It's only surprising for old people who have been unwilling to listen to complaints of school children for years now.
The list of problems that schools face (overcrowding, parental pressure, curricula packed with superfluous stuff no one will ever need again, curricula not even close to incorporating modern technology, buildings obviously in disrepair, way too early start times) is long, and it hasn't shrunk for years now.
At this point we might as well admit that schools are daycare for teens. And universities are daycare for adolescents. So lets cut the bullshit and focus on what matters, keeping kids occupied and keeping them from killing themselves.
I suggest medically induced commas for 8 hours a day. It's quite a safe technology with minimal long term negative effects.
> At this point we might as well admit that schools are daycare for teens. And universities are daycare for adolescents. So lets cut the bullshit and focus on what matters, keeping kids occupied and keeping them from killing themselves.
You're getting downvoted for the coma comment, but this here is spot on. When the schools got locked down because of the 'rona, the most pressing problem for parents was that they had no place to put their kid into or a way to care for the kids themselves because rents these days require that both parents work...
Another problem faced has been that houses are hot during the day, and now that you are home in the afternoons, houses without A/C are suddenly less livable in many locales.
So really, let's focus on what matters, the original point of holding down a job was clearly to enjoy the A/C at the office.
The system has been broken for long, but never so broken that it actually demands a top to bottom reform.
Besides, those who suffer with it the most either don't vote or have little political relevance or maturity to make a stand. And parents are not good mediators, since they tend to focus on the outcomes, not the day to day life of the student.
That's how you reach the unfortunate situation we have today.
I feel adults have been unwilling to listen to the problems of teenagers forever in fact. Teenage years are a difficult age, and it's really remarkable how many people I know seem to think of teenagers as spoiled, indisciplined children who should just get their shit together.
And its more incredible that they dont listen when you remember those adults were teenagers once too, and probably had very real issues that were ignored by their parents too!
I think it's more 'as an adult I realise that what I faced as a teenager was not all it appeared to be'.
Every cohort of teenagers since ancient times has believed, it seems, that their parents didn't understand. I think then one finds the ignorance was usually balanced in the other direction. Parents in general do want their offspring to grow to be self sufficient, which does require some pain - we're not going to be here forever to care for our kids - but most parents want their kids to get through their whole life with fulfillment and happiness. Sometimes that means a little hardship for a greater life overall.
This I think accounts for parents, in general, seeming to be hard on teenagers. Those teenagers will either realise it was for good or initiate a revolution in how they treat their own teens. That revolution hasn't happened yet.
My observation is that we go in cycles - parents are liberal, their children are more conservative (when they become parents), so their children respond by being more liberal, etc..
I don’t think we go in cycles. It seems that we continuously get more liberal. At some point we may hit a steady state where we cycle, but we haven’t so far.
What we are hitting is a continuous backlash of conservatives unhappy with progress... no matter if it's abortion, LGBT rights, PoC/non-white rights, or anti-discriminatory language.
These paleo-conservatives are who elected Trump and they are correct in exactly one thing: there is a cultural war against their outdated views.
The study is for anxiety of school, not anxiety in general. Now that people are at home, of course they are going to be less anxious of schooling.
Quote:
“With children and young people having been out of the classroom for so long, and with many students in this study seeing improvements in mental health and wellbeing during that time, the case to address issues weighing on their quality of life at school is stronger than ever.”
That quote doesn't corroborate your conclusion. I suppose it could be misinterpreted, and a better phrasing would be something like this:
"With children and young people having been out of the classroom for so long, and with many students in this study seeing improvements in mental health and wellbeing during that time, the case to address issues at school weighing on their quality of life is stronger than ever."
Quote: "Compared to pre-pandemic, there was an overall decrease in risk of anxiety, and an increase in wellbeing but no large change in risk of depression"
"A first-of-its-kind report by the University of Bristol reveals younger teenagers across the South West felt less anxious and more connected to school when they were away from it during the Covid-19 lockdown."
