find it surprising that you've only found studies that show tracking to be beneficial.
> Also the meta-analysis you posted basically just says that a bunch of these studies have methodological flaws and don't really show anything.
And those are not accounted in the conclusion that is still that mixed classroom is preferred over non-mixed ones.
> And again, you have to use logic here. If you don't teach kids, but still take up their time not teaching them, how are they going to learn things?
That's a fallacy. Mixing classroom is not equal to "not teaching them". Again, you said yourself that a good fraction of the class is high performance kids. 20% is a big fraction, it's 5 students over 20. You decide to frame the situation as if a good fraction was just 100% ignored, which is just you framing the situation so the conclusion is what you want to hear.
> The position you're putting forward is absurd. Literally illogical. Cannot happen.
Reality does not care about your feelings. The reality is what we measure when we measure the facts. This is what these studies have done. They have concluded that your naive logic is incorrect: they have measured that non-mixed classroom does not mean high performance students stop learning.
> ... and I think you'll find I said that I think the smart kids would thrive if you just put them in a room with each other with some educational toys/games, and maybe gave them about a half hour of instruction per day.
And this is probably exactly why mixed classroom don't damage high performing students. You are adamant to pretend that in a classroom of 20% of high performance students, the teachers will lock them in a dark room or only tell them exactly what they are telling the low performing students. But then you also explain that it is easy, just gave them stuffs to do and leave them alone. What you are saying is that basically you can easily care for a high performance student when they are in a mixed classroom.
> The original context was about people having exactly the weird visceral reaction to tracking (or "discrimination" or segregation) that you display.
Which "weird visceral reaction"? You said that non-mixed classrooms are an obvious good solution. This is a lie, this is incorrect. Even being generous and saying that "non-mixed may be a good solution", your affirmation was that "non-mixed wins with a clear margin, it is an _obvious_ solution, and people who are not convinced by it have no legitimacy for this position at all". I don't care about "discrimination", I don't care about "stopping your kid to get smart".
Again, if I'm wrong, it would be SUPER EASY for you: articles like the ones I've provided should simply not exist. If I'm wrong, those articles are IMPOSSIBLE. If indeed non-mixed classrooms are the obvious solution you pretend it to be, every single study should either say "too large uncertainty to conclude anything" or "clear benefice from non-mixed classrooms". The fact that there are studies that say "statistically significant no benefice from non-mixed classrooms" is just the reality telling you that "it's an obvious solution" is not true.
> The fact that you think it's unfulfilling to learn at the pace you're capable of instead of being made to artificially sit and wait is more of a statement about you.
How being in a mixed classroom suddenly stop your kid to learn at the pace she like? YOU SAID IT YOURSELF that she needs half-hour a day of attention per day for this to be satisfied.
This sentence was there where you went all crazy about "those devil people who want to force my smart kid to not be smart" or "those devil people who want all children to be the same, for some reason that no one knows". WHY? WHO IS DOING THAT? You seems to think that people cares about your kid learning or not, and try to stop her learning. That's why I pictured you as obsessed with competition: you assume that kid education is somehow a competition (otherwise there is no reason at all for other people to try to stop your kid to learn).
> And, yes, my kid is an outlier, as are these other kids I'm talking about.
I meant: your kid is an outlier amongst the high performance kids. No kid is the same. No high performance kid is the same. Some will need half-hour a day, some will need five hours. Some will to work out the problem by themselves, some will need guidance. Some will need to learn continuously on a long period of time, some will need scheduled short sessions with big pause in between.
And you may have talked to tens of parents. 1. that is still a ridiculous small sample to drive any conclusion. 2. based on this conversation (for example how you find reason to convince yourself that your kid is in reality smarter than other kids), I'm pretty sure you heard what you wanted to hear from these parents.
> Did you miss the part where ... Do you understand what ...
Calm down, there. I was talking about your kid being an outlier amongst the group of high performing kids. You keep coming up with "my kid don't need more resource, so if someone says HP need more resource, they are lying", "my kid was fine with half-hour of teaching, so that is what a HP kid needs", ... And again, I'm sure you will say that you have discussed that with tens of other parents. Again, tens of parents is NOTHING. It's ANECTODICAL.
But, hey, thanks for showing your true colour: I was talking of your kid being an outlier amongst the HP kids, but you did not hesitate one second to come at me blaming me for something that I did not do at all.
> The school knows this, and doesn't attempt to accommodate it.
It may be the case, but there are a lot of as equally probable hypothesis.
For example: Your kid is used to homeschooling and struggle to adapt to a classroom. Because you cannot conceive that the problem is not the result to your imaginary "bad people who, for reason no one can explain, want to stop children learn", you just jumped to the conclusion "they don't accommodate it, I'm so much smarter than them, let me come with a genius idea". Then, you met the teachers and proposed ideas that people who have tried noticed will not work, and you got angry when they politely discarded them (instead of thinking that maybe they know things you don't, you just assumed you are so much better than them). Then, you talked to other parents, some of them in the same crazy state as you, some of them indulging you, some of them probably trying to balance your position but you did only hear what suits you.
All of that fits very well all the data points. Way more that the hypothesis that, despite the fact that your kid is so easy to teach for and that it will benefit mainly to all the other kids, somehow people refused your idea.
Did you actually look at any of what was being measured? It's like grades and state standardized tests. Maybe we have a different definition of high performers in mind, but in the world I've existed in, any high performer considers state standardized tests to be a joke. And obviously grades are going to be tied to whether they were challenged. If you have kids getting straight A+s, that means they were on easy mode, and should have been asked to do more. If you were going to do a standardized test, you need to test above the level that's expected of them. e.g. you would need to do something like give them a GRE subject test in high school and see how well they do. If you actually have a room full of advanced kids, then they should be able to tackle linear algebra, differential equations, electromagnetism, special relativity, etc. in high school. Not like... basic trigonometry and polynomials. Most people will find those subjects too difficult to ever learn in their lives. So obviously a heterogeneous class is not going to work. You can't teach the smart kids differential equations while you're also trying to teach the other kids in the same class the quadratic formula. And this applies at all levels.
If you think it works, you measured the answer to the wrong question. Clearly. That's why you need experience and a qualitative understanding of the domain. What is a gifted child like, qualitatively? You need to know what questions to ask.
And, yeah, if a kid needs five hours a day to be ahead in elementary school, they're not a high-performing kid. Like I said before, right now she's getting zero instruction per day at her level in school. The teacher told me as much. Literally zero. She said if I'd like, I can send her with materials that I've picked out and acquired myself for that 30 minutes. And again, part of my problem is when you're made to sit for hours of instruction on things that are well beneath your level, you get really bored and tired. Yes, she only needs a half hour. The fact that she's in class all day makes it harder for her to get that half hour.
In any case, I think for anyone familiar with this subject, you've very well demonstrated what I was talking about, bending over backwards to defend not teaching kids at all as somehow beneficial.
> Did you actually look at any of what was being measured? It's like grades and state standardized tests.
Did you? Because the meta-analysis is NOT limited to grades and state standardized tests, it also includes some studies that look at, for example, university/career paths.
> If you have kids getting straight A+s, that means they were on easy mode, and should have been asked to do more.
If the kid is not learning anything, then they skip to the next year. I believe you mention yourself that your kid skipped class years already. The problem is not about classroom mixed or not, if the kid is above the level, move them to the next mixed classroom year.
If you can't move her to the next classroom because she fails the basic test that checks if she has the basis, then it is the proof that she is learning in the previous year classroom.
> bending over backwards to defend not teaching kids at all as somehow beneficial.
WTF!?
Why on hell would I even want to "not teaching kids"? That is just so crazy. What would I gain from that?
How is that difficult to understand? You arrived in the discussion, said "it's suuuuper easy, we just have to do X, but because of the big bad 'anti-discrimination', my genius idea is rejected".
At no point I tried to defend "not teaching kids". My point is: let's look what say people who study the best way to teach to kids. That's the opposite of trying to not teach kids.
When looking there, I quickly saw you were full of it: you pretended your ideas was "obvious", when there is plenty of studies showing that it is way more complicated than that.
But your reaction was to explain how smart and exceptional you are. The people doing the studies? All idiots. The teachers? All idiots. Only you know the correct way, because you have experience with ONE kid and talked to few other parents.
