Ask HN: What subjects should be removed/replaced in school? With what?
Software is eating the world, teach it. Why/How to not max out your credit cards, so very many useful things are taught far too late or never at all. The concept that the parents are supposed to be the source of some of this information relies on parents being good at parenting…
Anyone can justify any education about anything. Which is why progress in this field is so slow. No one can actually win an argument with anyone about any taking any topic they care about off a curriculum, because every topic is passionate and useful to someone. So in a world where everything is super important to someone, you have to use a more advanced system of comparison. Like eliciting someone’s values on a psychological evaluation.
Not exactly, but something like, would you rather lose your index finger or your big toe? Ok, would you rather lose your index finger or 3 toes? Ok, how about one eye or one hand. If you ask enough of these rather odd questions, you can actually result in a value in dollars per a body part. Like this: https://projects.propublica.org/graphics/workers-compensation-benefits-by-limb
It is the tragedy of the commons that no educator wants to pay the price of seeing their curriculum reduced or replaced with something better. For them better doesn’t exist.
23 comments
[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 38.5 ms ] threadCurriculum organization is one of his main points. An alternative to periods and subjects is a sort of freeform classroom with unpaced curriculum with several teachers circulating to help. This is supposed to avoid classes moving too quickly or too slowly and continually engage students.
A course on technology and ethics would be an interesting course to add.
This! It is hard to understand the world if you don't know what has led up to it. I'd even expand it. I think "older" history should be taught with thought about present-day context as well. Questions such as: Do you think there are modern-day consequences to the war of 1812? What do you think this book says about the political atmosphere at the time it was written? What world events do you think might have inspired this book?
Mostly, I got this view from my spouse. When he went to school, history and literature were combined into one subject. And I very much like the cross-subject learning like this.
1. School curriculum structured more like an RPG skill tree. The main point or advantage of this is that students can take any path they'd like to be "Level 12th Grade." Many schools let people into physics who don't know algebra. This, for example, would result not only in kids not learning physics, but also becoming less enamored with learning themselves due to the inevitable total failure they'll experience. .
Obviously, as a by-product of this we'd have to get rid of grades. Rather than grades you simply can take courses, and once the "cluster" of requirements are completed you'd be deemed to be "nth grade."
2. School should ideally be intertwined with practicality. For at least K-12 I see little reason why everything can't have a more practical focus. This removal in abstraction will keep students engaged and make more clearly the point that everything they're learning is actually useful. With this being said, schools should actually emphasize teachers less. Kindergarteners/1st years and 12th grades/final years should be the only ones to be taught by teachers directly.
Ideally, everyone else would be taught by the year above them. Teachers would be present, but mainly to oversee curriculum development, and keep things on a higher level moving along. This has the nice advantage of making it so that in 2nd - 11th grade, student "teacher" (who's just another student) is 1:1. With this kind of attention most students on the cusp of learning will finally be able to get the individualized attention they need.
The main problem with this is if the students aren't smart or knowledgeable enough themselves to teach anyone else. This goes back to (1). Students should be ideally, excellent or out. The idea of passing grades is kind of silly. Passing should be excellence. I wonder why people think it's OK to just get by in school? Everyone is capable. School isn't [that] hard.
While there were "grades" (they had to to be compliant with the Mexican education system), grades were bundled into clusters, so a room would have grades 1-3, another 4-6.
For each room, there would be one teacher, whose main goal was to guide the students (in fact we called them "guides", not teachers).
Skills and knowledge were containerized and were part of a dependency tree. There were several different areas (biology, math, linguistics, etc) and in each you were expected to reach a certain level at the end of your 6th grade, but you were otherwise free to explore subjects at your own pace and in the direction of your preference.
This resulted in kids specializing in certain areas, a certain level of competition and pride in your expertise, and an early grasp of what you liked.
Overall, I think the result was very positive, and the most visible difference, at least when I left the Montessori school to a new traditional-style classroom, was that I felt that Montessori kids had a certain genuine love for learning and sharing knowledge, whereas most of my new peers felt that learning was a chore imposed on them. Obviously this is one anecdote, and would love to hear more cases.
Where? At least in the 90s, my experience being in VA, GA, and NV, this is not an accurate statement. Algebra was a prerequisite for Physics in high school.
> School curriculum structured more like an RPG skill tree.
This is already, partially, the way things are, or at least used to be, experiences with different states may vary. Curriculums include prerequisites for courses. You can't take Calculus without trig and/or pre-calc, which require algebra II and geometry.
If a school permits students into courses that they aren't qualified for, the school has failed the student and should be called out for it. Hell, I wasn't permitted to take courses I was qualified for because of moving between states and differences in course descriptions/names (until my parents pressured the school).
