All of Matt Bateman's Comments + Replies

How productive are our education systems? And how has our education system scaled over the last hundred years?

Answer by Matt BatemanOct 04, 20221

(Your link to Public education as share of GDP seems to be recursive to this post.)

Really good questions. I also wish there was better historical data, including for the many centuries of history where the one-room-schoolhouse/tutorial method dominated. Very hard to say how many people attended school in Ancient Greece, the proportion of those people relative to various demographics, or even just how big schools were.

Quick and very incomplete tidbits off the top of my head, from a combination of pitch decks and my history of education class:

something like

Matt Bateman2y2

I found myself nodding along to most of this and really appreciate the positive vision and integration of safety and progress. Two critical comments:

In the last section you basically assert an alternative to the supposed progress/safety tradeoff, one which I prefer. But it left unanswered (and even unasked) a lot of the live questions I have about this topic. It seems like there are broader cultural patterns of (a) overblowing or even completely manufacturing risks, and (b) decreasing our tolerance for risk in a way that is less than intentional. And these... (read more)

Content and Method of Classical Tutoring

Matt Bateman2y3

There are really two questions, I think. One is whether or not tutoring is a good way forward. The other is about the classical curriculum and methods that the tutors used, but that were also used in non-tutoring contexts (Roman primary schools, Medieval universities, etc.).

I think your info is mostly about the second thing.

Re: what changed in the Renaissance and Enlightenment: Enlightenment tutors tended to do much more geography and be more on the more aggressive side about teaching Euclid. There was also probably on average some easing up on the later e... (read more)

1SebastianG2yConfidence level: 30% Strongly agree this info is mostly about what tutoring was, but I have been struck recently by how far-reaching this idea of 'rhetoric' is. I have found it very easy throughout my life to think about this classic notion of rhetoric as mere speaking well and persuading. But the way it is talked about and the way the curricula of Cicero, Quintilian and Renaissance thinkers seem to think of it, as you say, as the master skill of the elite. Is it not true anymore? It depends on how we define this master skill. What exactly was this skill, if it is broader than mere persuasion? Rhetoric has its roots in law, political, persuasion, and the courts so we might call it 'public advocacy.' But it concerns not so much what to advocate so much as how to advocate. So at minimum it requires a knowledge of law, persuasion, and politics. What might rhetoric have to do with progress studies? Today, the good public advocate needs also knowledge of technology, economics, and maybe something else, and an eye to how more good can be done. But the key factor of a modern rhetoric would be the study and practice of mechanisms and method for getting stuff done: soft networks, legal process, fundraising, think tanks, legislative interventions, startup pitches, nonprofit organization, policy drafting and implementation, management science. Since I believe that organizational and structural barriers are currently a bigger limiting variable on progress than invention and technology, a new version of rhetoric might be called for. One alternative view is that I am just abusing the term and rhetoric is as obsolete as wooden wheels.