Bryan Caplan: Well if you wanna pull out your hair a little bit more. Out of all my ultra moderate reforms that I suggested, the one that I stand behind more strongly than any other is abolishing foreign language requirements in the United States. Because there, we’ve got a bunch of facts, which are: hardly any jobs use foreign languages, it takes a lot of time to get any good. And furthermore, in this book I’m able to go and snap together a bunch of pieces of data to show that virtually zero Americans claim to… even claim to speak a foreign language very well in school.
So I say, look, even if it did have these big payoffs, the system is just a waste of time, and people spend years doing it for nothing. And even here, I just run against a brick wall and people say, well in that case we should just improve the teaching of the foreign language.
Well, how about you do that and then get back to me, but continuing to fund the thing that we have, this is garbage!
And again, Washington state from what I understand, now allows kids to use a computer language in place of foreign language. Like, why not do that? Then it’s like, “No, no we need to do both.” People don’t have an unlimited amount of time, and shouldn’t teenagers be able to have a frigging childhood! Like how much of their childhood do you want to destroy with jumping through these stupid hoops?
Robert Wiblin: Yeah, it makes me incredibly mad. There is some value in learning a foreign language. You get some income gain depending on the language. But it doesn’t matter if no one’s learning it anyway.
Bryan Caplan: Well we just need to teach it better Rob, that’s the answer.
Robert Wiblin: We could fund it once we figure out how to teach it I guess.
Bryan Caplan: Yeah, I mean, when my older kids were in high school, they got three weeks of high school Spanish, I can see why the acquisition’s so poor. They had three weeks of Spanish where they were not taught any Spanish, it as just rambling lectures in English about the history of Spain. You know, I was like, “What is this stuff?”
Robert Wiblin: Yeah. I mean I really feel that there’s two ways you can go. I learned Spanish by living in Spain for a year-
Bryan Caplan: Oh nice-
Robert Wiblin: And that worked, and it was pretty easy because you just get exposed all the time. But I learned more or less nothing at high school before that. I think you either have to go all way, and learn it properly by traveling there, or just give up, don’t even start.
Bryan Caplan: By the way, I think this is one … I think there is pretty solid evidence in the immersion technique at teaching foreign languages, where you just ban English in the classroom and it’s hardcore from day one. But again, almost … Like colleges frequently do it. I think a foreign language acquisition in college seems clearly better to me. Like high school’s just don’t do, and it seems to me like the evidence is all there, and they just have so much inertia, and they just have so little interest in actually even using the time they have valuably. That the knowledge, however … A better pedagogy just stays unused on the shelf.
This is what I see so much going on with education, and someone says let’s just improve it. It’s like look there’s so many things that are already known to improve but they’re not being used. When someone has that bad of an attitude towards evidence, I think they should have less money.
Robert Wiblin: Yeah, so one place where I think I might disagree with you on the transfer learning is in writing. Or at least my experience is that, basically all of the writing I’ve done I feel just makes me better at writing in other situations. Writing essays makes me better at writing emails, I think. Writing blog posts just makes me better at probably doing this podcast, or at least writing up the blog post with a podcast. Would you agree that there are some generic schools that people can improve that have wide applicability?
Bryan Caplan: So for the writing, I’m very inclined to agree with you, if you’ve got, if you’re putting in a lot of effort or you have a really good teacher. And again, a teacher that actually gives you line by line feedback on your writing. What I’m skeptical about is that normal writing classes are having this broad effects. So again, the typical crummy English class where you just go and write like five essays in the whole year, and then the teacher just puts a grade on it, maybe corrects a couple spelling mistakes, that’s what I don’t think is improving.
On the other hand, if you’re going very hardcore, if you’re writing an essay every single week with detailed feedback than I completely believe that that works. And in fact that is the main way that I invest my time in homeschooling my other sons, is on improving the writing. That’s one way … Like every essay, I sit both of them down, we go over each essay with a fine-toothed comb. It’s very to see the improvements there. Even there, when they switch from history to English, than the general lesson of answer the question was lost at first. Although it was easier to regain the knowledge of remember, answer the question they asked you, don’t just ramble on about the general topic.
Easier to get someone to apply that when they already learned it in another subject. When yet, when you’re asked a history question, answer the history question. Then when you’re asked an English question, answer the English question. Like oh, yeah.
Here’s the thing, none of this research shows that transfer doesn’t happen. Or that it couldn’t happen. It just shows that not much of it happens in the real world. Right. And there are actually a couple of prominent transfer researchers who claim to have discovered the magic bullet. I’ve got the techniques that do work. Generally it’s only one person who believes in each particular technique. So there’s like, each guy has his own magic bullet, and no one else is convinced. Even if they’re right, I just say this just doesn’t explain what’s going on in the current system, and that’s really what I’m trying to understand. But yeah, I mean there’s a lot of area where it seems like transfer could happen.
Out of people, not just that I know, but out of a lot of your listeners I bet, that they transfer a lot. Because a lot of it is more about attitude and curiosity and determination and follow-through, then about logic. So it’s something where, given that the logic of transfer is clear, the failure for it to happen is all about psycho-logic. And again, what it takes to get the psycho-logic into the logic, I think it’s determination and curiosity. But that’s much easier said than done. Be curious, have determination. Like, oh, okay. Well, yes sir.