Note:
"felt less anxious and more connected to school when they were away from it".
My opinion on school, coming from someone living in Europe:
- Homework should be abolished
- School should start at a reasonable time. In my opinion, 8AM is too early. Kids that live far away have to wake up at 6AM, which is not a normal time judging by when kids wake up during summer break (9-10AM). 9AM would be acceptable. Not sure how much it would affect teachers' lives though.
- Kids should be made aware of the psychological help they can receive if they have personal issues. We had a psychologist at school, but I don't think anyone consulted them.
- Kids should be taught practical life skills over random trivia. Housework (fixing things, cleaning etc), finance, time management, how to actually learn/study effectively, mental health awareness, working out with correct technique and not ruining your body, how to eat healthily are all things that I value more than knowing the intricate details of how the European Union came to be (knowing history is useful and interesting, but I'd have rather spent that time on the aforementioned things). Of course, a lot of kids are going to complain many things in this list are boring, but they will value them once they grow older. PE in my school didn't teach any theory, which is just stupid looking back. Our body is with us for the rest of our lives, we should have the knowledge of how to take care of it.
Also, certain degree of freedom is something that everyone wants and values in their life. It would probably be expensive and hard, but if possible, I'd try to give kids a way to choose a small part of their study path.
Homework is very important. It gets you to practice intrinsic motivation - getting things done in your own time when nobody is forcing you to do them and when you have other, more appealing alternatives.
Even if preparing people to just put up with something miserable were a valid goal, it's exceedingly unlikely that just subjecting them to it for years on end is the most effective or the most efficient way to prepare them for it.
My local school didn't force me to do homework. It was always clear that I understood the material, and I could generally answer questions on it if tested. I think they had bigger things to worry about than whether I was doing the homework.
I did really poorly in school, also barely did any homework (lacked motivation) and at some point most teachers just gave up on asking whether I even did it. Somewhat miraculously, I still got my A levels. University is now going a lot better.
If anything homework let me practice my excuses and lying. Teachers and parents alike provide plenty of extrinsic motivation for doing even the most pointless of homework. If I hadn't found a passion in programming I likely wouldn't have developed any intrinsic motivation whatsoever, and that's a real problem.
Arguably, "excuses and lying" is also a useful life skill. Not necessarily for society, but certainly for the individual. Even if you never lie again after school, it's useful to be able to detect the behavior in others.
I personally learned nothing from homework, besides the anxiety that came with trying to make up an excuse for why it wasn’t done. I spent more time trying to avoid doing homework than actually doing it.
A big problem with school for me was that very little of it was framed in a way that made it seem useful. In subjects where I either understood the value (math for example, as I learned to program in my teens, so saw value in it to do things I wanted. While many of my peers followed the “it’s only useful if you want to be a math teacher” philosophy) or had some kind of extra interest in, I did well in, but even in subjects I chose to do, liked and was good at (eg German), I struggled trying to find the motivation to do any homework. Being forced to didn’t help, I would rather stare into space for an hour than actually spend the time on homework.
A big part of it, I think, was I needed downtime. I had already spend many hours in school and now was being told I needed to spend my time doing more school stuff? No thanks!
Even now, a couple of decades later, I need downtime to process the things that happened during the day. I’m a huge believer in Hammock Driven Development because of how important I feel thinking, reflection and downtime is.
EDIT: hell, I did really bad on one subject I used to be great at because of the homework: the homework load was too high so I dropped to the lower level class instead, which was the start of my downward spiral: it was too easy so I didn’t do much in it, the teacher didn’t push me and a few years later I struggled and never recovered. If the homework load were less, I would have stayed in the higher level class and, while I’m not certain, I’m pretty sure I could have at least maintained my ability instead of it deteriorating. I still believe I would have done better in my final exam at age 13 than I did at age 17 because of this.
For you claiming that math was useful there will be 20 claiming that math is one of the most useless class.
And in the next sentence they will claim that school should teach practical things, like doing your taxes.
