Why the Center for Educational Progress won't achieve anything

Only radical overhaul can improve education

I have thoroughly fleshed-out ideas on what education ought to look like. Apparently, so does the Center for Educational Progress. Who has better ideas? Let’s look into it.

Here is their about page:

Who are we?

Jack Despain Zhou is the writer behind the newsletter Tracing Woodgrains, known primarily for his coverage of the FAA’s hiring scandal, admin abuse at Wikipedia, and his writing on the education system. He currently attends law school. Previously, he worked as producer for the podcast Blocked and Reported and served as an Airborne Chinese Language Analyst in the United States Air Force. He has been passionate about education reform since childhood. He is on temporary leave from the Center for Educational Progress.

Lillian Tara is a recent graduate of Harvard Graduate School of Education. She worked at several think tanks and managed two nonprofit programs prior to CEP, where she looks forward to bringing a much-needed shift towards excellence in America’s educational culture.

Thomas Briggs is a recent law school graduate from UCLA, a former philosophy grad student, and a stubborn optimist about American education.

Monsieur Despain has written us an article on his education philosophy. TLDR: he supports acceleration and tracking but is timorous when it comes to critiquing the structure of education. By the structure of education, I mean the entire social construct of funding, credentialism, physical institutions, and age discrimination. I am not timorous about these things; consequently, I have said that funding should be slashed, most school should be remote, diplomas should be abolished, high schools should be sold off and shut down, and age discrimination laws should be totally overhauled to support a new mode of life for young people, which is beyond early 20th century socialist-progressive educational ideas.

Maybe I’m just some crazy dreamer. You can hardly convince voting pöbel to not ban basic algebra in middle schools. Being a pragmatist on the frontlines therefore means spending your time trying to convince pöbel to allow 8th graders, and maybe even 7th graders (if you’re feeling especially radical and bold), to study quadratic equations. Doesn’t this feel like an uphill battle for basically no reward though? It’s like fighting an enemy in armor, and you keep swinging at his steel fortifications. You land a lot more hits, but it does little damage. Maybe if you are lucky you will give him a small fracture. My strategy is harder, but it involves aiming at the heart. If I can get between the armor, I 1-hit KO him, and he’ll never bother me again.

I think maybe the Center for Educational Progress doesn’t see the tactical mistake they’re making, because they’re not informed on the background anatomy and theory required to understand the difference between these strategies. They think the opponent is their friend. They think as they swing, he can be convinced to join their side. They think there is no gap in the armor, and also that he’s immortal anyway, and a heart blow won’t destroy him. They think he’s a necessary defender of the people, and that the best they could ever do is make him sore anyway.

All of this is wrong: the education system is outdated and needs to be retired. Completely. Like, in a way Curtis Yarvin would be proud of. And to understand why and what should replace it, you need to be an expert on human intelligence and development, and be pretty well-versed in the modern economy and what it needs. Nobody at the Center satisfies these requirements, which is why their proposals will always be half, or quarter-measures. Or even eight-measures.

Consider the following:

Just a 1 SD 4th grader [115 IQ], a member of the top 15%, is predicted to be able to skip 15/4 = 3.75 grades. This is roughly 8th grade level work in 4th grade. By extension, such students could begin high-school level work at the age of 11, and college-level work by the age of 15.

It is true that a 130 IQ person can easily skip 5 or 6 grades. That’s about 1 in every 50 people in a 100 IQ country. This is something that may shock some people, as it is rarely done, due to the aforementioned structural issues, as well as the whitoid tendency to treat school as a social club. How will my daughter be the prom queen if she’s 10 years old in high school? How will my son be a good football player if he’s 11 years old in high school? How will they have any social life with same-age peers when they are expected to be friends with the people they sit in class with, instead of with people from non-school activities or the non-school community (church, the neighborhood, etc)? Then there’s all the age laws and extra-judicial age discrimination backing up the system. Scholarships are often tied to age. I could have gotten a bachelor’s by the age of 18, 4 years early for America (which is vastly underperforming my IQ, because my parents failed to accelerate me beyond age-graded honors classes when I was under 13, due to the aforementioned Ameritard/whitoid reasoning patterns), but scholarships and acceptances to “good schools” are dependent on age, explicitly or implicitly. I ended up taking a full-ride scholarship tied to a national exam you can only take if you are registered at an official school in the 11th grade. So you can’t do an online high school diploma at home quickly, get it, and then take the test, they have an arbitrary age-grading requirement that means the test takers are almost always 15-17 years old and haven’t started university, unless they plan in advance and get in good with the administration of some registered school. And you’re only allowed to start university a year and a half after the exam, you can’t leave the high school! So everyone will be 17-19 when starting university. The only reason they have this requirement is to put down people who want to skip the bullshit. If you look, this logic is everywhere and going to university early usually means going to a bad one for a lot of money relative to what a 130+ IQ student should be paying (nothing).