This has good and bad points. My sister went to one school, which let her take physics without the algebra course. She was interested in Physics, but wasn't as good with math. Only.. in the context of physics, it wasn't so much of an issue learning it. It provided context. The same can be said about complementary courses: You can take physics, but you gotta take the complementary math as well. My sister was quite upset when she changed schools and they wouldn't let her take the physics course without the math course.
Alternatively, many schools offer 2 levels of physics courses: One has the traditional math-focus and the other is usually labeled, "applied physics", which focuses on the effects of physics on things without the math focus. I think this lets folks understand the world around them without actually having to do the hard science - much like folks learn about chemical reactions and biology - and can understand it - without doing the math that goes along with it.
In a way, it is an extention of the school being "intertwined with practicality" sort of thing in the second point.
I don't think this is correct. The issue is much more complicated. First, education is not really a tragedy of the commons, more like a tragedy of the anticommons [1].
I agree there's a time constraint to a curriculum. But that little hiccup is trumped by education's private-public problem: the US compulsory education space involves the private interests of parents/students overlapping with the public interests of their state, overlapping the big interests of the federal government. Education doesn't operate like an under-regulated scarce resource being depleted, much worse than that, it's an over-regulated scarce resource where nothing useful can get accomplished or make real changes - a dark hole of the anticommons.
I also agree schools seriously need to add more practical subjects as well as life skills classes. With that said, every educator I see is not happy with the current curriculum and they usually have opinions on what to change first. Plus small shifts in curriculum have happened and are slowly spreading. There are states and public schools with software classes, health ed, workplace training etc... But fuck some states and school districts don't even want to teach science and want to keep teaching the Bible, to everyone, by law. The federal government had to step in a few times, but there are limits to what the fed can and should do.
I'm not exactly sure how the workers comp values you brought up tie in with your very good education question, but I do see how workers comp in each state deals with similar problem: Why is an index finger valued at different amounts in different states? And then why is an index finger valued the same for different people? Surely some people are going to lose much more in life earnings due to such an injury vs others people, so how can it be standardized or fair?
This is America. We have a Constitution. And have a social contract. And we have a population of all shapes, colors and sizes. A good education curriculum and system, determined by the government seems very difficult to implement and be compatible with the other structures here.
If I had to answer I would say students should be given much more freedom, at a much earlier age to focus on a subject they want plus more freedom to learn on their own and get credit. Besides that, add philosophy and computer science. Cut pure math after algebra, offer math in the context of the other sciences like physics and computers. Cut some of the pure literature, no more old English and Beowulf taught for weeks, maybe a single class, teach more literary non-fiction in English classes. Pray for the best ;)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_anticommons
Specialization is power. What profitable skill could students be learning that wouldn't have tons of side value? Creating, fixing, doing nearly anything that was worth paying for would pull the right skills into their brains and push out the useless ones.
If you need to learn to calculate the volume of a vase for an actual reason, with money on the line, you have a better chance of actually retaining the knowledge, and seeing the value in it. Autodidacts have a trick up their sleeve. Interest. Normal students can be interested as well, if they were learning things worth learning.
I'd drop a lot of the homework, possibly only introducing it at a high school level. I'd drop grades for young students - up to middle school - and adjust the grades for the upper levels so that an average mark - a C in the states - actually reflects the average levels.
See, I think when your average or goal is an A - perfect - it doesn't leave room for those that go above and beyond what is expected. It also makes it so that the struggling students are really, really far behind. I mean, think about it. A C student struggling and earning a D would get help, yet in the current system, they still get help at the D or F level, yet their peers are generally making A's or B's - so the difference is greater. I think we could make use of standardized testing better as well, with fewer and shorter tests.
I'd also do much more cross-learning. Want to teach kids to work in fractions? Teach them to cook, teach them to read music. Actually apply maths, including algebra and geometry, to real-life scenarios. History can be taught with literature - and science, and math. After all, many scientists were really given a hard time because of the politics of the day.
Above all, I think general skills should be the focus. Everyone should know how the justice system works in practice (not just theory). Folks should know how to get credit and keep it, how to file taxes, what taxes are used for, and so on.
We could also do Much better teaching about health. I had many classes going over basic anatomy and sex education, where they mostly told us that it could make a baby and we could get horrible diseases. Unfortunately, learning how to take care of your own body, what to do when you are sick and when to go to the doctor or ER aren't included. The same goes for learning about healthy relationships, signs of abuse (for both sexes!), and learning about the needs of children are absent and I generally think this sort of thing is a shame.
I very much agree with this. Back when I was in high school we had some overlapping topics in Math and Physics. But in the Physics class we'd actually see things applied to the real world (e.g. a quadratic equation representing the trajectory of a cannon ball), and that made the stuff learned in Math a lot more interesting to me.