It all boils down to not wanting to put any effort in the end.
And? That doesn't go against what I said. I just said that a big problem is that subjects aren't framed in a way that makes them seem useful, regardless of if they are or not.
For me, homework was the time where I got to actually solve problems instead of wait till somebody faster yells answer. It was time when you could struggle and then realize that when you struggle enough, you can figure it out.
In the school during lesson, there is less privace as people look at you struggling and plus there is always someone to instantly nudge you.
People wont scream out answers during tests. Tests is the best way to ensure kids gets to sit and think about problems. Homework doesn't do that at all for many kids.
I strongly believe that tests are an underutilized way to teach. Many seems to believe that you can't learn anything during tests, that they are only there to evaluate kids. However actually sitting and thinking about stuff is really important and tests helps with that.
Tests typically have short time and there is pressure.
Tests are not place for individual problem solving nor for figuring stuff out, they are for when you already learned that stuff and is proving to others that you did.
IMHO the common practice of homework is maybe not completely wrong but executed incredibly badly. I remember one time where I was with a friend doing homework together. It was about writing a text. We were so incredibly bad at it, the texts were full of repetitions and missing the important information. How should a 12 year old know how to brush up his writing skills outside of school anyway? I ended up skipping most of my homework the rest of my school time. (This worked surprisingly well for most subjects and teachers.) Going to university was such a breeze in contrast. Clear instructions, self-contained lectures, references are provided so it's possible to drill into a topic either alone or together with others...
To me school is mostly about teachers checking on students instead of them actually explaining things. Once I was on a summer school in the Netherlands during university and I remember one of the professors saying that during the first 2 semesters they need the students to unlearn destructive behaviours from school. E.g. admitting when they don't know something and to ask. I'm from Germany but to me it seems like a problem occurring in many countries.
A part of the difference between college and elementary/high school is that most people don't want to be in elementary/high school while in college there is a lot more self-motivation. Learning is a lot easier when you actually want to learn and improve and you feel you have a personal stake in what is going on.
While not perfect, Montessori seems like a good start to demonstrating that kids can choose to study.
The Montessori Method of Education, developed by Italian physician Maria Montessori, is a child-centered educational approach based on scientific observations of children. The method views the child as naturally eager for knowledge and capable of initiating learning in a supportive, thoughtfully prepared learning environment. It attempts to develop children physically, socially, emotionally and cognitively.[1]
I think of Montessori as a smart middle ground between under-structured "child-centered" and over-structured traditional education. I've seen it explained as a triangle of child, teacher, environment, where the teacher spends some time preparing the environment, some time instructing the child how to interact with the environment, and some time making adjustments to the environment.
I learned 95+% of things I know about programming outside of class. Now, I doubt that anyone would really lean a "well balanced" set of subjects, but students can be made to have their own intrinsic motivations to study things.
>- Kids should be made aware of the psychological help they can receive if they have personal issues. We had a psychologist at school, but I don't think anyone consulted them.
I used them, they were great for scoring high quality drugs. All I needed to do was memorize a list of symptoms, regurgitate them and get referred to a specialist and do the same again.
Which is why as an adult I find the whole area of psychiatry to be bunk. And that's supposedly the harder of the psychological sciences. If you can't deal with false positives you have no place in medicine.
If I came in to a doctors office and demanded they reattach my missing leg, while clearly having two legs I'd be met (rightly) with skepticism, somehow when it comes to the mind it doesn't work that way. Surely someone would have figured out a way to measure the missing serotonin by now?
This is a very naive understanding of modern clinical psychology. Modern psychology is the way it is exactly because someone couldn't figure `out a way to measure the missing serotonin', or rather, it is a meaningless measurement.
The total failure of positivism in clinical psychology is what resulted in the current state of affairs, pushing for more of it won't bring about any imagined golden age of psychology, only further `the pandemic of mental anguish that afflicts our time' [0]. Positivism is a flawed doctrine and at this point should be considered nothing but dangerous dogma -- at least in the case of psychiatry.
