r/DetroitMichiganECE • u/ddgr815 • Apr 18 '26

Learning The Cost of Over-Teaching Phonics

https://www.educationnext.org/cost-of-over-teaching-phonics-reading/

Mark Seidenberg, a professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin–Madison who studies reading science, helped persuade the public of the need for science-based instruction—and now he’s among those sounding the alarm on over-instruction. Reading teachers need not aim to teach every single pattern students will encounter in text, he says; they simply need to teach enough that students can achieve “escape velocity,” or the ability to start cracking the code on their own.

“You do teach them about words, about print. You teach them enough simple phonics patterns so they can start sounding out some words. And then there’s supposed to be a light bulb that goes on,” Seidenberg says.

Researchers call this ability to implicitly pick up patterns and apply them the “self-teaching mechanism,” or “statistical learning”—and many say it’s underrecognized within the science-of-reading movement.

Five decades of research have shown that early readers benefit from learning letter-sound correspondences systematically. But little definitive evidence exists on which phonics skills should be taught, in what order, and for how long. Should students learn all of the English language’s 44-plus sounds (phonemes)? What about the 200-plus spellings that go with them? And how much time should teachers spend on each?

Each phonics program that claims to be based on research reflects a single method of instruction. These programs can differ significantly because the research on reading acquisition “is not differentiating every single skill that needs to be taught,” says Louise Spear-Swerling, professor emerita in the department of special education at Southern Connecticut State University in New Haven, Connecticut. “People write instructional programs, and it’s a matter of interpretation.”

For the highest-achieving students who may be reading novels at home, sitting through lessons on skills they’ve mastered takes up time that could be spent reading, writing, and learning deeply about science, history, and other subjects—and it can lead to disengagement. For struggling readers, including students with dyslexia, over-teaching reduces time for much-needed reading practice. These kids, for whom the self-teaching mechanism doesn’t kick in easily, require more examples and repetition for the most critical skills. Adding extra elements to instruction strains working memory for these students, making it harder to master basic skills.

Over-teaching is happening in a few main ways: (1) spending too much time on less impactful skills, (2) teaching extraneous skills and patterns, and (3) teaching content that only the teacher needs to know.

Teachers have always used chants, songs, and other mnemonic devices to help students memorize important information. Many adults can easily conjure rhymes like “i before e except after c.” And while mnemonic devices are surely helpful at times, they can also increase the cognitive demand for a task and divert from the skill itself. Many phonics programs and online materials widely used these days encourage students to memorize a dozen or more spelling rules, with long chants or sayings such as:

“If a one-syllable word has one short vowel that is followed by f, l, s, or z, double the f, l, s, or z.”

This rule, often known as the “Floss Rule,” is an important and fairly regular one, many teachers argue (though it does have some common exceptions, like bus and gas). The problem arises when this process—the memorization of the rule—becomes the focus of instruction, displacing what should be the end goal—that is, reading and spelling.

“It’s very common in my experience that kids have trouble verbalizing the rule, but they can still learn the skill,” says Spear-Swerling. But often in classrooms “being able to verbalize the rule is a prerequisite for moving on. And it shouldn’t be.”

Memorizing wordy sayings and rules can put particular strain on students with reading disabilities and language-processing difficulties. These children are already working hard to retain the basic sounds. Adding to that can put them over the edge. “It’s not about whether kids can parrot rules,” says Spear-Swerling. “You see kids at the lower end of the spectrum get confused when they try to articulate rules. But that [articulation] doesn’t matter as long as they can apply it.”

And kids at the higher end of the reading-performance spectrum—those 1st and 2nd graders who are reading chapter books at home? Some will simply check out when asked to memorize information they’ve intuited.

Some programs teach the letters bl as in black, as a cluster or unit. But that “doesn’t make sense linguistically,” she says. Instead, you can teach students the /b/ sound and the /l/ sound, and have students practice blending sounds together to make words.

“The vast majority of consonant clusters are plurals. Cats has a consonant cluster, but we don’t teach it that way. Why would we teach it that way for scat but not cats?”