Sorry, but you have no authority. You are just a parent (and because of that, you are biased, you believe that your experience with your child means that all high performing kids are the same as your child).
I'm not defending "not teaching kids". I'm just trying to explain to you that if the teachers did not accept your idea, is it not because they are evil, or idiots, or in some sort of anti-discrimination crusade (why? why would anyone even care?). It is just that your idea is not convincing at all. We already discuss here that there is no scientific ground to pretend that non-mixed classroom will magically solve all problems (and, yes, this is counter-intuitive, but this is why people have studied that so much). I've also introduced how it simply cannot be doable practically, but of course you ignored that, it is so much comfortable for you to pretend that it is because you are a genius and they are against you. (for example, the teachers claim that HP children require more resource, so putting them in the same classroom will make it impossible to provide enough resource to everyone in the classroom and impact them negatively. I know you are saying that it is impossible that HP kids require more resource, but again, you base that on ONE kid and on few chats, while people who say it is the case are literally the ones who manage these resource)
In all these discussion, you just reinforced that: you proved, again and again, that all your reasoning is only originating on your experience with ONE kid. You prove, again and again, that your reaction to different opinion is "nah, I'm the best, they are all idiots" instead of the healthy scientific honesty of reviewing your conclusion based on new data. You prove, again and again, that if someone does not agree with you, it is inconceivable for you that this person reason for not agreeing with you is not the result of some strange conspiracy where they want to ... not teach kids? ... impose anti-discrimination everywhere because of reason?
You are not interested in finding a good solution, you are interested to entertain the idea that the teachers are idiots and that you know better than them.
And again, I say it again: maybe non-mixed class is good for your particular kid. But your kid is just ONE DATA POINT. For all you know (and I know you will pretend that you know all the HP kids in the world, better than people who works directly with them), your kid is an outlier. And you have to understand that the school will not do something that is just beneficial for your kid alone (and I know "but I talked to other parents...", again, PARENTS ARE WORTH NOTHING. THIS IS NOT SCIENCE. THIS IS NOT FACTS. Often, when they behave like that, just emotional self-entitled ignorants who think they know everything better than everyone)
> You buy icecream for your kid and not for the random kid.
discrimination is about rules not about individual actions.
It would be "everyone can eat ice cream", or "ice cream is unhealthy and no one can eat ice cream".
If the rule is "Ice cream has too much sugar and because of the obesity epidemic we decided to ban ice cream, except for my son who is super special boy and he can have it every day" that is discriminatory. Even if your son doesn't eat it and effectively the rule is the same for everyone in practice.
On the basis of "resources are limited" you end up with discussions of rights that are equal on paper but discriminatory in practice. "Everyone can buy a house", but some people are rich and some have nothing. You have freedom and equality but also homeless people.
Here the question however is about in groups and out groups. So its for example about "theft is wrong" where you only arrest people stealing from supermarkets but not the CEO of the supermarket when he is stealing people salaries with mandatory unpaid overtime.
That is a law where rich people are covered by the law (their business is protected) but they are exempt (their theft is unprosecuted). That is the kind of in gorup/ out group being debated
Yeah, if you restrict the meaning of "discrimination" and "ingroup" and "outgroup" to examples making your point obvious and true then it's obvious and true.
> What we’re talking about is the notion of what constitutes good or “being a good person”.
For most people it follows pretty basic principles that are based on notions of "goodness" which might include humility, fairness, generosity, courage...
Under those circumstances, almost all humans believe that treating everyone as equals is aligned with those principles and therefore makes you a good person. Having to square that with conflicting dehumanised views of others, means that the easiest way to do it is to simply pretend that you are treating everyone the same while subjecting those you discriminate with a harshness that isnt applied equally.
> In reality there is nothing inherently wrong with discrimination itself,
You are using two different definitions of the word in a way that is sophist and not sophisticated.
Discrimination of humans is the mistreatment of others based on characteristics that are protected (those that are predetermined). Discrimination as the noticing differences and evaluating them based on taste is a second definition of the word, used in very different contexts.
That is not "liberal sensitivity" that is just polysemic words.
In the same way that standing in a room with a very powerful light bulb would not make your argument any brighter.
> We are talking about modifications to what constitutes bad vs good forms of discrimination.
No. We were talking about the psychological tools used by conservative people to deal with the cognitive dissonance of wanting to believe themselves as moral and accepting of inherently good precepts like the equal value of all human life while they want to not accept the consequences of the police state they set up to control people they believe inferior.
YOU tried to make it about the semantic similarity between two of the three meanings of the word discrimination. Which is the kind of parlour trick that only works if your audience is stupid.
Liberalism does neither uniquely hold the axiom that all humans are equal, nor does it shape the minds of people to hold it as a universal principle. It is a pretty universal tenant of almost all ethical systems, the only exceptions being system where some humans are not considered human (to avoid the everyone should be treated the same principle still being upheld), or systems that are openly discriminatory in which case they hardly call themselves moral.
Systems that say "we win because we are more powerful" do not do it based on ethics, and systems that have an underclass tend to dehumanise it (slaves not being citizens in rome). Everywhere else people are "equal", where the upper class are exempt from the worst consequences of legal frameworks (see sunset towns in jim crow america only affecting black people).
If you believe the person you’re discussing this with really has a “tiny little lizard brain”, that’s an immutable fact of their birth and you shouldn’t be discriminating against them based on it.
You need to consider what is actually the “citizenry” of a society. In your example it sounds like the nobles are the citizens and the peasants are non-citizens. Using the term “noble” and “peasant” confused the matter with inter class or socioeconomic concerns.
What you’re describing seems to be unequal justice for the poor rather than an in group or out group dynamic but it’s not clear because you’re mixing ideas. Note that in Ancient Roman society there wealthy Plebeians and poor Patricians.
The Greeks had a similar arrangement in their various city states with regards to citizenship and non-citizenship (the helots being the most legible example of this).
I would encourage you to consider that you are at least an order of magnitude not thoughtful enough to really understand what we’re talking about and keep that in mind when it occurs to you to use insults.
> You need to consider what is actually the “citizenry” of a society. In your example it sounds like the nobles are the citizens and the peasants are non-citizens. Using the term “noble” and “peasant” confused the matter with inter class or socioeconomic concerns.
In-group and out-group dynamics go far, far beyond citizenry. It is clear that you wish to declare all you consider to be undesirables as non-citizens to justify your discrimination against them, but this is not actually a useful model for anything.
> What you’re describing seems to be unequal justice for the poor rather than an in group or out group dynamic but it’s not clear because you’re mixing ideas.
No, I am talking about the literal basis for modern liberalism's existence. Liberalism has gradually expanded to encourage equality between more types of people, but the origin was in anti-royal and anti-noble sentiment, in opposition to birthright privileges and an immutable social hierarchy. You appear to be woefully ignorant of history, which is understandable for a tiny little lizard, but you should perhaps not speak of things you know nothing of.
It’s not about desirable vs undesirable. You have a different relationship and rules that govern conduct for your mother and father, wife, and children than you do your neighbors or someone who you don’t know who lives in the other side of the country. Those are not “undesirables”.
In the US it's always the liberals arguing for special treatment baked into the law for their favored groups and the conservatives argue for equal treatment. The liberals then argue back that equal treatment is de facto discrimination against then.
I'm talking about now. Most recently the liberals took their case all the way to the supreme court (and lost) insisting on their right to run a racial quota system in universities.
Not quite - in a very classical form of Conservatism, the Monarch and Nobles would have a different set of laws and social conventions. Usually, it's not an ideolgoical thing.
Aka Magna Carta '3 tiers of society' - the Monarch, Nobles, Plebes etc.
Or in Roman society, Nobles/Senators, Free people, slaves.
There are no popular conservative movements in the US at all. “Popular conservative movement” is almost an oxymoron.
The “conservative movement” in the US is just liberalism, the US was conceived as a liberal project. The founding mythology is a revolution against a king
k310 · · focus · HN ↗
“Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”
<a href="https://pylimitics.net/wilhoits-law/" rel="nofollow">https://pylimitics.net/wilhoits-law/
monideas · · focus · HN ↗
For example, under Jewish law a Gentile who commits theft against another Gentile is liable for the death penalty, whereas it is not a capital crime when a Jew commits theft against another Jew.