[0]: I believe it was Mark Fisher that said something to this end but I digress.
If you do not have any objective measures then what you have is a cult.
By any objective standard - suicide rates, lost days of work, self harm, substance abuse, murder, etc. - we are worse off or no better today than in 1960 when we were supposedly emotionally stunted and oppressed. Every extra dollar spent on psychology/psychiatry since then has been a waste.
That's not even touching on the crisis of reproducibility that has made a mockery of the entire field and put it somewhere between catholic confessionals and recreational drug use in terms evidence based outcomes.
You seem to think I'm defending modern psychiatry, I'm not. I'm merely saying that positivism is what brought us here, and certainly isn't the way to bring us anywhere better.
You brought very little in defense of positivism, so I'm at a lose as to what I can respond with there. What I will say is that, by relying on a macroscopic outcome and declaring that any increase must be caused by the psychiatric field, you ignore the very obvious fact, something positivism constantly struggles with, that the world has changed since the 60's. Is the rise of social media the fault of psychiatry? Is underemployment? How about Fortress Europe?
By most microscopic measurements, clinical psychology is a cure that does help the majority of patients. Both in the long-term and short-term.
>By most microscopic measurements, clinical psychology is a cure that does help the majority of patients. Both in the long-term and short-term.
That is where we disagree.
Clinical psychology makes people feel better about themselves in the short term, long term there is a distinct lack of evidence of positive outcomes. And a lot of unrepeatable experiments that show positive trends which disappear when looked at more closely.
Schools start this early so parents can get their kids to school and still go to work in time. You could start school at 9AM for kids old enough to do that themselves, but it's not gonna work for families with younger kids.
As for psychological help, maybe those who consulted them just didn't talk about it?
Except the few places without public transportation, most parents don't have to take their kids to school. Starting later would probably help with overprotective parents.
Depending on where you live, it's probably not safe (and maybe even forbidden) to let young children (<10 years) go to and on public transportation alone.
Are school buses not a thing anymore? The suburb I grew up in definitely didn't have a remotely decent public transit system but the school district was required (along with all public school districts in the state of Texas IIRC) to provide a school bus that stopped within a few minutes' walk of every student's home (probably with exceptions for people who actually lived outside of the school boundaries and applied to transfer in). In high school, classes started after 9am and it all seemed to work just fine.
That seems like a really long day. I didn't have a daily homeroom, how many hours of classes are included in that? I would feel awful for any child that gets dropped off at 6am, sits in a cafeteria for an hour, sits through 2 hours of homeroom and then 8 hours of classes.
That's also probably only going to work for highschool aged kids. The reality is that they're probably capable of getting themselves to school if you have to leave early
It is not mandatory. Our school has similar system and kids spend that time playing. They dont just sit on chair. There is one teacher to supervise a group of kids, if there are too many kids the group gets split into two.
Where I went to school (New England, USA) it was done the other way around. Elementary school started at 9am, middle school was earlier, and high schools were even earlier. That schedule didn't make a whole lot of sense to me.
Most of this used to be on the curriculum - Home Economics and Craft, Design and Technology have gone out of fashion, but covered the practical things. My school had a vehicle workshop as well as kitchen classrooms. Oh, and a typing pool, too :)
This got me thinking - I wonder how much of that comes down to mundane reasons like budgets, rather than pedagogy. Change costs money and most schools are slow moving. For example, I suspect that the content of secondary school mathematics have changed little in generations, but the content of practical lessons in cooking, vehicle maintenance, finances, programming, etc. changes much faster.
A lot comes down to budget I think. Schools are judged mainly on standardized testing scores and funds will be allocated to ensure optimization of that metric.
Schools mainly get funded through local property taxes. If you compare curriculum in towns that are generally middle and upper middle class with towns that have a larger lower middle class population you’ll probably see different curriculum. More AP classes, electives, life planning, etc.