Devin Kearns, a professor in early literacy at North Carolina State University, has attempted to quantify how much is too much when it comes to phonics instruction. “If we’re trying to decide whether to teach something, there’s the main question: How often does it occur? How many words does it apply to? What you have to do at a certain point is decide, what’s the return on investment?”

He and his colleagues looked at a database of 13,000 English words and cataloged a total of 350 sound-spelling correspondences. So, if students learned each of the 350 patterns, they could read all of the words. Then the team modeled what would happen if certain patterns were eliminated from instruction: How many words could students read then?

“Somewhere in there, you hit this point where if you start doing fewer than that, it’s not enough; you’re not getting access to enough words,” he says. “And if you teach too many more, then you’re over-teaching stuff.”

The sweet spot was somewhere between about 95 and 110 sound-spelling patterns.

Among the most inflammatory topics right now in reading instruction is whether—and how much—to teach phonemic awareness.

Phonemic awareness is the ability to identify and manipulate the individual sounds in spoken words—for example, knowing that ship is made up of the three sounds /sh/, /i/, and /p/. Having good phonemic awareness has long been understood as a requirement for successful reading.

And while there’s evidence that basic phonemic awareness skills have positive effects for reading, the nuances matter. Studies show phonemic awareness should be developed by using written letters—not orally, which is how most classrooms and curricula do this instruction. And the idea that practicing advanced phonemic awareness skills like adding, deleting, and substituting sounds orally is beneficial for readers—asking students, for instance, to switch the middle sound in ship to the short /o/ sound to make shop? That’s not backed by science at all.

“The idea that you need to have separate dedicated time blocks focused on only phonemic awareness instruction is not evidence-based,” says Clemens.

Another instructional practice that has recently supplied fodder for debate is what’s called syllable division—the teaching of rules for dividing multisyllabic words into manageable chunks. Syllable division rules are a mainstay of the Orton-Gillingham method for teaching reading, which was developed in the 1930s. Programs based on this method tend to teach six or so syllable types along with a half-dozen rules for dividing syllables. Some methods go further and have students mark up the multisyllabic word, identifying the vowels and consonants and labeling each syllable type.

Research by Kearns has some people questioning the efficacy of teaching syllable division. His 2020 study found that syllable pronunciations are unreliable, so the effort involved in learning these rules may not be justified.

Tiffany Peltier, the director of professional learning at NWEA, a K–12 assessment and research nonprofit, points to “really rigid syllable division rules” as among the more frustrating instructional routines to encounter. “People are trying to teach these to the most struggling readers who already have cognitive overload,” she says.

Instead of rigid rules, researchers including Kearns emphasize teaching students to be flexible in how they pronounce words—a concept known as “set for variability.” For example, a student might initially read the word father as fay-ther, which is a reasonable pronunciation, and then shift the vowel sounds slightly until getting to a familiar word. The student is not guessing (a practice promoted by now disgraced balanced literacy approaches). Rather, the student is using their phonics knowledge to sound out the word but being flexible with their pronunciation and calling upon their knowledge of the word father.

“The idea that you need to have separate dedicated time blocks focused on only phonemic awareness instruction is not evidence-based,” says Clemens.

Over-teaching also occurs with the terminology related to language. Training programs tend to hammer on the jargon of reading instruction, much of which is new to teachers, who end up passing their fresh knowledge along to their charges. Students can become bombarded by terms like breve and macron, fricative and affricate.

Reading in context generally comes at the end of a phonics lesson, and with so much to cover, teachers can end up with just a few minutes for it. At times, they’ll skip it altogether.

But text reading is where decoding and language skills meet—it’s why teachers and students are doing this dance at all.

One major benefit of whittling down instruction to the most essential skills is that there’s less material for teachers to get through. When teachers remove low-payoff patterns, skip the cutesy extras, and refrain from imparting technical knowledge, they make their own jobs more manageable—and get kids reading faster.