Liberals cannot even conceive of such a thing since it contravenes the basic premise of liberalism so they can only conceptualize it in the way you outlined.
And by the way, this means that this in-group vs out-group thing (“two-tier justice system”) happens under liberal regimes, it just doesn’t get acknowledged officially.
We’re talking about a basic human sociological reality that is modeled incorrectly by liberalism.
Arkhaine_kupo · · focus · HN ↗
No. You can get the benefits in many ways: without a justice system, by encoding it into law or by in group agreement.
The disadvantage of not having a justice system are obvious, the disadvantage of putting it into law is that it very clearly and easily can be pointed out as discriminatory. And most people want to feel like they are good people.
So by doing through in group agreement, the members can simultaneously hold moral cleanliness subjectively while objectively benefitting from a two tier system.
We are all equal, but some are more equal than others. If you want to quote someone clever about it
monideas · · focus · HN ↗
Within the Liberal frame “not discriminating” or at least “not being seen as discriminating” is good and the opposite is bad.
You’re still approaching this from the Liberal frame. It is very hard to transcend this because it is the totalizing predominate ideological substrate of the modern world.
In reality there is nothing inherently wrong with discrimination itself, only with particular forms of it. Types of discrimination which are considered non-controversially acceptable would be people’s choices of mate, who they hire into their company according to their skillset and “culture fit”, who is invited to a birthday party, or allowed into a home, things like this. These are forms of discrimination. The term itself in common usage has a negative valence which means “bad forms of discrimination”, “bad” according to Liberal/modern sensibilities.
We are talking about modifications to what constitutes bad vs good forms of discrimination.
If someone is still struggling with this, consider the semantics/valence of the phrase “I have a very discriminating taste in art”. This doesn’t have negative valence but the basic idea of discrimination is being invoked here.
actionfromafar · · focus · HN ↗
cauch · · focus · HN ↗
On the opposite, I feel that this idea is quite common amongst non-liberals who misinterpret liberals. A liberal would say "this is discrimination, this is bad", and the non-liberal would hear "this is discrimination, all discrimination is bad, this is bad". But similarly, one could say "this is sharing private information, this is bad". Does it mean that the conclusion is that sharing private information is always bad? Even when you share info with your family? Or when you open up to your partner? The mistake done by the liberals is that they assume the context is obvious. They assume that it is obvious for everyone that "that particular discrimination" is one of the bad ones.
(and, sure, I'm sure some liberal people also don't get the distinction and fall into the mistake of thinking that all discrimination is bad. My point is that it is not particularly a "liberal frame")
There is a good way to estimate if a discrimination is "the normal one" and "the bad one". A discrimination is bad if the real principal objective is to favour the in-group and disfavour the out-group.
People use that criteria themselves unconsciously. If I say "I'm not giving this to Steve because I know they don't like it", people will just think it's fine. If I say "I'm not giving this to Steve despite the fact he deserves it but I don't like him", people will notice it's unfair. I think liberal people just assume this is obvious, or even not realise it themselves.
This criteria works well. For example, in the examples you gave, none of these actions have been done because "we don't think the people we excluded from the advantage don't deserve it for not being our in-group".
But it is also true that when it comes to conservatism, there are elements where the discrimination is made to exclude the out-group not on fair principal reason, but for the principal reason that it is advantageous for the in-group and the out-group is arbitrarily considered "not worthy of it".
monideas · · focus · HN ↗
This is why even ideas like the nuclear family are hard to define or defend within Liberalism.
Remember that Black Lives Matter had on their website a declaration that they rejected the notion of the nuclear family.
Along the same exact lines the notion of what makes someone a citizen of a Western country is very hard to define or discuss. In some sense every person on earth is basically an American, they just haven’t been officially granted citizenship yet. No one can actually define what particular qualities qualify someone to become an American citizen or not, everyone just has vague notions and some ad hoc mishmash of various financial or political interests.
This makes discussions around illegal or legal migration in the West very difficult to have, purely on an intellectual level in terms of the categories.
cauch · · focus · HN ↗
I don't think it means that "ideas like the nuclear family are hard to define within liberalism". I think they define them as clearly as in conservative circles (if not better, in conservative circles, these notions are often "gut feelings").
And I don't think liberalism is trying to ban things like nuclear family. People can still have as much nuclear family as they want, as long as it does not impact people who don't recognise their arbitrary authority or who are not part of one (willingly or not).
For example, Black Lives Matter is a good example, as they never rejected the nuclear family itself, just said they don't recognize its authority when this structure is restricting the solidarity potential between individuals.
Same with citizenship: it is not true that liberalism struggles with this notion. Liberalism is just trying to find a fair balance and avoid cases of unfair restrictions on people whose only crime was to be born on the wrong side of an imaginary line. It does not mean citizenship is rejected in itself, but it means that you cannot arbitrarily invent rules that favourise the group you are part of.
Arkhaine_kupo · · focus · HN ↗
> Remember that Black Lives Matter had on their website a declaration that they rejected the notion of the nuclear family.
The definition of nuclear family is incredibly easy to explain. And BLM rejecting its enshrinement in certain political and legislative situations doesn't make its definition any harder?
Like if you are a kid brought up by your aunt, or grandma. Or if one parent is dead, or divorced etc having limited legal protections is silly. We already cover this with the concept of a legal guardian, but its limited and complicated and offers only partial protection.
The nuclear family is a cold war political tool designed around car centric suburbs and civic design red lining. It didnt even make sense at the time, when many children had their dad leave for Korea and later Vietnam. And with women working, the primary caretaker being secondary family members.
And that is entirely within the framework of white, suburban middle class america.
> This makes discussions around illegal or legal migration in the West very difficult to have, purely on an intellectual level in terms of the categories.
Only if you pretend that you do not understand what people are talking about, the context of certain discussions and the situations or problems being addressed or discussed.
Categories are context dependant and humans are very comfortable making and working with categories, even universalising them. But there is no perfect enclosure so categories NEED to be context dependant, this is equally true in pure Maths as it is in human realities.
neuroticnews25 · · focus · HN ↗
Come on, the outgroup is indefinitely big and the resources are limited. You buy icecream for your kid and not for the random kid. You favour the wellbeing of human race to that of aliens. Presumably you understand the will of Sentilese people to not share the island with strangers. Does it matter whether they think "we have to do this to protect our existence" or "we fucking hate white people"?
I think if you try to define what forms of favouring the ingroup are justified and what it means for Steve to deserve X you'll end up with something like "discrimination is bad when it violates the liberal moral intuition". Don't get me wrong, I love meritocracy and the world it built, but I don't think we can navigate millenia worth of social constructs with a simple rule of thumb.
cauch · · focus · HN ↗
When I buy icecream for my kid, I don't pretend that it is because my kid is more worthy of icecream than the random kid. My objective is not to "favour my kid": I don't think of the icecream as something that my kid should deserve more than a random kid.
My point is that when you see a liberal person saying "it's a discrimination. it's bad", it is, in the large majority of the case, a discrimination where the principal motivation is "conflictual", where the principal motivation is based on "there is us, and there is them, and we want to end up with us having X and them not having it".
As proof, it is obviously not true to pretend that when you buy an icecream to your kid, the majority of liberal people will come at you and say you are discriminating.
neuroticnews25 · · focus · HN ↗
>there is us, and there is them, and we want to end up with us having X and them not having it
There is your family, and different families, and you want to end up with your kid having the last icecream rather then some other guy having it.
>My objective is not to "favour my kid"
But you are favouring your kid, and it would become conflictual if someone demanded your money for his kid.
cauch · · focus · HN ↗
I guess there are 3 possibilities:
1. You believe all discrimination are bad. But in this case, it also means that buying a icecream for you kid is bad, because you gave it to your kid and not someone else. By extension, it basically means a large fraction of our human interactions (each time the interaction profit to someone else than us) are discrimination, and therefore bad.
2. You believe no discrimination are bad. But society obviously disagree with that. If, as a group, we decide that neuroticnews25 should be treated badly and differently of someone else not based on objective reasons but just because we feel like it, it is pretty clear that it is universally recognized as an unfair situation.