The town I live in has pretty high taxes but it’s mainly to fund the local school system which ranks high. Just about everyone with kids uses the public school system because of this and it’s a big selling point to new residents home-shopping.
Do nutrition & medicine not get taught in science lessons? They were for me (in the UK).
Also, not sure 15 year old me could have imagined something less interesting than finance lessons where I get to figure out how to manage all the money I don’t have.
They do in South Florida when I was growing up. I also had a half year of health class, which includes nutrition. I also had home economics class, which covered nutrition, cooking, sewing, budgeting, etc. But my understanding is that those are getting cut in order to have kids focus on classes to pass tests.
We had some basic finance, but I would have liked more. We covered writing a check and balancing a checkbook. I'd have liked to see more about calculating compound interest, as well as a primer on how taxes work. I can see the tax lesson failing, though, if it was too long before I got an actual job.
> Basic electronics
This was covered in college, but not high school. I'm not sure this is very practical for most people, either. People need to know how to use computers, but not necessarily how to design a circuit board.
I did in the 1970's computer programming at my comprehensive and we started with adders, half adders and machine language programming BTW this was for the CSE stream (this not going to university)
The idea of mandatory education is to guarantee that you're provided basic skills to have a chance to survive a thrive in society regardless of your environment.
On the whole university professors are terrible teachers. The concept of a professor wasting time giving a lecture to 100 people is surely at an end - far better to find the 1 in 100 professors who are good at teaching to record a lecture and give it to 10,000 people - where those people can pause, play it back as many times as they need, etc
This may surprise you but the reason professors teach is that they’re experts in their fields. Lecturing serves more purposes than simply educating, it allows immediate interaction over the subject matter as it is presented and intended. You are expected to show up at a lecture already knowing the contents, not as if you’re going to the cinema. This though is how people treat it.
While this is at best a very dubious sentiment, I've only really seen it applied to university lecturers. I don't see how it can reasonably be applied to primary/secondary teachers.
I think that's a fair point. But I also think that the education system should have a levelling effect, where it doesn't matter who looks after you when you are at home - everyone has the same opportunities to learn.
Students' parents, guardians, extended cohabiting family, etc. have an impossibly diverse range of skills (and ability to communicate, etc.). Even if these people were available at all times, they remain a hugely variable source. If we're saying that practical life skills are important, we should aim to provide a consistent experience to avoid inequality in society.
I'm sure everyone has stories about how the people who raised them taught them a few things well and were terrible examples of others. Some of these will be funny, but others can have life changing consequences.
> Isn't the problem they are not available anymore?
Eh, no; they're probably more available on average these days. Average working hours are down quite a lot in most developed countries, and far more people have regular scheduled employment (vs working on a farm or similar, which could frequently be every waking hour for most of the year). But the assumption that most parents either know these things or are good at teaching them is... optimistic, to say the least.
Yeah. Same here. I made my first dish at 7-8. We had a mini stove and I cooked corn with bunch of veggies on it. It was fun. Afterwards, I learnt to do more complex stuff due to single parent household.
The state monopoly on schooling needs to be abolished. Parents must be able to give the amount of money a current state school costs to a private school of their own choice. This will enable competition and choice. As it currently stands, only wealthy people can send their children to a private school, but this is completely artificial.
> School should start at a reasonable time. In my opinion, 8AM is too early. Kids that live far away have to wake up at 6AM, which is not a normal time judging by when kids wake up during summer break (9-10AM).
They wake up that late because they're staying up late. They should be waking up when the sun tells them to, and go to sleep when their body tells them to, which doesn't happen because they're surrounded by light that messes up their circadian rhythm. This has a huge impact on things like anxiety.
Consequently, there can't be one time that is optimal. Why do we work the hours that we do, year round? It doesn't make sense biologically, it's an artifact of industrialization.
> “Research to date has shown that the circadian rhythms of adolescents are simply fundamentally different from those of adults and children,” said lead author Gideon Dunster, a UW doctoral student in biology.