> Unfortunately, learning how to take care of your own body,
This should be fixed in PE. I only got interested in being active after I was already an adult (and a very sedentary one). For years I hated the thought of doing physical activity because I associated it with PE class and all the bullshit I had to endure (bullying and having no option but to play sports I didn't really like).
Would be nice if we were taught at school about body composition, nutrition, different results you can get from exercise (strength, hypertrophy, endurance, that kind of thing). PE is often instead a bunch of random stuff with no explanation of what results can be expected.
I'd also extend PE so kids have it all through school - in high school, I only had 2 semesters over the years. 6 weeks of that was Ping Pong. Yes. Ping pong. Valid physical activity, sure, but I really don't need to know the rules. It would be more helpful to know how to build up a running habit and how to do resistence and flexibility training safely. It'd be helpful to know how to stay active without equipment - and in addition, how to use the equipment safely.
I generally seperate the nutrition into a health and life skills class, but they could be combined easily.
Kids should be far more computer literate than they are now. People understand basic biology, chemistry, etc, but almost no one I know outside of work could give you even a rough abstraction of how a computer works (except maybe the idea that there is "memory" and the "cpu" is the thing that does the work).
I could rant about this topic forever, the state of high school education in our country is absolutely atrocious. I learned way more from reading in high school than I did in class (save my Chemistry teacher who was awesome).
Once kids know the three R's then maybe you can introduce some of these other topics. Writing effectively is a job skill (and one that is lacking as anybody who hires and reads cover letters knows). Basic algebra is practically a prerequisite for programming. You mention learning how to "invest in your future" and that is was I think the standard curriculum aims to achieve.
I agree with you that the order of planets and capitals of states are not particularly useful knowledge by themselves. But in order to understand the what is going on in the world knowing geography is pretty important. If you work in any company of a certain size (whose business spans states or countries) then you should not have to refer to Wikipedia for context for every business decision.
It has been a while since I have been in school but I have managed to offend a few teachers since with my suggestion of getting computers out of the classrooms completely. This might have changed but when I was in school the students already knew more about computers than the teachers and the teachers could not effectively teach using tools (computers) they did not know.
All the OP's proposed suggestions can, and do, fit into a semester homeec course many highschoolers already take, so I just can't see the supposed failing. The reduction of a basic foundation of facts to "useless trivia" is the reason we can have white house offficals take to the news and say they have alternative (but somehow equally valid) facts. Without this foundation (of conveniently measurable skills and masteries, who do you even evaluate a "good apology") students are essentially cut off from a memetic ocean of shared knowledge. You cannot have a functioning democracy without a populace with basic literacy and numeracy as well as a shared body of facts that acts as the training set for all subsequent facts.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastery_learning
Why is it that we would focus on all the things people do not actually care about, as opposed to the things they actually do? Let learning be a pull process, not a push process. You pull in the skills you need to do things well, you don't learn all the things you might need, only to discover you didn't need them.
Shoving information into peoples heads and hoping that it leads to utility somehow in the future is a long shot when compared to using utility itself to pull the required knowledge as needed, and you then have a 100 percent hit rate on the cache. You're never filling your cache up with junk.
Some exceptions to this exist, obviously, such as language, speech, writing, math up to algebra, some geometry, logic, ethics, hygiene, and success tactics such as delayed gratification, goal setting, teamwork, etc.
Those subjects have the largest amplification effect on other subjects. Some other subjects are better endpoints than starting points, and it would be great if the people that loved those subjects wouldn't try and pretend they were good amplification starting points.
The mastery learning you linked to seems to beat a dead horse? More profit can be had by giving up on some hard things and returning to them after you've tried learning things you weren't burnt out on yet. Some people will just always hate a certain subject. If you require 90 percent performance before you move on to the next thing, you lose the profit of task switching for freshness.
Also, this seems to unrelated to the point of better subjects. If teaching technology doubled in effectiveness overnight, you're still learning things you can't make money with and are unlikely to ever use, no matter how well you know it.
I'll say that knowing mental approximations for sines is a wonderful thing. And, come to think of it, writing something to do the same approximation as the calculator sounds good too. And then analyzing the error introduced by the two methods... So many fun tangents!
On the one hand, learning how to approximate functions with arbitrary precision definitely solidifies an understanding of what those functions are doing.
On the other hand high school math classes are often taught quite algorithmically. Therefore, rather than tests and problem sets, what if the student's chief deliverable was a small python package that performed the algorithms for that lesson? This has a really good advantage of teach basic life skills of turning a specification or intention into a physical product. It also does not significantly impair students that need a strong math background going forward. Finally, makes life a little easier for teachers because some of their grading work could be automated.
Now these two approaches could be applied independently, but I think they would work well together, particularly because the numerical approximation programs generalize a bit better than symbolic ones.