3. You agree that some discrimination are ok, and some discrimination are not ok. But in this case, you need to have a relatively objective criteria.
I gave you what I believe to be a relatively good criteria. Not perfect, but way sufficiently good that I cannot "cheat" and cherry pick the discriminations that I like as "ok discrimination" and the discriminations that I don't like as "bad discrimination".
This is the important point: even if the criteria is not perfect, the important point is that the criteria is not hypocritical or opportunist: the criteria is not built to justify what I like. This is the case because the criteria is based on a logic independent of what I personally like or dislike.
This criteria is: if the discrimination is mainly, principally, based on a wish to create advantages to the in-group and/or create disadvantages to the out-group, it is bad.
Obviously, it is not the case when I buy an icecream to my kid. At no point in my mind, when I buy an icecream to my kid, I even think "what about the other kids". They are not in the picture. "other kids" would not even exist and the situation and decision would be the same to me. And my wish is to provide an icecream to my kid, not to make sure the other kids don't have one (if they end up having one, it does not matter to me).
But when you look at situation where people point out discrimination as bad things, this is the case. When people want to "not allow black people in the front of the bus, or at universities", the whole argument _needs_ the existence of black people to even exist in the first place. The argument is not "discriminating by side-effect", the argument is "discriminating on purpose", the goal is to have different situations for the two groups.
And what I'm saying is that when people are saying "it's discrimination, it's bad", it is based on this criteria (it does not mean people who said that cannot be wrong, or that we cannot discuss if indeed this criteria is fully satisfied or not). I was answering to a comment that was implying that people who say "it's discrimination, it's bad" don't have any criteria and just considered all discrimination as bad.
> But you are favouring your kid, and it would become conflictual if someone demanded your money for his kid.
But it is not the main motivation.
If Bob said to Alice they will pick them up at the airport, if Bob's car has an engine problem and Bob is unable to pick up Alice, then the consequence is that Alice is not driven back home.
If Bob said to Alice they will pick them up at the airport, if Bob drive to the airport, see Alice, slow down and make a rude gesture at Alice and drive away, then the consequence is that Alice is not driven back home.
But people will not judge Bob equally on these two situations.
It's the same here: people say "it's discrimination, it's bad" only when people created a "bad" situation, a situation where the main argument for their decision was "there is us and there is them". This is what makes it bad.
neuroticnews25 · · focus · HN ↗
cauch · · focus · HN ↗
But, I don't know about you, but when I do something nice for my family or my friends, I don't have them compete with non-family or non-friend in my head. I'm never in a situation where I think "oh, X will get this, but I prefer to have my friend having this". This is a horrible situation: friendship is not a zero-sum competition where you reward your friends and punish your non-friends.
If I have the choice of giving a job to my friend or to a foreigner, I will give the job to the most qualified.
And, yes, I can "favour" my country: for example, I may support a national sport team. No discrimination there. But if I have to make a choice between two countries that deserve it equally and that this decision has bad consequence for one country, I will certainly not pick the country I like the most just because I like it the most.
So, again: there are "ok discrimination" and "bad discrimination", both can be about country/family/...
ndriscoll · · focus · HN ↗
Now to me, there's an obvious solution to that problem. For the school, it is apparently quite non-obvious to put the smart kids together. My impression is that this comes down to "discrimination" despite the fact that the advanced kids are probably also better behaved and can have a worse teacher to student ratio, so lower resources if anything. In fact, I think they would thrive just being in a room together with a babysitter and some creative toys they could play with with each other and maybe 30 minutes a day of instruction. But for some reason we can't segregate kids by ability and need every classroom to span the entire range (presumably because "segregation" is also axiomatically bad).
My general impression is that people who self-identify as Liberal are more likely to defend this than people who self-identify as Conservative (this is probably a very US-centric categorization since the words don't at all follow their meanings; "Liberals" tend to be extremely illiberal and "Conservatives" tend to not be very conservative).
cauch · · focus · HN ↗
You are saying that your daughter is in a class composed of, let's say, 10 "average-performing" kids (AP kids) and 10 "high-performing" kids (HP kids), and that because there is 10 HP that require specific support, they don't have enough resources to get any support to her. You also say there are enough HP to form one classroom, so let's say there are 2 classrooms with both 20 students, 10 of which HP and 10 of which AP. But then you are saying that the obvious solution is to split differently, with 20 AP in one classroom and 20 HP in another classroom. But it is not clear to me how it would free up resources.
If 1 HP needs 3 units of resource and 1 AP needs 1 unit of resource, you will have, before, one classroom that needs 30+10 units of resource, and one classroom hat needs 30+10 units of resource. Total: 80. And after your proposal, one classroom that needs 20 units of resource, one classroom that needs 60 units of resource. Total: 80.
If we have only one teacher per classroom, and a teacher can only provide 20 units of resource, and that the teacher was giving resource proportionally, it means that, in the initial scenario, your daughter will get 50% of what she needs, and in your proposal, 100% of what she needs. But it also means that a HP will get 50% of what they need in the initial scenario, and 33% of what they need in your proposal. In this context, it does look that you are asking for a change that profit your daughter while impacting negatively other kids. And that we went for a "balanced" situation where all kids get 50% of what they need, to a situation where some kids get more than others.
Of course, it is way more complex than this. For example, what is "equality": provide the same percentage of needed resource, or provide the same absolute value of resource independently of the need (cf. the famous picture of people of different height using wooden boxes to see a football game). Both of them are equality of opportunity, but with a different metric: one says they will achieve the same success if they provide the same effort, one says they received exactly the same treatment.
But at the end, I'm not convinced the situation is really "There is an obvious good solution (my solution) and the school is being bad for not recognizing my genial idea and having concerns around fairness. That is therefore the proof that people will reject good idea because they are obsessed with the diktat of 'no discrimination'".
ndriscoll · · focus · HN ↗
I literally just want them to group with by ability and move at the pace of even the slowest HP. I was told there were literally at least 15 children who scored 99th percentile national on their first standardized test, and mine only scored 97th, so there's no chance that they'll be able to do anything for her. There are 5 classrooms, so quintiles seems reasonable enough, but like I said, I would actually be perfectly happy with e.g. 25-30 kids in my kid's class while the slower classes get 15. It is entirely about segregation. Her teacher told me that she has to devote her time to working with the kids who can't count to 4, and my daughter has told me at least one kid isn't fully potty trained and regularly wets themselves. I'm teaching my kid multiplication at home where I end up having to do all of her education myself anyway. She literally gets precisely 0% of what she needs, in the same way that putting a third grader in a kindergarten classroom gives them no benefit at all. Fortunately, I already anticipated that being the case, but it still annoys me that the only reason we're sending her to school is to meet other kids, and they're not putting her with the right group of kids, so even the social value is somewhat limited (she has, on her own, happened to latch onto the four smart kids in her class for recess/lunch. Go figure).
The average home in my area costs $1.5 million and somehow this is the state of public schools. As you might imagine, this sort of situation turns you into a NIMBY or pro-vouchers real fast. There's no resource problem; it's entirely intentional mismanagement.
cauch · · focus · HN ↗
I'm still not sure of your argument. You are asking to split into two classes: one with 25-30 kids (the "smart" group), which includes your daughter, and one with 15 kids (the "dumb" group). But you choose the threshold so that your daughter makes it into the "smart" group. Would you also be happy if they decide to do one class with 25 kids and one class with 25 kids, and your daughter is in the "dumb" group? And if you had to choose between only two choices: either the status quo or your kid in the "dumb" group, will you prefer the second one for the benefice of kids in the "smart" group? It feels like you are asking to redistribute for the benefit of some kids only (and in particular, yours), even if it has bad consequences on other kids. I would not use the term "discrimination" in this situation, but I think it is a terrible state of mind. You need to understand that you are not special: if the school was applying your idea, other parents whose kids are hurt by this idea will come to them and complain like you've done, and if they accepted to change things for you, they have no reason to not accept to change things for them.
I also hear your explanation about how your kid progressed well when homeschooled and all that. But you seem to jump to the conclusion that the difference is due to failure of the school or the presence of lower performing kids. That does not seem obvious to me, especially when you explain that you were not giving her more than half hour of instruction in a day and that she is years ahead (not that it is bad, but that's probably a better explanation why she is not flourishing at school).