> “All of the studies of adolescent sleep patterns in the United States are showing that the time at which teens generally fall asleep is biologically determined — but the time at which they wake up is socially determined,” said Dunster. “This has severe consequences for health and well-being, because disrupted circadian rhythms can adversely affect digestion, heart rate, body temperature, immune system function, attention span and mental health.”
Seen similar information from other sources, but this came up first after a quick search. Of course screen light probably makes the problem worse, but there do seem to be significant biological factors.
Maybe the reason they're playing Fortnite until 2AM is because they have no other time to play it because ~8 hours of their day are being absorbed by a majority of dubious-value bullshit that also comes with homework (and some people are even defending the latter)?
If you want to fix the world, start at home. If playing Fortnite is worth messing up your biological clock, causing you fatigue, anxiety and maybe even depression, perhaps you need to get your priorities straight first.
My point is that maybe the problem isn't Fortnite but the fact that the system is giving these kids way too much work (when you factor in transport if they happen to live far from the school this can add another hour or two, but unlike in a full-time job they can't just switch to a closer school like they could with a job) and they don't have enough time for socializing/entertainment?
Fair enough, but what happens if you shift personal responsibility to some abstract concept like "the system"? Nothing. The system does not care about you, it takes no responsibility, it just is. If it changes at all, it will do so at a glacial pace, because there's a lot of interest groups involved. The school system is a bureaucracy, it's in the business of maintaining problems, not solve them.
Why are we talking about personal responsibility or trying to put the fault on the kids? We're putting kids in a prison-like system with 8+ hours of forced labor and then we're surprised that they're doing unhealthy long-term choices when it comes to managing whatever little time they have left. Maybe we should not be putting them in a prison and address the root cause of the problem instead of criticizing how they cope with it?
First, I'll have you know that your choice of words is ridiculous and may trigger severe eye-rolling in those who aren't quite as out of touch as you are.
Secondly, I probably don't disagree all that much on the (lack of) merits of the public school systems. Having said that, you can live a life within that system and not make it actively worse for yourself, no matter who is at fault. That's personal responsibility.
I am indeed using very strong words to try and drive my point home but it doesn't seem like it's working - maybe you just had a very different experience of school and got significant value out of it which made the inconvenience look worthwhile to you?
Regardless of our opinions, I think the goal of this entire thread is to discuss the shortcomings of the system and how we can make it better and not just blame the kids for not coping well with it?
I think the goal of this thread is to scold me for "blaming the victim", which is unjustified. I'm not blaming anyone for being fed up with school, I certainly was fed up with it myself.
The point is that no matter how injust "the system" is, no matter who is to blame for your predicament, there's always a way for you to make your situation worse still.
> Kids should be taught practical life skills over random trivia.
This is parenting vs schooling, ignoring the fact that many schools are really glorifed babysitting services.
And more importantly, history isn't "random trivia". While the merits of a degree in history may be debatable, if the majority of the UK had a passable knowledge in why the EU exists, and what the UK did to become an empire, the attitude towards integration with the EU would likely be very different.
> PE in my school didn't teach any theory, which is just stupid looking back.
PE is the bare minimum amount of exercise and movement a child could have without being considered "entirely sedantry". For many kids it's the _only_ exercise they get.
> And more importantly, history isn't "random trivia". While the merits of a degree in history may be debatable, if the majority of the UK had a passable knowledge in why the EU exists, and what the UK did to become an empire, the attitude towards integration with the EU would likely be very different.
As much as I agree with other points, I can only strongly disagree here. It strongly implies a condescending attitude that stupid and uneducated decided about British future. If only they could be brainwashed^H taught they would choose the “right” option.
Well, I strongly disagree with you strong disagreeing.
It's not condescending in the slightest, and debate around Brexit revealed that although theres's nothing wrong with being against european integration, a lot of people have almost no idea of what the EU does and does not do.