She might only be 120 IQ

Then there’s ageism during university. Structure influenced by decision to stay in school longer. I should have been able to go to university at 14 or before and do whatever I wanted there. Have a driver’s license (just make it a skills + IQ test), party, whatever. 140 IQ 14 year olds don’t need to be held to the same standard as 95 IQ 14 year olds. One is smarter than pöbel adults by leagues and the other is still many IQ points dumber than their high school teachers plus they have very little crystalized knowledge.

Then there’s ageism after university. An Indian girl who was graduating from my high school at the age of 15 wanted to be a physician. A great career for a smart, motivated, Indian woman. I overheard one of our teachers tell her that she should take a gap year, think about getting a master’s degree, etc, definitely don’t graduate from university in 3 years, which would have been easy for her because she already had a lot of credits and so on, because medical school admissions officers hate applicants under the age of 21. Even if they have completed the pre-med requirements with great grades, high MCAT scores, all of that, they often reject them and make them wait, because they think they’re “too immature”! This is retarded on its face because in most countries people study to become medical doctors in undergrad and not in a post-undergrad setting. In other words, they start at 17 or 18. My review of brain science confirmed these guildist nincompoops are wrong, which is not shocking when they are best known for iatrogenesis, guarding their bloated salaries by inducing artificial scarcity of healthcare practitioners through overrequiring licensing and inducing artificial scarcity of said licenses, and reinventing basic integral calculus because they are math illiterate in ways dangerous for their patients.

These issues seriously perturb at least 10% of students. This girl’s IQ was likely in the 120s from knowing her scores and so on. The 1-or-2 year math tracking acceleration with early graduation the Center advocates for was already in place at my high school and really only serves the 60th-75th IQ percentile. What does their math education matter for anyway? None of them go on to do anything quantitative professionally. So it’s almost a completely pointless policy.

And how do you suppose, without structural reforms, you actually serve the top 10%? My high school was really upper cut, as much as it gets outside of NYC and SF magnet schools. They could not find enough talent to teach anything beyond basic calculus. The calculus teacher really tried, and was really good, but she talked about how it was really hard for her. For example, she talked about how she really struggled to grokk basic ODEs, which there is a chapter on in the Stewart book, even after doing it for years. Easiest class I ever took. There’s literally no way I could have studied what I needed in that school if I had been appropriately accelerated. No way at all. You have to have a university with PhD holders teaching or the whole school thing is just pointless, it becomes entirely online. In other words, you’ve got to have little kids at high school, or they just skip it and study that stuff at their elementary/middle school (same thing really, all the buildings are the same), and then they go to a university in their early teens. And you can’t have this without the structural reform I discussed.

And we haven’t even mentioned all of the time wasting they do too. So many fake classes that have nothing to do with reality or higher knowledge. And they’re all “required”. To deal with this you’ve got to destroy command economy diplomas where the State orders up so many graduates per year in X, Y, and Z classes designed by the pöbel politburo in Washington and the state capitol, and then the government workers produce those graduates for the State on the assembly line. The only alternative is an educational market economy where students and their families determine individually what they think is important to study this year. But really implementing this destroys the whole school system because it implies early university access, infinite acceleration possibilities, and completely decimates any rationale behind physical high schools and so on, where probably 80 or 90% of courses will immediately lose all demand.

All of this is to say that I support the Center for Educational Progress in theory, but their measures are not likely to really lead to any improvement. I haven’t seen anything fully backwards come out of them though, which is a huge improvement over other education groups, who mainly exist to promote “equality” and raise teacher salaries. The one thing I might disagree with is I have seen some of them say here and there that their approach is okay, because smarter students should “learn more” but spend the same amount of time in school. This is both dysgenic and economically misguided. Future scholars should learn more; Future professionals should learn about the same in school, and start work quicker. That way the smarter marry younger and have more kids. Not every 130+ IQ person should be a professor. Most smart people stop at the bachelor’s level or after a very particular professional degree for a reason. It’s all they want and all they need. Smart people who want to code should get their CS diploma at the age of 16. Smart people who want to do finance should get their math & finance diploma at the age of 16. Smart people who want to be a veterinarian should finish veterinarian school at the age of 20, or even before. Then they should marry young, by 21, before dumber people are even done with college, if they go. That way, the smarter have bigger families and the dumber have smaller families. Future professors can indeed stay in school longer, forever even, which is in fact what professors do. Although they should be getting paid for it by 18 if they are really smart.

One final note is that I did reach out to Monsieur Despain some months ago on X to discuss these ideas, and he completely blew me off. Maybe he’s just busy with law school (which he would have completed at 20 if I had my system), but it didn’t give off the vibe that these guys are open to learning something new from someone who has areas of expertise which are relevant and which they don’t possess. Maybe that’s not the case, but even without that interaction my prior was 95% it would be like that, since it’s human nature, especially among rationalist adjacent types. Rationalists want to be smart, and nice, and people who really put themselves out there want to gain status. Well, if my ideas are unpopular, because they seem to be mean to the bottom 70% of people, then they’re bad for being nice and gaining broad status. If they’re based on advanced expertise that rationalists usually lack, they also make them feel dumb. So they’re just complete kryptonite, on top of institutional status seekers mostly not being interested in ideas to begin with. It’s sad.