In short, I really don't think it is a good example that shows that people who tend toward NIMBY or pro-vouchers are reasonable people.
ndriscoll · · focus · HN ↗
And yeah even e.g. 28-22-18-16-16 would be better. I'm not claiming I'm special; I'm taking at face value what they told me that my kid is bottom of the pack of the smart kids (I'm actually skeptical of that claim, but I don't think it's particularly relevant to my point). You still have the question of why is this large cohort of smart kids in class with kids who can't count to four? Like, if we take at face value that there's an entire classroom worth of kids who are multiple years ahead of curriculum, why aren't we teaching them at their level? Even if my kid isn't in that classroom. The school is well aware that they have multimodal distribution in ability, so why aren't they designing the class composition around that? They know the statistics better than I do, so I'm sure that they could fit it much better than these numbers I'm throwing out, but even the numbers I'm saying would be a dramatic improvement, and again, I'm asking for fewer resources allocated to my child and more for the lower performing children.
You've done a fantastic job illustrating the type of person who thinks this is an unfair proposal (poor baseball field box analogy and all), and therefore everybody just has to move at the bottom 10th percentile pace, which is what the current system actually does.
cauch · · focus · HN ↗
This is not at all obvious from your explanation. But also, between you and them, if I had to bet, I would say that they are way better positioned to know about resources that you do. They are the ones providing the resources, they are the ones doing the "accounting", they see, with their own eyes, what needs resource or not. Did you even consider that maybe they are right on this point?
> You still have the question of why is this large cohort of smart kids in class with kids who can't count to four? ... why aren't we teaching them at their level?
Did you do some research on this subject? Apparently, there is a lot of academic research there, and the conclusion is that grouping by levels is not as beneficial or as an obvious good idea as it seems.
Especially in young children, skills can vary very quickly and "smartness" is not one dimensional. Apparently the best recommendation is to have mixed class but with the teacher aware of the level of each kids. Which can perfectly be exactly what your school is doing: in which case, they are doing the best for your kid and you are pushing them to adopt something that is worse.
On top of that, you said that they say HP requires more resource. If it is the case, it means that having them all in one classroom may be impossible to manage. So, it would _hurt_ the HP classroom and be dragging everyone to the bottom.
> and therefore everybody just has to move at the bottom
I don't understand why you are saying this. Nothing in my argument have been about "moving to the bottom for the sake of some minority".
In my first message, I have done some math showing that, in the context where HP require more resource, it looks to me that YOUR proposal is moving everyone to the bottom.
In my second message, I argue that your proposal is based on what will be best for your child, and that another parent will ask for something different. No "moving to the bottom" there either.
What is happening is that you don't know much about the subject, but you have _decided_ that splitting classroom is "obviously" the best way to go, you've _decided_ that you better how resources are divided than people whose job is literally to provide the resource.
YOU are the one who come with a simplistic "good idea" that people have tested in past, studied, and concluded that it brings everyone to the bottom.
ndriscoll · · focus · HN ↗
Like her freshly three-year-old sister is at a level more advanced than the class, and is apparently more of a cognitive peer than most of the classmates.
I think at this point the failings of the education system with respect to phonics are widely known enough that you can just discount professional opinion entirely. We're talking mass incompetence and failure. A complete disaster.
It's crazy to me that you're now arguing that I don't understand enough about education to criticize professional educators when I'm wildly outperforming them as a layman dedicating a few minutes a day to the task. And just using some basic logic, how is a kid supposed to benefit from learning something they mastered when they were two years old? Before you say, oh well, maybe they could use additional practice. No, they mastered it when they were two years old. Literally, none of their day is spent at their level. So, how could a mixed classroom possibly be better for them? Why don't we put kindergarteners with 12th graders and only teach the kindergarten curriculum if mixed ability is so beneficial?
How does the current situation not bring everyone to the bottom when they literally don't teach past the bottom?
cauch · · focus · HN ↗
The fact that you are explaining that because you have experienced TWO situations, you are in a position to know better than people wo have way more experience, with a way more diverse set, shows that the main problem is you acting like a "Karen".
> I think at this point the failings of the education system with respect to phonics are widely known enough that you can just discount professional opinion entirely. We're talking mass incompetence and failure. A complete disaster.
First, you realise the conclusions I've presented are obtained by studies in plenty of different countries. Are you saying that somehow every education system all over the world (including the ones that did not do the mistakes you pretend is the proof they are unreliable) are all incompetent?
> ... when I'm wildly outperforming them as a layman dedicating a few minutes a day to the task
How many children have you taught? Because from what you said, it was ONE. You have no idea of the diversity of students, you have never experienced student for which your approach crashes and burns lamentably.
But, yeah, you are an armchair educator on the internet, so, obviously you know wayyyyyy better. You even say something (which is: it's better to have classroom separated by levels) that a simple google search demonstrates is terribly simplistic, and even risk bringing everyone to the bottom.
> So, how could a mixed classroom possibly be better for them?
That argument is the level of "how can the earth be round, I see it flat around me".
I don't care about your specific kid. You base all your conclusion on this single data point. The studies are looking at thousands of gifted kids, and conclude that mixed classrooms are better, including for the high performing ones. Maybe not for your kid, but then you are asking to bring everyone else to the bottom just for your special kid.
Also, your kid is not even on the top of her class. There is no way that the teacher don't provide tasks also for the smart ones as they are a big fraction of the classroom. But you will tell me that you know exactly what the teachers are providing, despite not being in the classroom, just because "I know better than them".
ndriscoll · · focus · HN ↗
Do you have any experience as a gifted child? Or are you an educator defending the system or something? It's incredibly easy to find stories about how much gifted kids hate school and how bored they get being in genpop classes covering the same topics over and over for a decade straight because their classmates somehow never learn it. Guidance from our state on identifying children with disabilities (which covers giftedness) literally talks about how gifted children have a risk of becoming bad students and developing behavioral problems because they get so checked out. This is not some unknown thing.
I'm telling you what the school communicated to me, and what's on the worksheets that come home with her. Like I said, I actually suspect that the ranking here is incorrect because the testing methodology is kind of poor (they basically measure who's extremely good at the first six weeks of kindergarten instead of who's operating at a 2nd-3rd grade level), but I'm taking their claim at face value, saying that my kid isn't top of the pack. Taking that for granted makes the entire system seem even more absurd since that means there's an entire class worth of kids that could essentially skip multiple grades for instruction while remaining together socially. So why don't they do that?
And I know they don't do that, because I know who the kids are in her class who scored at the 99th. I talk to the parents. They get a 30 minute pullout every other day, but still also participate in the same hours of math and reading instruction that everyone else gets (learning their alphabet or counting single digits). During the pullout time, my kid is told to sit quietly and color so the teacher can focus on helping the lower performing kids. I also know from the parents that this has been an ongoing issue for years. I know from the school that if you don't ask about it, they just won't even tell you, and even when you do ask, they stay pretty cagey. e.g., my kid scored a little higher on her reading than she did on math, when I asked what they do in the pull-out group, she mentioned that they do leveled readers (which I've come to learn from parents are at a lower reading level than my daughter is at), and just didn't mention the math group, which, again, I've come to learn does exist from talking to other parents. I asked whether they could at least give my daughter the same work that the other kids are doing while she sits quietly and she said no, but I could send her to school with a workbook or books from home that I provide. I asked if they would let her go to the library outside of the scheduled every-other-week time, and she said no. So basically, I can do the entirety of the work myself to figure out the curriculum to provide her, and the school will be useless in that area.
Which is what I already planned for. I've been through this system myself, so I know that they'll be useless, but at least let the smart kids sit and play games with each other or something. That's really the only reason she's there in the first place.
I already know that gifted kids are not at all prioritized, but it's just wild for me to see somebody in the wild defending this. Like if I told you that my kid were struggling to learn her alphabet when she's in third grade, and that they were saying they weren't going to try to get her any kind of help, and they were just giving her the same work as the other third graders that she has no hope of comprehending, would you have the same attitude? And if 20% of the school were operating at that level, and I said, hey, maybe let's group them all together so they can get the help they need since we don't have the resources for them to have individual attention, you would say that's not a good idea?
