The Evolutionary Psychology of the Creation of High Schools

It makes more sense if they're for socialism and marriage and not for actually learning

In my first book, I showed that high schools are educationally inefficient and argued therefore that they should be abolished. Of course, nobody listened. This lead me to later study memetics. I found there that the power of memes is weaker than I previously thought, and most memetic phenomena is downstream of genes.

When I wrote my first book, I was under the impression that evolution is slow, and politics has low heritability. I favored Foucault-style “elite theory” explanations for social phenomena, and I therefore blamed the rise of high schools and associated credentialism on the ruling class and the proliferation of new technologies. I no longer find this explanation fully satisfying.

Instead, I now favor two new explanations for the near-worldwide presence of the high school system. These are worldwide dictatorship of the proletariat, and adolescence as an evolutionarily appealing luxury good in the average (but not in every) person.¹ These explanations are not necessarily competing; rather, they can be complementary.

Dictatorship of the proletariat

The worldwide communism explanation is the most similar to the Foucault style theory, aber auf ihrem Kopf gestellt, sozusagen². This explanation takes notice that every rich country not only has a lot of high school, it is also either implicitly Marxist (democratic), or explicitly Marxist (controlled by a communist party). We take that these contries are really all Diktaturen des Proletariats. In these contries, all goes the proletariat way. And high school is that way.

Without appealing much to evopsych, high school is that way, because high school equalizes and socializes. In nearly every country, high school is seen as universal and compulsory. There may be some mild exceptions. For example, Deutschland, historically, is a minor exception to that rule, sending those who are not university bound to less high school. But this is fading more and more:

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Germany is set apart in another way, which is that everyone is forced by law to attend public school. In every country, high school forms a sorting system while equalizing birth. Assortment is determined by so-called “merit.” It may be that this aristocracy-crushing feature is possible to make more manifest when those with privilege cannot bypass the early sorting by sending their offspring to a private Gymnasium.

When I say high schools compose a sorting system, that doesn’t mean they are “meritocratic” as normally understood. Rather, people are sorted in a way that is agreeable to the ascendency of the dictatorship of the proletariet. It may be considered an anti-meritocratic mechanism that rewards obedience to the Proletariat State more than actual merit.

While this approach can be linked back to evopsych, it is not fully necessary, as we do not refer to variance in instincts or evolutionarily important functions like reproduction. Rather, we simply assume everyone is a Machiavellian power maximizer. From this we derive that societies converge on democracies when wealthy enough. In a democracy, the power of the average person matters the most. The average person feels that their averageness is most empowered among young people by having their be high schools.

This explains why high schoolers themselves do not rebel from what I called an oppressive top-down system. The high schoolers themselves on average see that this system is in their favor. Its mediocrity and heavy-handedness is only offensive to a certain higher type of person. One who could easily do without it, who does not need the signalling and so one. One who would be in a better position without it. In a democracy, as long as 51% of people are in a worse overall position without high schools, rational voters will always vote for high school.

There is a phenomena among the sub-100 IQ that goes something like, “wow, adulting is so hard, I wish I was in high school again!” It’s because being sub-100 IQ is rough. In high school they’re house slaves who can make Cs without losing their jobs. High school is full on communism — but this cannot be afforded for everyone, so it is only rolled out for the lowest productivity category of adults. In line with this theory, as soyciety becomes richer, it should roll out to higher ages — the push toward universal university fits with this. Beyond that there is credential creep (do a master’s) and the expansion of high school-style jobs, like being a high school teacher, a hospital administrator, or a university administrator.

Don’t worry about AI destroying your job if this theory is true. You can always get a master’s degree and become an administrator of something! Maybe they will even have software administrators that pretend to write code even more than FAANG excess employment before FAANG started to abspecken.

Evopsych

The dictatorship of the proletariat explanation can be thought of as a special type of evopsych theory that relies on some realistic class theory, and goes around evolved power psychology (mass narcissism, egalitarianism — for the purposes of resource allocation) instead of evolved sex psychology. The more traditional “evopsych approach”, the second of our two new explanations, has more to do with reproduction and less with class. Whether society be a democracy, high school is universal enough that the ruling party attends it, and then chooses en masse to keep it and expand it. They find it good for themselves, and extend it to others.

What is good about it exactly? This theory takes advantage of the observation that inventing high schools is the same as inventing a new stage of life called adolescence, which is defined as when a young adult is in high school student (as university becomes high school 2.0 they expand it to also include those years). It is useful to view high school as the enforcement of adolescence when considering this theory, because adolescence is often discussed as if it is biological. Really, it is a bio-social construct — and attempt to structure the biological in a certain way which is, as the theory goes, evolutionarily beneficial.

