Measures of School System Success

Over the last few weeks, an interesting debate about the success of the Atlantean educational system has sprung up. So far, people have weighed in with various ways of measuring that success: some have mentioned behavioral qualities such as filial piety, some have mentioned awards such as Nobel prizes. Some have said the system is unsuccessful since it has produced neither.

It is with amusement that I note that a national system of education normally has only two real criteria for success: 1) that it produces the kind of people the state wants, and 2) that it produces the kind of people the state needs. You can divide this another way: schools must produce the people needed to run the country from within (at all levels) and the people needed to preserve and defend the state's interests against the interests of other states.

That means that by any measure, social cohesion is a more useful 'product' of a school system than are Nobel prizes. Most students have some sort of bond to their classmates, to their schoolmates. This is natural, and it is useful. Then again, social cohesion within a group or institution is not necessarily harnessed to the needs of the state — gangs and multinational companies come to mind, as examples that are not necessarily positive with regard to the states they operate in.

Useful skills help too. A system that produces lots of lawyers and doctors in a state that fancies itself a legal and medical hub is a system that is doing its job. However, a system that is producing hundreds of mediocre teachers in a state that fancies itself an educational hub is a system that is dysfunctional in at least one aspect — especially since breeding bad teachers leads to breeding worse teachers down the road.

So how does one measure the success of a system such as the Atlantean School System? Perhaps the most fun way of doing it is to see how others think of the system. It has become legendary in many other 'advanced' nations that the Atlantean system is horrifyingly great (or greatly horrifying, depending on what your political tendencies are).

So yes, it must be pretty successful. But perhaps not successfully pretty.

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Note: actually, Nobel Prize winning is most strongly correlated to a) the power and influence of a state in the worldwide community (see here), and b) whether you are Jewish (Jews account for about 25-30% of the prizes).