This is the level of insanity on display. I'm literally asking for discrimination in the sense that I am given less. I ask that fewer resources go to my child, and you push back on it. Because that's how deeply ingrained this idea of everybody being equal is within some people. You know she would do better, and you can't see that happen.
cauch · · focus · HN ↗
As a proof, you were coming with your genius idea "let's create per-level classroom". Did you even googled it? People have tried, with a scientific methodology, blind study and all, with absolutely no reason to lie and with different concurrent teams re-trying, hoping to gain from proving their competitors wrong, and yet reaching the same results. And their conclusion is that "per-level classroom" drags kids to the bottom and "mixed classroom" is just better for the kids.
You are telling me you have sooooo much expertise on the subject, but at the same time you felt head first in the first naive trap on the book.
The "I talk to parents", the "I've checked on the internet", the "I've asked ChatGPT", the "I've read a book", ... This is not expertise.
I pity the teachers who have to see you giving them lessons on things that they obviously know 100x better than you. Do you realise that when you were teaching 1-2 kids and talking to 5-10 parents, they taught HUNDREDS of gifted kids (you said yourself that in this school they have tens of those per year) and talked to HUNDREDS of parents. If what you went through gave you some expertise, then the teachers you have in front of you have 100x your expertise: they've done exactly what you've done, but 100x more than you.
As for the ending, it's so ridiculous. Why would I want to do something bad to your kid? We want the SAME thing: for the kids to get the best. You came and said "per-level classrooms are obviously the best answer". I quickly check and see "per-level classrooms is a stupid and naive idea, don't do that". Because I want to HELP your kid, I just say that maybe you should not assume you know all the answers (initially quite friendly, but the arrogance and the insults have slowly eroded that), when you apparently haven't read a book on the subject, assumed by default that the teachers are all stupid, and concluded that if anyone does not do as you say they are trying to hurt the children for no reason at all.
And this whole conversation has nothing to do with "discrimination". I SUPPORT organising classroom with the primary objective to be more useful for the students. I don't consider this being discrimination. The reason I don't think you are right is not because there would be "discrimination". I haven't said that anywhere. The reason I don't think you are right is because you are a parent with very limited expertise (a couple of children and some social network, that is all anecdotic data points) and you are proposing solutions that are naive and known to be stupid. But you are unable to even conceive that I'm not motivated by some kind of ideology. It tells so much about your capacity to analyse the reality.
ndriscoll · · focus · HN ↗
<a href="https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.101.5.1739" rel="nofollow">https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.101.5.1739
> While the direct effect of high-achieving peers is positive, tracking benefited lower-achieving pupils indirectly by allowing teachers to teach to their level.
<a href="https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20150484" rel="nofollow">https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20150484
> Minorities gain 0.5 standard deviation units in fourth-grade reading and math scores, with persistent gains through sixth grade. We find no evidence of negative or positive spillovers on nonparticipants.
<a href="https://www.iza.org/publications/dp/15528/patterns-determinants-and-consequences-of-ability-tracking-evidence-from-texas-public-schools" rel="nofollow">https://www.iza.org/publications/dp/15528/patterns-determina...
Here's the real problem:
> we find positive effects on high-achieving students with no negative effects on low-achieving students, suggesting that tracking may increase inequality by raising the ceiling.
And yeah if I'm producing better results, I'm going to go ahead and characterize myself as having more expertise, evidently. This is also a known thing: homeschooled students (i.e. students taught by "non-experts") tend to do better than public schooled students even with very little time investment. They are, charitably, acting like "expert beginners." Less charitably, they refuse to do the correct thing, and fall into weird memes like when they explicitly told kids not to use phonics-based reading strategies for 20 years.
And when talking about science, you need to take a step back and think about whether what you're saying is even plausible. Your claim, basically, is that putting my child in a group of kids that is operating on a level several years beneath her somehow benefits her. That she would actually be pulled down by being in a group of peers that's at her level. What kind of mechanism would possibly produce that result? I can easily list mechanisms for the reverse. And just with some basic logic here, why do we let some kids take AP calculus and not keep them in algebra 1 over and over for years for their benefit?
cauch · · focus · HN ↗
But obviously, you "forgot" the articles that don't go in your direction, such as <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1756-5391.2009.01032.x" rel="nofollow">https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1756-5391... (which is easier to find than one of the articles you quote, so you probably either did a search that target specific articles, or saw it and choose to ignore it). This is a meta-analysis (so it is not just one study), and it concludes that per-level classrooms does not improve high performing students while improving the low performing students. In other terms: it says that non-mixed classrooms will drag students to the bottom.
> And yeah if I'm producing better results, I'm going to go ahead and characterize myself as having more expertise, evidently.
You DON'T produce better results, you had ONE student, this is way not enough to conclude if you are producing better results.
> Your claim, basically, is that putting my child in a group of kids that is operating on a level several years beneath her somehow benefits her.
You said yourself that the class contains a big fraction of kids that are better than her (and, yeah, I know, you don't believe the experts, your kid is in fact sooooo smart). Even if your kid is smarter than them, it is a lie to pretend that your kid is in a classroom that has a level which is several years beneath her.
And again, a naive non-expert would have a naive intuition: "oh, if some students are not at her level, of course she will not learn as much new stuff at her level so of course it is not good". Experts know that this reasoning is naive: learning is not just force-feeding books in the kid's brain, and what works with kid X may not work with kid Y. At the end of the day, if what you were saying was true, it would be clearly evidenced in data. But it is not. Even if you can find some articles where they say high performing students in non-mixed classroom did a bit better, how do you explain that there are so many studies that say they don't see the clear gap that your reasoning implies? How do you explain that? Let me guess: they are all communists part of the strange conspiracy because they are afraid of how smart your daughter is.
(by the way, do you realise how stupid your argument is: neither me or my kids will ever have to compete with your daughter. And competition is not even about high-performer or smart people: the smart people often end up being uninterested in the stupid egomaniacal competition, they prefer fulfilling lives. The fact that your daughter is smart does not make her a threat to anyone, and if she is smart, the fact that she was in a non-mixed classroom will certainly not impact her opportunities. If it does, I guess it means she is not really as smart as you think she is)
This is yet another "armchair scientist" approach: in science, we know these kind of intuitions are very risky. You fall for it because you are not an expert, you are just a self-entitled "Karen" who got confirmation bias that they know better than everyone.
Again, maybe your kid (and the handful of your "social network") is one of these outliers who thrive in home-schooling or non-mixed classroom, but it does not mean it is true. It does not mean your "genius idea" is not something totally bad to apply.
ndriscoll · · focus · HN ↗
And again, you have to use logic here. If you don't teach kids, but still take up their time not teaching them, how are they going to learn things? The position you're putting forward is absurd. Literally illogical. Cannot happen. Like, yeah, if you don't let anybody take calculus, their math grades might go up. Because you stopped asking anything of them. They might also feel more confident? Which doesn't mean a whole lot if they actually want to do university math and find out they're way behind, and their school just never actually offered anything past what other kids were doing in middle school.
If you think you got a different result, the conclusion needs to be that you measured the wrong thing and you asked the wrong question.
I think I've been pretty clear that it's about 20% of the kids that are apparently operating at a very high level. I've been told that the median is around the national median, which is to say abysmal. I don't have a good picture of the distribution between the 50th and 80th percentile at our school. So yes, the class is operating at a level several years beneath her. And if I assume that 20% of her cohort are above her, then it's also operating at a level years beneath them. Again, this is just a basic logical inference granting the assumption that they told me.
I don't know where you get this idea about force-feeding books. I said I've never worked with her for more than about a half hour in a given day, and I think you'll find I said that I think the smart kids would thrive if you just put them in a room with each other with some educational toys/games, and maybe gave them about a half hour of instruction per day.
I also never suggested I'm competing with you or anyone or that anyone is a threat? The original context was about people having exactly the weird visceral reaction to tracking (or "discrimination" or segregation) that you display. I want her to learn about the world because life is interesting. The fact that you think it's unfulfilling to learn at the pace you're capable of instead of being made to artificially sit and wait is more of a statement about you.