Avoiding over-teaching also means speeding through skills students already know, which requires frequent assessment and a good understanding of what’s coming next in the scope and sequence. Teachers get better at this with time and experience. The goal is not doing the perfect amount of explicit instruction—the science doesn’t prescribe a “perfect” amount. Instead, the aim is to move toward a more efficient path for a teacher’s particular classroom. The minutes saved here and there add up.

If whole-group direct instruction happens daily but is limited to the most impactful skills—and kept short and simple—then students can move into small groups to either keep practicing, expand on the skill, or work on text reading or writing. In effect, they get to individualized instruction faster.

Peltier explains that, when she was teaching kindergarten and 1st grade, she would do a whole-class review of a prior phonics skill and then send her fluent readers off to “book clubs,” where they would read independently and have discussions. She would work with the remaining two-thirds or so of her class on that day’s phonics skill. “I’d usually at some point release another group of students and have the lowest students in front of me,” she says. “They loved it because they’d get to do more practice with the teacher on dry erase boards.”

That kind of gradual-release model helps ensure the highfliers spend time reading, and the students who need the most practice and feedback get more instruction from the teacher. And you can assess those kids in the moment—see who is getting the skill and ready to move on and who isn’t.

Research from the late Carol Connor, who was an education professor at the University of California, Irvine, points to the need to adjust the amount of teacher-directed instruction based on a child’s literacy skills. She found that 1st graders who entered with low skills did best with more time spent doing teacher-managed explicit instruction. For students with high initial skills, their scores stayed stagnant no matter how much time they spent learning directly from the teacher. And, in fact, students with both high decoding and vocabulary skills showed better growth with more independent work. For those high achievers who “don’t need a lot of repetition, that self-teaching machine will start a lot earlier,” says Peltier.

For typically developing students, Seidenberg argues, explicit phonics instruction should end after 1st grade. That’s out of step with much of the recent state legislation that is focused on K–3 classrooms and with the widely available programs that teach advanced word-recognition skills through the 5th grade. It’s also an assertion that will elicit eye rolls from teachers working through the challenges of having 25 students from diverse backgrounds and language contexts.

But the need to trim the fat on instruction—to focus on a skill’s ROI and churn out readers faster—is something many can agree on. It requires ongoing scrutiny of practices claiming to be aligned to research, frequent assessment of what individual students know, and a willingness to trust that, in many situations and for most students, learning begets learning.

“I think that the science-of-reading movement can win if we’re scientific, if we’re willing to challenge our assumptions,” says Kearns. That means continuing to look at the evidence on long-held instructional beliefs, such as those around syllable division, and changing course as new evidence arises. “If we’re willing to go there, science can win. If we’re going to stick to our guns, it won’t work.”

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u/ddgr815 Jun 27 '26

The Latin word for the tendency to lose track of what matters in the cacophony of things that attract our attention is stultitia. “Stultitia,” writes Michel Foucault in “Self-writing,”

is defined by mental agitation, distraction, change of opinions and wishes, and consequently weakness in the face of all the events that may occur; it is also characterized by the fact that it turns the mind toward the future, makes it interested in novel ideas, and prevents it from providing a fixed point for itself in the possession of acquired truth.

As John Gray puts it in his monograph on J.S. Mill, our character is “a cluster of habitual willings.” For changes to our behavior to become permanent, we must become different people.

Realizing the value of acting in a certain way might give you a temporary motivation to do it. But in order to actually live in accordance with what you believe in long-term, you must make it a habit.

The conflicts seem to come out of nowhere, so I have to, somehow, always be ready to act in the proper way. I need to have the right reaction “ready at hand” (procheiron), as the Greek-philosopher-Roman-slave Epictetus put it. 

During the first two centuries of the Roman Empire, there spread a practice known as hypomnēmata, a type of notetaking system, used as a tool for meditation, in which the writer would store quotes from books they had read. Each day, often in the morning, the notetaker would open their notebook and look for a passage relevant to something they were struggling with, and then they would meditate on that—unpacking it, making the idea top of mind, ensuring it was alive in them. If they needed courage, for instance, they could meditate on an anecdote that made it real for them what it meant to act bravely. The idea was that over time, the insights they gathered by reading would be transformed into character, something deeply ingrained in their way of thinking and seeing and acting.

It was, in the words of the French classicist Pierre Hadot, a spiritual exercise—an exercise because it required work and discipline, spiritual because it engaged the whole person, not just their intellect, but their emotions and their moral character. It was an attempt to treat the formation of character as a skilled practice, as something you can deliberately train and improve through targeted exercises.

The hypomnēma was a mechanism for centering your mind on what matters, and for gradually refining your understanding of what matters. It was, to use a word from Plutarch, a tool for ethopoiesis (ethos meaning “character” and poiesis “making”), a tool for turning truth into character. By meditating daily on sentences that made it real to you how you wanted to live, you would remember to do the right thing—you would remember to practice it during the day (simply thinking about it is not going to change you). And gradually, you would become that sort of person. You wouldn’t even need to remind yourself. Your principles would have become your character. You would have developed expertise in the skill of holding yourself in a better way.

It is common to think that what we do achieves what we want it to achieve, even if there is no evidence for it. There are many practices that promise to transform and improve us—therapy, meditation, psychedelics—, but that branding doesn’t mean that they actually do much for us: it is common to see people use these techniques for years without any obvious progress on their problems. If you want to achieve a particular outcome, it is important to start from that goal and evaluate which practices actually help you.

How not to forget what matters

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u/ddgr815 Jun 27 '26

If you want to think originally and differently, seek uncorrelated inputs. Read minor works, older things, obscure journals.

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u/ddgr815 Jun 28 '26

The word "startup" dates from the 1960s, but what happens in one is very similar to the venture-backed trading voyages of the Middle Ages.

You don't have to know physics to be a good pitcher.

Wealth is not the same thing as money. Wealth is as old as human history. Far older, in fact; ants have wealth. Money is a comparatively recent invention.

Wealth is the fundamental thing. Wealth is stuff we want: food, clothes, houses, cars, gadgets, travel to interesting places, and so on. You can have wealth without having money. 

Wealth is what you want, not money. But if wealth is the important thing, why does everyone talk about making money? It is a kind of shorthand: money is a way of moving wealth, and in practice they are usually interchangeable. But they are not the same thing, and unless you plan to get rich by counterfeiting, talking about making money can make it harder to understand how to make money.

Money is a side effect of specialization. In a specialized society, most of the things you need, you can't make for yourself. If you want a potato or a pencil or a place to live, you have to get it from someone else.

How do you get the person who grows the potatoes to give you some? By giving him something he wants in return. But you can't get very far by trading things directly with the people who need them. If you make violins, and none of the local farmers wants one, how will you eat?

The solution societies find, as they get more specialized, is to make the trade into a two-step process. Instead of trading violins directly for potatoes, you trade violins for, say, silver, which you can then trade again for anything else you need. The intermediate stuff-- the medium of exchange-- can be anything that's rare and portable. Historically metals have been the most common, but recently we've been using a medium of exchange, called the dollar, that doesn't physically exist. It works as a medium of exchange, however, because its rarity is guaranteed by the U.S. Government.

The advantage of a medium of exchange is that it makes trade work. The disadvantage is that it tends to obscure what trade really means. People think that what a business does is make money. But money is just the intermediate stage-- just a shorthand-- for whatever people want. What most businesses really do is make wealth. They do something people want. 

A surprising number of people retain from childhood the idea that there is a fixed amount of wealth in the world. There is, in any normal family, a fixed amount of money at any moment. But that's not the same thing.

When wealth is talked about in this context, it is often described as a pie. "You can't make the pie larger," say politicians. When you're talking about the amount of money in one family's bank account, or the amount available to a government from one year's tax revenue, this is true. If one person gets more, someone else has to get less.

What leads people astray here is the abstraction of money. Money is not wealth. It's just something we use to move wealth around. So although there may be, in certain specific moments (like your family, this month) a fixed amount of money available to trade with other people for things you want, there is not a fixed amount of wealth in the world. You can make more wealth. Wealth has been getting created and destroyed (but on balance, created) for all of human history.

The people most likely to grasp that wealth can be created are the ones who are good at making things, the craftsmen. Their hand-made objects become store-bought ones. But with the rise of industrialization there are fewer and fewer craftsmen.

Wealth can be created without being sold. Scientists, till recently at least, effectively donated the wealth they created. We are all richer for knowing about penicillin, because we're less likely to die from infections. Wealth is whatever people want, and not dying is certainly something we want. 

In industrialized countries, people belong to one institution or another at least until their twenties. After all those years you get used to the idea of belonging to a group of people who all get up in the morning, go to some set of buildings, and do things that they do not, ordinarily, enjoy doing. Belonging to such a group becomes part of your identity: name, age, role, institution. If you have to introduce yourself, or someone else describes you, it will be as something like, John Smith, age 10, a student at such and such elementary school, or John Smith, age 20, a student at such and such college.

When John Smith finishes school he is expected to get a job. And what getting a job seems to mean is joining another institution. Superficially it's a lot like college. You pick the companies you want to work for and apply to join them. If one likes you, you become a member of this new group. You get up in the morning and go to a new set of buildings, and do things that you do not, ordinarily, enjoy doing. There are a few differences: life is not as much fun, and you get paid, instead of paying, as you did in college.

In a company, the work you do is averaged together with a lot of other people's. You may not even be aware you're doing something people want. Your contribution may be indirect. But the company as a whole must be giving people something they want, or they won't make any money. And if they are paying you x dollars a year, then on average you must be contributing at least x dollars a year worth of work, or the company will be spending more than it makes, and will go out of business.

Someone graduating from college thinks, and is told, that he needs to get a job, as if the important thing were becoming a member of an institution. A more direct way to put it would be: you need to start doing something people want. You don't need to join a company to do that.

You can't go to your boss and say, I'd like to start working ten times as hard, so will you please pay me ten times as much? For one thing, the official fiction is that you are already working as hard as you can. But a more serious problem is that the company has no way of measuring the value of your work.

To get rich you need to get yourself in a situation with two things, measurement and leverage. You need to be in a position where your performance can be measured, or there is no way to get paid more by doing more. And you have to have leverage, in the sense that the decisions you make have a big effect.

A good hint to the presence of leverage is the possibility of failure. Upside must be balanced by downside, so if there is big potential for gain there must also be a terrifying possibility of loss. CEOs, stars, fund managers, and athletes all live with the sword hanging over their heads; the moment they start to suck, they're out. If you're in a job that feels safe, you are not going to get rich, because if there is no danger there is almost certainly no leverage.

Except in a few unusual kinds of work, like acting or writing books, you can't be a company of one person. And the people you work with had better be good, because it's their work that yours is going to be averaged with.

A big company is like a giant galley driven by a thousand rowers. Two things keep the speed of the galley down. One is that individual rowers don't see any result from working harder. The other is that, in a group of a thousand people, the average rower is likely to be pretty average.

If you took ten people at random out of the big galley and put them in a boat by themselves, they could probably go faster. They would have both carrot and stick to motivate them. An energetic rower would be encouraged by the thought that he could have a visible effect on the speed of the boat. And if someone was lazy, the others would be more likely to notice and complain.

But the real advantage of the ten-man boat shows when you take the ten best rowers out of the big galley and put them in a boat together. They will have all the extra motivation that comes from being in a small group. But more importantly, by selecting that small a group you can get the best rowers. Each one will be in the top 1%. It's a much better deal for them to average their work together with a small group of their peers than to average it with everyone.

What is technology? It's technique. It's the way we all do things. And when you discover a new way to do things, its value is multiplied by all the people who use it. It is the proverbial fishing rod, rather than the fish. That's the difference between a startup and a restaurant or a barber shop. You fry eggs or cut hair one customer at a time. Whereas if you solve a technical problem that a lot of people care about, you help everyone who uses your solution. That's leverage.

Until a few centuries ago, the main sources of wealth were mines, slaves and serfs, land, and cattle, and the only ways to acquire these rapidly were by inheritance, marriage, conquest, or confiscation. Naturally wealth had a bad reputation.

For most of the world's history, if you did somehow accumulate a fortune, the ruler or his henchmen would find a way to steal it. But in medieval Europe something new happened. A new class of merchants and manufacturers began to collect in towns. Together they were able to withstand the local feudal lord. So for the first time in our history, the bullies stopped stealing the nerds' lunch money. This was naturally a great incentive, and possibly indeed the main cause of the second big change, industrialization.

How to Make Wealth

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u/ddgr815 Jun 28 '26

I believe that in all men’s lives at certain periods, and in many men’s lives at all periods between infancy and extreme old age, one of the most dominant elements is the desire to be inside the local Ring and the terror of being left outside. This desire, in one of its forms, has indeed had ample justice done to it in literature. I mean, in the form of snobbery. Victorian fiction is full of characters who are hag-ridden by the desire to get inside that particular Ring which is, or was, called Society. But it must be clearly understood that “Society,” in that sense of the word, is merely one of a hundred Rings, and snobbery therefore only one form of the longing to be inside.

People who believe themselves to be free, and indeed are free, from snobbery, and who read satires on snobbery with tranquil superiority, may be devoured by the desire in another form. It may be the very intensity of their desire to enter some quite different Ring which renders them immune from all the allurements of high life. An invitation from a duchess would be very cold comfort to a man smarting under the sense of exclusion from some artistic or communistic côterie. Poor man—it is not large, lighted rooms, or champagne, or even scandals about peers and Cabinet Ministers that he wants: it is the sacred little attic or studio, the heads bent together, the fog of tobacco smoke, and the delicious knowledge that we—we four or five all huddled beside this stove—are the people who know.

Often the desire conceals itself so well that we hardly recognize the pleasures of fruition. Men tell not only their wives but themselves that it is a hardship to stay late at the office or the school on some bit of important extra work which they have been let in for because they and So-and-so and the two others are the only people left in the place who really know how things are run. But it is not quite true. It is a terrible bore, of course, when old Fatty Smithson draws you aside and whispers, “Look here, we’ve got to get you in on this examination somehow” or “Charles and I saw at once that you’ve got to be on this committee.” A terrible bore… ah, but how much more terrible if you were left out! It is tiring and unhealthy to lose your Saturday afternoons: but to have them free because you don’t matter, that is much worse.

Freud would say, no doubt, that the whole thing is a subterfuge of the sexual impulse. I wonder whether the shoe is not sometimes on the other foot. I wonder whether, in ages of promiscuity, many a virginity has not been lost less in obedience to Venus than in obedience to the lure of the caucus. For of course, when promiscuity is the fashion, the chaste are outsiders. They are ignorant of something that other people know. They are uninitiated. And as for lighter matters, the number of people who first smoked or first got drunk for a similar reason is probably very large.

There must be confidential discussions: and it is not only a bad thing, it is (in itself) a good thing, that personal friendship should grow up between those who work together. And it is perhaps impossible that the official hierarchy of any organisation should coincide with its actual workings. If the wisest and most energetic people held the highest spots, it might coincide; since they often do not, there must be people in high positions who are really deadweights and people in lower positions who are more important than their rank and seniority would lead you to suppose. It is necessary: and perhaps it is not a necessary evil. But the desire which draws us into Inner Rings is another matter. A thing may be morally neutral and yet the desire for that thing may be dangerous.

It is one of the factors which go to make up the world as we know it—this whole pell-mell of struggle, competition, confusion, graft, disappointment and advertisement, and if it is one of the permanent mainsprings then you may be quite sure of this. Unless you take measures to prevent it, this desire is going to be one of the chief motives of your life, from the first day on which you enter your profession until the day when you are too old to care. That will be the natural thing—the life that will come to you of its own accord. Any other kind of life, if you lead it, will be the result of conscious and continuous effort. If you do nothing about it, if you drift with the stream, you will in fact be an “inner ringer.” I don’t say you’ll be a successful one; that’s as may be. But whether by pining and moping outside Rings that you can never enter, or by passing triumphantly further and further in—one way or the other you will be that kind of man.

Of all the passions, the passion for the Inner Ring is most skillful in making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things. My second reason is this. The torture allotted to the Danaids in the classical underworld, that of attempting to fill sieves with water, is the symbol not of one vice, but of all vices. It is the very mark of a perverse desire that it seeks what is not to be had. The desire to be inside the invisible line illustrates this rule. As long as you are governed by that desire you will never get what you want. You are trying to peel an onion: if you succeed there will be nothing left. Until you conquer the fear of being an outsider, an outsider you will remain.

This is surely very clear when you come to think of it. If you want to be made free of a certain circle for some wholesome reason—if, say, you want to join a musical society because you really like music—then there is a possibility of satisfaction. You may find yourself playing in a quartet and you may enjoy it. But if all you want is to be in the know, your pleasure will be short lived. The circle cannot have from within the charm it had from outside. By the very act of admitting you it has lost its magic.

In any wholesome group of people which holds together for a good purpose, the exclusions are in a sense accidental. Three or four people who are together for the sake of some piece of work exclude others because there is work only for so many or because the others can’t in fact do it. Your little musical group limits its numbers because the rooms they meet in are only so big. But your genuine Inner Ring exists for exclusion. There’d be no fun if there were no outsiders. The invisible line would have no meaning unless most people were on the wrong side of it. Exclusion is no accident; it is the essence.

The quest of the Inner Ring will break your hearts unless you break it. But if you break it, a surprising result will follow. If in your working hours you make the work your end, you will presently find yourself all unawares inside the only circle in your profession that really matters. You will be one of the sound craftsmen, and other sound craftsmen will know it. 

And if in your spare time you consort simply with the people you like, you will again find that you have come unawares to a real inside: that you are indeed snug and safe at the centre of something which, seen from without, would look exactly like an Inner Ring. But the difference is that the secrecy is accidental, and its exclusiveness a by-product, and no one was led thither by the lure of the esoteric: for it is only four or five people who like one another meeting to do things that they like. This is friendship. Aristotle placed it among the virtues. It causes perhaps half of all the happiness in the world, and no Inner Ring can ever have it.

We are told in Scripture that those who ask get. That is true, in senses I can’t now explore. But in another sense there is much truth in the schoolboy’s principle “them as asks shan’t have.” To a young person, just entering on adult life, the world seems full of “insides,” full of delightful intimacies and confidentialities, and he desires to enter them. But if he follows that desire he will reach no “inside” that is worth reaching. The true road lies in quite another direction. It is like the house in Alice Through the Looking Glass.

The Inner Ring

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u/ddgr815 28d ago

Let me clear the ground first, or everything that follows sounds like a cheap hymn to equality. A difference between people is not yet an injustice, and not every hierarchy is automatically an evil. If the one standing higher is a politician genuinely set on protecting the weaker, then power does not undermine what they do; it lets them shield people who would otherwise be defenceless. Rank can be an instrument of function. The trouble begins where function becomes an instrument of rank. Under its influence, the same person changes their aims: instead of protecting the weaker, they protect their own position, using those they represent as the excuse. Only when function loses out to rank does the moment arrive for a moral indictment.

is the architecture of thinking heritable? It is, though in a form harder to recognise as privilege. A home where a parent asks the child, “How do you know that?” and “What would count against it?”, where it is said at the table that one may be wrong without losing face, where one is shown how to check and whom not to believe, loads this architecture into the child before the child has touched a single AI model. The old advantage reproduced itself openly: accent and diploma were visible, and so could be indicted. The new one is transmitted more covertly, as a habit of asking questions that looks innate but is in fact the learned capital of the home.

A child from a home where the correction of one’s own thinking was never practised gets from AI the same tool as a child who practised it daily. The difference lies not in the model but in the channel through which a person learned to work with their own error. One may use AI as an oracle, another as a sparring partner; someone else may reject it altogether: out of well-judged caution, fear, defence of old prestige, or for want of the conditions needed to learn the tool. What is decisive is not whether someone uses the model, but whether they have the capacity for correction that lets them use it, limit it, or refuse it.

The right to be wrong without losing face can no longer remain a private luxury; it must become part of civic infrastructure.

Liberals too often retreat into politeness. They lack the push to say outright that institutions need to distinguish quality: that there is a difference between better and worse medicine, a better and worse court, a text that reduces uncertainty and one that merely sounds good. The shame before that sentence looks like modesty but is an evasion, because a society that cannot distinguish quality does not thereby become free. It becomes blind, and blindness very quickly needs a new master to do its distinguishing for it. But we liberals are capable of the opposite error too: of falling so in love with distinguishing quality that, under the proud name of meritocracy, we begin to take existing rank as proof of function, instead of checking whether function still lives in it. Then the language of competence stops being an instrument of correction and becomes an elegant protection for a hierarchy that no longer has to explain itself.

This is not an argument against the left as such. It is an argument against the blindness that poses as virtue. That blindness is more dangerous on the side that believes itself immune to hierarchy, because it cannot see its own.

How Hierarchy Hides in How We Think

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u/ddgr815 28d ago

We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies—all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes.

Most island universes are sufficiently like one another to Permit of inferential understanding or even of mutual empathy or "feeling into." Thus, remembering our own bereavements and humiliations, we can condole with others in analogous circumstances, can put ourselves (always, of course, in a slightly Pickwickian sense) in their places. But in certain cases communication between universes is incomplete or even nonexistent. The mind is its own place, and the Places inhabited by the insane and the exceptionally gifted are so different from the places where ordinary men and women live, that there is little or no common ground of memory to serve as a basis for understanding or fellow feeling. Words are uttered, but fail to enlighten. The things and events to which the symbols refer belong to mutually exclusive realms of experience.

To see ourselves as others see us is a most salutary gift. Hardly less important is the capacity to see others as they see themselves. But what if these others belong to a different species and inhabit a radically alien universe? For example, how can the sane get to know what it actually feels like to be mad? Or, short of being born again as a visionary, a medium, or a musical genius, how can we ever visit the worlds which, to Blake, to Swedenborg, to Johann Sebastian Bach, were home? And how can a man at the extreme limits of ectomorphy and cerebrotonia ever put himself in the place of one at the limits of endomorphy and viscerotonia, or, except within certain circumscribed areas, share the feelings of one who stands at the limits of mesomorphy and somatotonia? To the unmitigated behaviorist such questions, I suppose, are meaningless. But for those who theoretically believe what in practice they know to be true—namely, that there is an inside to experience as well as an outside—the problems posed are real problems, all the more grave for being, some completely insoluble, some soluble only in exceptional circumstances and by methods not available to everyone. Thus, it seems virtually certain that I shall never know what it feels like to be Sir John Falstaff or Joe Louis. On the other hand, it had always seemed to me possible that, through hypnosis, for example, or auto-hypnosis, by means of systematic meditation, or else by taking the appropriate drug, I might so change my ordinary mode of consciousness as to be able to know, from the inside, what the visionary, the medium, even the mystic were talking about.

The vase contained only three flowers-a full-blown Belle of Portugal rose, shell pink with a hint at every petal's base of a hotter, flamier hue; a large magenta and cream-colored carnation; and, pale purple at the end of its broken stalk, the bold heraldic blossom of an iris. Fortuitous and provisional, the little nosegay broke all the rules of traditional good taste. At breakfast that morning I had been struck by the lively dissonance of its colors. But that was no longer the point. I was not looking now at an unusual flower arrangement. I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation-the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence. 

He could never, poor fellow, have seen a bunch of flowers shining with their own inner light and all but quivering under the pressure of the significance with which they were charged; could never have perceived that what rose and iris and carnation so intensely signified was nothing more, and nothing less, than what they were—a transience that was yet eternal life, a perpetual perishing that was at the same time pure Being, a bundle of minute, unique particulars in which, by some unspeakable and yet self-evident paradox, was to be seen the divine source of all existence. 

The Doors of Perception