It is true that nearly all “adolescents” broadly share certain biological characteristics.

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Evolutionarily, the most important of these is peak fecundity. Perhaps everything else of note biologically about the period is downstream of this basic fact. For example the males are at peak testosterone — that’s because they are supposed to be finding a mate which means fighting and sex drive. It has also been claimed that the brain is undeveloped until after adolescence, but I showed this is false in my book, as peak fecundity predicts. You need maximum brain power to successfully mate — we find that executive function, IQ, and everything else are indeed fully developed near the start of the high school phase, not the end of it or after the end of the university age range as claimed.

While I now believe the essentials are biological, not memetic, in my book I correctly noted that the undeveloped brain meme caught on very easily. Far more easily than any information I produce here. People want those memes genetically. It may not be true, but they see thinking of adolescents as immature instinctively as useful or beneficial.

Adolescents themselves like these memes. I began writing that book when I was in high school. I thought, nobody else is talking about this, let me make an after school club that is aimed at being a kind of “student union” where I pull up these studies and redpill whoever shows up to spread this ideology of being critical of your immediate surroundings. I got a few people to show up, they were high openness types, leftwing mostly, we debated a little bit. Their minds never changed. “It’s over”, I thought at that point. I dropped it. I couldn’t convince the people currently bearing the brunt of the waste it was bad. I’d never convince anyone older because they’re going to be the same type of people but they’re not around it, they don’t care, it’s just a job for them or their relatives by that point, why would they care?

You can go online and see these young people write “my brain is undeveloped”, “I’m a minor [and proud]”, etc. But how is this evolutionarily beneficial? What instincts does it pick up on?

It might not actually be beneficial right now. One paper found that

In contrast to evidence for other developed countries, we find that increased education causally reduces completed fertility. This negative effect operates through a postponement of first births away from teenage years, and no catch-up later in life. We attribute these findings to the particularly high opportunity costs of child-rearing in Germany.

This doesn’t happen in every country though — in fact, for baby boomers, high schools were a great way to get married. But it seems there’s a mismatch now — increasing adolescence decreases fertility instead of enhancing it. I suspect this is via an interaction with feminization. Normally, adolescence memes seem fashionable for women. The normal female life cycle is something like child, maiden, wife, mother, grandmother, repeat. Adolescence could be seen as a way to enhance the maiden period resulting in more successful marriages. Put all the maidens in close contact all day with marriageable bachelors doing no real work and you have a baby boom. Is that not the transition from remote farm girl maidenhood to early American coed high school?

But when men feminize, adolescence becomes fashionable for them too. They’re no longer young men looking for a girl to marry, they’re adolescent boys. Adding an extra year of high school under feminization just makes younger males less attractive to women and isolates women from older males.

Why is this? Adolescence is infantlization signalling. It’s purity for maidens. It’s young adult women pretending to be children. This helps them signal that they’ll be submissive wives and that their purity will be intact on the wedding day, since they’re able to accept infantilization as young adults before marriage from their parents and the community.

Clearly it is not desirable for men to signal this before marriage. Men should be responsible, productive, and mature. Under feminization, the signalling dimorphism in the “adolescent” age range shrinks, and the mean drifts feminine.

Adapted from Ch1 of my 1st book

Something had the median American marriage age falling from 1900 to 1960 before it began to go up again. If couples on average dated for 2 years, then we see that the median couple in 1960 started dating when the woman was still attending high school and the man had graduated. What we can say is that as high schools were becoming more common in America, women started marrying younger. It’s unclear if this is causal.

Conclusion

Both of these explanations can work side by side. In fact, they may mutually explain different features of these institutions. The “education” is explained by the communism theory, while the “adolescence” is explained by the evopsych theory. The near-universal nature of such a wasteful system suddenly becomes clearer, if these theories reveal its true purposes.

Different evidence can provide support for these two theories. For the communism theory, being critical of the current education system should positively correlate with with aristocratic, inegalitarian ideology. For the evopsych theory, acceptance of “infantilization memes” should correlate positively with feminimity. If the causal impact of high school rollout in the early 20th century could be measured, it should increase fertility and decrease average marriage age. More feminized countries should see lower fertility, ceteris paribus.

1. Weighted by power, if the democracy theory is false.

2. English is passé, oder vorbei. Like annoying francophiles, I will be inserting Deutsch into my English articles von jetzt an. רציונליסטים צריכים לנסות עם עברית