And, yes, my kid is an outlier, as are these other kids I'm talking about. That was literally the start of the discussion. We are talking about how the score handles outliers. The statistics of our school are that the class has a large number of what would be considered outliers at the national level. Did you miss the part where I said at least 15 kids in the cohort were measured at the 99th percentile? Do you understand what percentile means? They are, by definition, outliers. Or stated that the school said my kid is at the 97th percentile on the test they gave? That's ~2.5 standard deviations. And then I threw out numbers that made it pretty clear that there are around 100 kids in the cohort. Obviously we are not a typical distribution. The school knows this, and doesn't attempt to accommodate it.
And in fact, the first step for them would be to notice that their test doesn't attempt to measure the relative position of outliers. It stops at the skill it's trying to measure, which is far beneath their level. I imagine that if you or I were given a kindergarten test, we would also place above the 95th percentile, but it probably can't say very much about our relative ability because it makes no attempt to actually measure where we're at, and we're likely both well above kindergarten level.
(Not that this is particularly germane to the discussion, but since you keep calling me an armchair scientist, I do actually have published work on modeling plasma physics from my undergrad. I'm familiar with science)
cauch · · focus · HN ↗
What are the first results you get? I get an article on "engagement" (which is not really the subject), then a study that conclude "The results suggest that early tracking increases educational inequality. While less clear, there is also a tendency for early tracking to reduce mean performance." (aka dragging everyone to the bottom)
I find it surprising that you've only found studies that show tracking to be beneficial.
> Also the meta-analysis you posted basically just says that a bunch of these studies have methodological flaws and don't really show anything.
And those are not accounted in the conclusion that is still that mixed classroom is preferred over non-mixed ones.
> And again, you have to use logic here. If you don't teach kids, but still take up their time not teaching them, how are they going to learn things?
That's a fallacy. Mixing classroom is not equal to "not teaching them". Again, you said yourself that a good fraction of the class is high performance kids. 20% is a big fraction, it's 5 students over 20. You decide to frame the situation as if a good fraction was just 100% ignored, which is just you framing the situation so the conclusion is what you want to hear.
> The position you're putting forward is absurd. Literally illogical. Cannot happen.
Reality does not care about your feelings. The reality is what we measure when we measure the facts. This is what these studies have done. They have concluded that your naive logic is incorrect: they have measured that non-mixed classroom does not mean high performance students stop learning.
> ... and I think you'll find I said that I think the smart kids would thrive if you just put them in a room with each other with some educational toys/games, and maybe gave them about a half hour of instruction per day.
And this is probably exactly why mixed classroom don't damage high performing students. You are adamant to pretend that in a classroom of 20% of high performance students, the teachers will lock them in a dark room or only tell them exactly what they are telling the low performing students. But then you also explain that it is easy, just gave them stuffs to do and leave them alone. What you are saying is that basically you can easily care for a high performance student when they are in a mixed classroom.
> The original context was about people having exactly the weird visceral reaction to tracking (or "discrimination" or segregation) that you display.
Which "weird visceral reaction"? You said that non-mixed classrooms are an obvious good solution. This is a lie, this is incorrect. Even being generous and saying that "non-mixed may be a good solution", your affirmation was that "non-mixed wins with a clear margin, it is an _obvious_ solution, and people who are not convinced by it have no legitimacy for this position at all". I don't care about "discrimination", I don't care about "stopping your kid to get smart".
Again, if I'm wrong, it would be SUPER EASY for you: articles like the ones I've provided should simply not exist. If I'm wrong, those articles are IMPOSSIBLE. If indeed non-mixed classrooms are the obvious solution you pretend it to be, every single study should either say "too large uncertainty to conclude anything" or "clear benefice from non-mixed classrooms". The fact that there are studies that say "statistically significant no benefice from non-mixed classrooms" is just the reality telling you that "it's an obvious solution" is not true.
> The fact that you think it's unfulfilling to learn at the pace you're capable of instead of being made to artificially sit and wait is more of a statement about you.
How being in a mixed classroom suddenly stop your kid to learn at the pace she like? YOU SAID IT YOURSELF that she needs half-hour a day of attention per day for this to be satisfied.
This sentence was there where you went all crazy about "those devil people who want to force my smart kid to not be smart" or "those devil people who want all children to be the same, for some reason that no one knows". WHY? WHO IS DOING THAT? You seems to think that people cares about your kid learning or not, and try to stop her learning. That's why I pictured you as obsessed with competition: you assume that kid education is somehow a competition (otherwise there is no reason at all for other people to try to stop your kid to learn).
> And, yes, my kid is an outlier, as are these other kids I'm talking about.
I meant: your kid is an outlier amongst the high performance kids. No kid is the same. No high performance kid is the same. Some will need half-hour a day, some will need five hours. Some will to work out the problem by themselves, some will need guidance. Some will need to learn continuously on a long period of time, some will need scheduled short sessions with big pause in between.
And you may have talked to tens of parents. 1. that is still a ridiculous small sample to drive any conclusion. 2. based on this conversation (for example how you find reason to convince yourself that your kid is in reality smarter than other kids), I'm pretty sure you heard what you wanted to hear from these parents.
> Did you miss the part where ... Do you understand what ...
Calm down, there. I was talking about your kid being an outlier amongst the group of high performing kids. You keep coming up with "my kid don't need more resource, so if someone says HP need more resource, they are lying", "my kid was fine with half-hour of teaching, so that is what a HP kid needs", ... And again, I'm sure you will say that you have discussed that with tens of other parents. Again, tens of parents is NOTHING. It's ANECTODICAL.
But, hey, thanks for showing your true colour: I was talking of your kid being an outlier amongst the HP kids, but you did not hesitate one second to come at me blaming me for something that I did not do at all.
> The school knows this, and doesn't attempt to accommodate it.
It may be the case, but there are a lot of as equally probable hypothesis.
For example: Your kid is used to homeschooling and struggle to adapt to a classroom. Because you cannot conceive that the problem is not the result to your imaginary "bad people who, for reason no one can explain, want to stop children learn", you just jumped to the conclusion "they don't accommodate it, I'm so much smarter than them, let me come with a genius idea". Then, you met the teachers and proposed ideas that people who have tried noticed will not work, and you got angry when they politely discarded them (instead of thinking that maybe they know things you don't, you just assumed you are so much better than them). Then, you talked to other parents, some of them in the same crazy state as you, some of them indulging you, some of them probably trying to balance your position but you did only hear what suits you.
All of that fits very well all the data points. Way more that the hypothesis that, despite the fact that your kid is so easy to teach for and that it will benefit mainly to all the other kids, somehow people refused your idea.
ndriscoll · · focus · HN ↗
If you think it works, you measured the answer to the wrong question. Clearly. That's why you need experience and a qualitative understanding of the domain. What is a gifted child like, qualitatively? You need to know what questions to ask.
And, yeah, if a kid needs five hours a day to be ahead in elementary school, they're not a high-performing kid. Like I said before, right now she's getting zero instruction per day at her level in school. The teacher told me as much. Literally zero. She said if I'd like, I can send her with materials that I've picked out and acquired myself for that 30 minutes. And again, part of my problem is when you're made to sit for hours of instruction on things that are well beneath your level, you get really bored and tired. Yes, she only needs a half hour. The fact that she's in class all day makes it harder for her to get that half hour.
In any case, I think for anyone familiar with this subject, you've very well demonstrated what I was talking about, bending over backwards to defend not teaching kids at all as somehow beneficial.
cauch · · focus · HN ↗
Did you? Because the meta-analysis is NOT limited to grades and state standardized tests, it also includes some studies that look at, for example, university/career paths.
> If you have kids getting straight A+s, that means they were on easy mode, and should have been asked to do more.
If the kid is not learning anything, then they skip to the next year. I believe you mention yourself that your kid skipped class years already. The problem is not about classroom mixed or not, if the kid is above the level, move them to the next mixed classroom year.
If you can't move her to the next classroom because she fails the basic test that checks if she has the basis, then it is the proof that she is learning in the previous year classroom.
> bending over backwards to defend not teaching kids at all as somehow beneficial.
WTF!?
Why on hell would I even want to "not teaching kids"? That is just so crazy. What would I gain from that?
