Sometimes I forget that you’re older and thus a more powerful vampire more experienced than me.

Forgive me if I ever seem too provincial.

I leave out all the boring and embarrassing details. FWIW I might have been the dumbest least well-adjusted guy in my class.

Scattered thoughts on education:

If a technocratic dictator instituted a centrally managed, stratified education system (tracking), then party officials/bureaucrats would use it to extort parents by holding children hostage.

If school vouchers/tutor vouchers are in any way transferrable or fungible, alcoholic parents will sell them to temporarily embarrassed, frugal intelligentsia and thus widen the educational gap.

Efforts to make education more integrated are sold as left-wing or fostering solidarity and social cohesion, but are actually cost-cutting measures that make education net worse for everybody (Will-Rogers-Effect).

There is a lot of confounding going on between socioeconomic class and school/teaching style. Waldorf education is notoriously bad at actually imparting knowledge on children, but it tends to attract hippie parents with strong convictions and disposable income (I knew a couple of Waldorf-educated math students. They hated it. I don’t know if they would have hated regular high schools less, but still).

Montessori Schools are actually based on constructivist developmental psychology and not eastern mysticism woo, but the selection effect is even bigger there.

Moscow-educated mathematicians or rather math teachers trained by Moscow-educated mathematicians were great at actually teaching math. I learned more English from Cartoon Network than from my teachers though. Eastern bloc English teachers were not very good. Same goes for Latin, but there was no Reticulum Tabulae.

I liked several books that were later required reading, before they were required reading.

Finnish comprehensive primary school until grade 10 with a good teacher/student ratio has the best outcomes in the EU. It’s not at all clear what causes that.

Back to vouchers:

I personally believe that there are lots of high school teachers out there either who do not understand the subject they are teaching or suck at the didactics of their subject. Good teachers can have a positive effect on students, but are limited by the material they work with.

Bad students can drag the rest of the class down. Smaller classrooms have numerous benefits: Not only does the teacher have more timer per student, but students who are slow to grok a particular concept keep the whole class back. It makes a difference if you have one stupid question per hour or three. The time adds up. It’s not always the same student lagging in every subject.

If you can use vouchers to pay for remedial classes or individual tutors in specific subjects, you could have slightly bigger classes moving on a much more consistent pace. It might be smarter to reduce the student/teacher ratio as needed for specific students and subjects.

I am much more skeptical of vouchers for whole schools (Which seems to be the proposed policy in the US?).