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Ask HN: If you can change one thing in the educational system, what would it be?

9 points by twidlit ↗ HN
I see education as one of the primary influencing factor (beside parenting & culture) in shaping people. Unfortunately its one of the hardest thing to disrupt or change.

So, lets not talk about constraints and feasibility and just get on with it. What is the single most potent nugget of change that will improve a nation's educational system?

19 comments

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sajithw
- Get rid of standardized testing and change the culture of teaching for the purpose of passing these tests. On the subject of just regular in-class exams: they are a necessary evil in many cases but only should be used for a mid-term or final exam. Teachers need to challenge students so that they have to work together to solve complex problems.

- Increase teacher salaries and promote the hiring of teachers with advanced degrees.

- Let people fail. Stop holding hands as much. On that note, stop catering to the lower end of the curve and holding back the smarter students. Set the standards high if not impossibly high so we can raise the definition of average.

- This one is a pipe dream: more specialized science and math schools. There are about a dozen or more sprinkled through the nation. I attended one for high school and it happened to be residential (and totally state funded). Seriously life changing.

Shorel
Testing should be done at the start of the term.

Teaching would then adapt to the shortcomings found in testing.

mikeknoop
Some school districts do this for courses, called "Pre Tests". Of course, most students don't take them seriously so I'm not sure how good of an indicator they are.
whichdokta
close the feedback loop between the obstacles of the teachers and the policies of the pencil pushers.
zeynel1
i dont know about your question but they say that the only purpose of education is to get the child out of the house for the major part of the day so that the mother can get a breather
dnos
Make it where people want to grow up to be teachers. The only idea I have for changing that is to pay teachers A LOT of money. Not just decent money. I'm talking about medical doctor money or more. Make it where teachers are not only respected for what they do, but for how much money they make. Maybe doing so would cause more great-minded people to teach instead of being tempted to other things because of money or status.

Think of the people who have inspired you. Surely if you have had a great teacher, that person would be in your list!

JacobAldridge
This would also have a supply and demand benefit for the people that become teachers. At the moment, a 'C+' average in high school will get you in to most teaching courses in my state. More money means more attractive means more applicants means only the better applicants get in - this means better teachers and a better system.

(And I appreciate that smarter != better, even in this case, but if teachers rarely got 'A's in their schooling life how can we expect them to challenge and inspire those who do?)

julius_geezer
Education is hard to disrupt or change because it is labor intensive. I really don't see any way to substitute technology or other capital improvements for skilled labor there. Nor do I think you can easily disentangle parenting and culture from education. Kids from educated households can endure really awful teachers for large proportions of their primary and secondary education, and go on to do fairly well. Kids from worse-off households have a much harder time.

Here it might be well for you to say how you wish to shape people. To be solid citizens? Great coders? High earners?

twidlit
solid citizens i guess or well-rounded people. I wonder what was lost in the guild / mentorship / apprenticeship system of old where it produced people like Da Vinci and michelangelo.
damoncali
Too much math in engineering education and not enough art.
JacobAldridge
I'd add greater financial literacy for all students. Not just economics (which was an elective I never took), but real world stuff on how taxes are calculated, and the wonder of compound interest.

Incidentally, I had the opportunity to speak to a group of high school students recently - and I'm looking for feedback - any would be appreciated. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1573711

jpdbaugh
I think that Cs should go back to being average. Even at the college level at MOST schools the average grade is a B. C is the middle grade on a 4.0 a scale so that is what most people should receive. It is a shame that a 3.5 in non engineering and science majors is considered "ok" or "good". If a student has under a 3.0 in business they might as well drop out because they aren't going to get a job. Grade inflation is a facade though. It is doesn't make it easier to get a job with your higher GPA because everyone is thrown into the upper bracket of the GPA scale. It is much harder to differentiate yourself when everyone either gets an "A" or "B".

To fix this I believe that grades should be given based on your points earned divided by total points. I think that grades should simply be giving to where you finish in a class. For example in a 10 person class the top 2 students get As, the next 3 get Bs, the next 3 get Cs, and the last 2 get Ds. I do think that Fs should be reserved for those that don't try and or show up for class or tests in a system over time. Obviously, you would do better in some classes than others and if you were truly exemplary or truly average you would get the according grade.

Shmulkey
Competition.

Destroy the public school monopoly with vouchers so that the same forces of creative destruction that power the tech industry can modernize and make more productive the education industry.

maxharris
Ged rid of the ideal of a "well-rounded" student. We've been stuck with this since the middle ages (see the Seven Liberal Arts), and it has been a major source of compulsion in education ever since.
_delirium
I'd go the opposite direction, personally. I wanted to take more humanities classes as a CS major, but was compelled to take a bunch of specialized/unnecessary CS classes in sub-areas I don't care about (or could've read about on my own) instead. I tend to see majors and disciplines as the major source of compulsion in education--- they all have ideas about "required cores" that everyone must take, often motivated more by politics than anything else.
maxharris
What I'm saying works just fine. If you want humanities courses, get a humanities degree; If you want chemistry, get a chemistry degree. If you want both, get both degrees. Lots of people double major, or get more. One of my friends completed five non-trivial, non-overlapping majors in college! This would work so much better if the majors were pure and no general requirements interfered.

It works both ways. I wanted less humanities and more science, but there are plenty of people that don't want to take a single math or science class in college if they can avoid it. Why force people?

_delirium
Well, my observation is that schools where the general requirements have been reduced have allowed the majors to fill the space by upping their own requirements, whereas schools with more general requirements have fewer per-major requirements, so it seems to be a tradeoff. I personally greatly prefer the 2nd approach, e.g. Harvey Mudd has 1/3 general science/engineering core, 1/3 humanities/social-sciences, 1/3 your major. Contrast with many engineering schools, where your major takes up >2/3 of your courses, which I think is a rather oppressive way to do things.

It's possible there could be a school with fewer of both kinds of requirements, where students get a build-your-own-major sort of deal. But if we're going to choose between more general requirements or more per-major requirements, I greatly prefer the first: to me, the 2nd ("all CS majors must take systems, theory, databases, and 2 of the following 4 classes") is a lot more compulsive, and generally results in useless specialist classes being added based on who's politically powerful within the department.

maxharris
> to fill the space

This is another deep problem with education. When people are forced to become "educated", school devolves into a holding pen. Why is it that we all went to college for four (or more) years, other than tradition?