How is that difficult to understand? You arrived in the discussion, said "it's suuuuper easy, we just have to do X, but because of the big bad 'anti-discrimination', my genius idea is rejected".
At no point I tried to defend "not teaching kids". My point is: let's look what say people who study the best way to teach to kids. That's the opposite of trying to not teach kids.
When looking there, I quickly saw you were full of it: you pretended your ideas was "obvious", when there is plenty of studies showing that it is way more complicated than that.
But your reaction was to explain how smart and exceptional you are. The people doing the studies? All idiots. The teachers? All idiots. Only you know the correct way, because you have experience with ONE kid and talked to few other parents.
Sorry, but you have no authority. You are just a parent (and because of that, you are biased, you believe that your experience with your child means that all high performing kids are the same as your child).
I'm not defending "not teaching kids". I'm just trying to explain to you that if the teachers did not accept your idea, is it not because they are evil, or idiots, or in some sort of anti-discrimination crusade (why? why would anyone even care?). It is just that your idea is not convincing at all. We already discuss here that there is no scientific ground to pretend that non-mixed classroom will magically solve all problems (and, yes, this is counter-intuitive, but this is why people have studied that so much). I've also introduced how it simply cannot be doable practically, but of course you ignored that, it is so much comfortable for you to pretend that it is because you are a genius and they are against you. (for example, the teachers claim that HP children require more resource, so putting them in the same classroom will make it impossible to provide enough resource to everyone in the classroom and impact them negatively. I know you are saying that it is impossible that HP kids require more resource, but again, you base that on ONE kid and on few chats, while people who say it is the case are literally the ones who manage these resource)
In all these discussion, you just reinforced that: you proved, again and again, that all your reasoning is only originating on your experience with ONE kid. You prove, again and again, that your reaction to different opinion is "nah, I'm the best, they are all idiots" instead of the healthy scientific honesty of reviewing your conclusion based on new data. You prove, again and again, that if someone does not agree with you, it is inconceivable for you that this person reason for not agreeing with you is not the result of some strange conspiracy where they want to ... not teach kids? ... impose anti-discrimination everywhere because of reason?
You are not interested in finding a good solution, you are interested to entertain the idea that the teachers are idiots and that you know better than them.
And again, I say it again: maybe non-mixed class is good for your particular kid. But your kid is just ONE DATA POINT. For all you know (and I know you will pretend that you know all the HP kids in the world, better than people who works directly with them), your kid is an outlier. And you have to understand that the school will not do something that is just beneficial for your kid alone (and I know "but I talked to other parents...", again, PARENTS ARE WORTH NOTHING. THIS IS NOT SCIENCE. THIS IS NOT FACTS. Often, when they behave like that, just emotional self-entitled ignorants who think they know everything better than everyone)
Arkhaine_kupo · · focus · HN ↗
discrimination is about rules not about individual actions.
It would be "everyone can eat ice cream", or "ice cream is unhealthy and no one can eat ice cream".
If the rule is "Ice cream has too much sugar and because of the obesity epidemic we decided to ban ice cream, except for my son who is super special boy and he can have it every day" that is discriminatory. Even if your son doesn't eat it and effectively the rule is the same for everyone in practice.
On the basis of "resources are limited" you end up with discussions of rights that are equal on paper but discriminatory in practice. "Everyone can buy a house", but some people are rich and some have nothing. You have freedom and equality but also homeless people.
Here the question however is about in groups and out groups. So its for example about "theft is wrong" where you only arrest people stealing from supermarkets but not the CEO of the supermarket when he is stealing people salaries with mandatory unpaid overtime.
That is a law where rich people are covered by the law (their business is protected) but they are exempt (their theft is unprosecuted). That is the kind of in gorup/ out group being debated
neuroticnews25 · · focus · HN ↗
Arkhaine_kupo · · focus · HN ↗
For most people it follows pretty basic principles that are based on notions of "goodness" which might include humility, fairness, generosity, courage...
Under those circumstances, almost all humans believe that treating everyone as equals is aligned with those principles and therefore makes you a good person. Having to square that with conflicting dehumanised views of others, means that the easiest way to do it is to simply pretend that you are treating everyone the same while subjecting those you discriminate with a harshness that isnt applied equally.
> In reality there is nothing inherently wrong with discrimination itself,
You are using two different definitions of the word in a way that is sophist and not sophisticated.
Discrimination of humans is the mistreatment of others based on characteristics that are protected (those that are predetermined). Discrimination as the noticing differences and evaluating them based on taste is a second definition of the word, used in very different contexts.
That is not "liberal sensitivity" that is just polysemic words.
In the same way that standing in a room with a very powerful light bulb would not make your argument any brighter.
> We are talking about modifications to what constitutes bad vs good forms of discrimination.
No. We were talking about the psychological tools used by conservative people to deal with the cognitive dissonance of wanting to believe themselves as moral and accepting of inherently good precepts like the equal value of all human life while they want to not accept the consequences of the police state they set up to control people they believe inferior.
YOU tried to make it about the semantic similarity between two of the three meanings of the word discrimination. Which is the kind of parlour trick that only works if your audience is stupid.
Liberalism does neither uniquely hold the axiom that all humans are equal, nor does it shape the minds of people to hold it as a universal principle. It is a pretty universal tenant of almost all ethical systems, the only exceptions being system where some humans are not considered human (to avoid the everyone should be treated the same principle still being upheld), or systems that are openly discriminatory in which case they hardly call themselves moral.
Systems that say "we win because we are more powerful" do not do it based on ethics, and systems that have an underclass tend to dehumanise it (slaves not being citizens in rome). Everywhere else people are "equal", where the upper class are exempt from the worst consequences of legal frameworks (see sunset towns in jim crow america only affecting black people).
applfanboysbgon · · focus · HN ↗
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sokoloff · · focus · HN ↗
applfanboysbgon · · focus · HN ↗
monideas · · focus · HN ↗
What you’re describing seems to be unequal justice for the poor rather than an in group or out group dynamic but it’s not clear because you’re mixing ideas. Note that in Ancient Roman society there wealthy Plebeians and poor Patricians.
The Greeks had a similar arrangement in their various city states with regards to citizenship and non-citizenship (the helots being the most legible example of this).
I would encourage you to consider that you are at least an order of magnitude not thoughtful enough to really understand what we’re talking about and keep that in mind when it occurs to you to use insults.
applfanboysbgon · · focus · HN ↗
In-group and out-group dynamics go far, far beyond citizenry. It is clear that you wish to declare all you consider to be undesirables as non-citizens to justify your discrimination against them, but this is not actually a useful model for anything.
> What you’re describing seems to be unequal justice for the poor rather than an in group or out group dynamic but it’s not clear because you’re mixing ideas.
No, I am talking about the literal basis for modern liberalism's existence. Liberalism has gradually expanded to encourage equality between more types of people, but the origin was in anti-royal and anti-noble sentiment, in opposition to birthright privileges and an immutable social hierarchy. You appear to be woefully ignorant of history, which is understandable for a tiny little lizard, but you should perhaps not speak of things you know nothing of.
monideas · · focus · HN ↗
consensus1 · · focus · HN ↗
pnut · · focus · HN ↗
Conservatives fight long and dirty to prevent equality in all cases, I have no idea what you are thinking of when you made your statement.
consensus1 · · focus · HN ↗
bluegatty · · focus · HN ↗
Aka Magna Carta '3 tiers of society' - the Monarch, Nobles, Plebes etc.
Or in Roman society, Nobles/Senators, Free people, slaves.
monideas · · focus · HN ↗
bluegatty · · focus · HN ↗
Historically, conservatism would have been strongly related to power structures.
In more contemporary terms it is as well, but not ostensibly about class.
There are no popular conservative movements that are mostly concerned with 'noble birth' for gosh sakes, or titles.
This whole discussion is ridiculoous.
Nobody is saying that 'The children of Senators should have special titles and special legal status'.
monideas · · focus · HN ↗
The “conservative movement” in the US is just liberalism, the US was conceived as a liberal project. The founding mythology is a revolution against a king
bluegatty · · focus · HN ↗
monideas · · focus · HN ↗
bluegatty · · focus · HN ↗
This is one of the few places where people would try to make the case.
[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservatism" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservatism