Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Childhood and Education Roundup #5, published by Zvi on April 18, 2024 on LessWrong.

For this iteration I will exclude discussions involving college or college admissions.

There has been a lot of that since the last time I did one of these, along with much that I need to be careful with lest I go out of my intended scope. It makes sense to do that as its own treatment another day.

Bullying

Why do those who defend themselves against bullies so often get in more trouble than bullies? This is also true in other contexts but especially true in school. Thread is extensive, these are the highlights translated into my perspective. A lot of it is that a bully has experience and practice, they know how to work the system, they know what will cause a response, and they are picking the time and place to do something.

The victim has to respond in the moment, and by responding causes conflict and trouble that no one wants. Also we are far more willing to punish generally rule-following people who break a rule, than we are to keep punishing someone who keeps breaking the rules all time, where it seems pointless.

Study finds bullying has lifelong negative effects.

Abstract: Most studies examining the impact of bullying on wellbeing in adulthood rely on retrospective measures of bullying and concentrate primarily on psychological outcomes. Instead, we examine the effects of bullying at ages 7 and 11, collected prospectively by the child's mother, on subjective wellbeing, labour market prospects, and physical wellbeing over the life-course.

We exploit 12 sweeps of interview data through to age 62 for a cohort born in a single week in Britain in 1958. Bullying negatively impacts subjective well-being between ages 16 and 62 and raises the probability of mortality before age 55. It also lowers the probability of having a job in adulthood. These effects are independent of other adverse childhood experiences.

My worry, as usual, is that the controls are inadequate. Yes, there are some attempts here, but bullying is largely a function of how one responds to it, and one's social status within the school, in ways that outside base factors will not account for properly.

Bullying sucks and should not be tolerated, but also bullies target 'losers' in various senses, so them having worse overall outcomes is not obviously due to the bullying. Causation is both common and cuts both ways.

Truancy

Ever since Covid, schools have had to deal with lots of absenteeism and truancy. What to do? Matt Yglesias gives the obviously correct answer. If the norm is endangered, you must either give up the norm or enforce it. Should we accept high absentee rates from schools?

What we should not do is accept a new norm of non-enforcement purely because we are against enforcing rules. The pathological recent attachment to not enforcing rules needs to stop, across the board. The past version, however, had quite the obsession with attendance, escalating quickly to 'threaten to ruin your life' even if nothing was actually wrong. That does not make sense either.

Then in college everyone thinks skipping class is mostly no big deal, except for the few places they explicitly check and it is a huge deal. Weird.

I think the correct solution is that attendance is insurance. If you attend most of the classes and are non-disruptive, and are plausibly trying during that time, then we cut you a lot of slack and make it very hard to fail. If you do not attend most of the classes, then nothing bad happens to you automatically, but you are doing that At Your Own Risk. We will no longer save you if you do not pass the tests. If it is summer school for you, then so be it.

Against Active Shooter Drills

New York State is set to pass S6537, a long overdue bill summarized as follows:

Decreases the frequency of lock-down drills in schools;...