I never claimed brainwashed, uneducated or stupid. Far from it. But many major important parts of british history are glossed over. Much of the empire is taught as though britain was a trading partner rather than brutal occupier, the Irish plantations are glossed over as an unavoidable famine, ww1/2 are celebrated as the strength of the empire, and the postwar agreements and decisions which led to the current EU are mentioned in a sentence. These are massively important periods which directly explain huge parts of britain's "influence" over the rest of the world, and the information is available quite publicly, just never taught to children.
If people at large understood what happened and why we have the institutions we currently have, they are shown to be far more likely to be in favour of them.
I wonder if you have really tried to understand the intellectual case for Brexit. Your 'if people at large ... ' is merely an exercise in wishful thinking.
For serious analyses of the Brexit question by extremely well equipped academics (I rather think they 'understand') and others try https://briefingsforbritain.co.uk/
It would be unfortunate here to mistakenly leave the impression that briefingsforbritain.co.uk is in some way neutral. Until the start of this year they used to be called "Briefings for Brexit". The content on the site is rampantly partisan. It would also be regrettable if one were to look at their academic qualifications as being somehow indicative of the quality of their arguments, rather than the quality of their rhetoric.
I guess YMMV, because at my school (a long time ago) we learned a new sport each term. And it took the better part of the term for the average kid to achieve some level of competency, much like an academic subject. It's certainly different in nature than academics, but you still need to "educate" your brain to arrive at the correct movement, timing and balance for any sport.
I've moved past my bitter feelings about the failings of my sports education.
It feels like PE was 2-3 years of gymnastics followed by 6-7 years of "let's just play basketball/volleyball/soccer" with a semester of swimming here-and-there. Certainly no instructions or structure to any of it.
As a fat kid, I was always the happiest when sitting out entirely (or swimming, where it turns out natural buoyancy is actually helpful).
Always getting Ds and Fs and being chosen last for any team activity led to me spend my college years on the couch.
Only through getting back pain and posture problems I found out 5 years later that I enjoy jogging and yoga and weightlifting and isometric exercise - if properly instructed.
It feels like I missed out on the years in between simply because PE at school never had the goal of helping kids be healthy - just keeping them busy in any way possible.
If I had to guess, I'd bet that the majority of kids were happy to kick a football around, and the 2-3 that woild be happy doing something else (i.e us) were just outnumbered. As a teacher, would you rather have 2-3 kids complaining about soccer or 15 kids complaining about yoga because they've never done it?
This was at a school with 7 years of compulsory Latin lessons. It would, in fact, be very much in line with the general syllabus to make students do stuff (Yoga, Latin) which they didn't appreciate for their primary effect (flexibility/muscular health, general language understanding) until years later.
Completely agreed with you there.
That said, when I was 16/17, our school let us choose between a few activities (ball sport, racket sport, running sport or "other" - gymnastics, swimming, rowing, archery, horse riding). Had I had those options rather than just soccer aged 7 instead of 17, I would likely have been far more active in the years in between.
We were given a similar choice at that age (in Germany).
Due to all my previous negative experience, I chose to sort-of-quit PE altogether. It was impossible to actually quit, but you could compensate it with an equal amount of extra credit, so I happily replaced it with Arts credit.
Surprisingly, no one as much as batted an eyelid at that. The snobby attitude of "who needs PE anyway" was certainly prevalent in my age group.
There were three camps in my school - the "soccer is our life" group, the "who needs PE anyway" and the "I've got to go for a 10k run for my extra curricular sport anyway, might as well do it during school time" group. PE for 3 years just saved me having to do a run before school that day.
> PE is the bare minimum amount of exercise and movement a
> child could have without being considered "entirely
> sedantry". For many kids it's the _only_ exercise they get.
A study has shown that PE in schools have show it has zero benefits and only teaches some kinds to skip classes.
The discipline isn't, but the way at least I've been taught it unfortunately is... It didn't take me until I graduated to take an interest in history, when I could learn the cause and effect chains without getting distracted by rote memorization.
When it comes to history... yes, there's a large overlap. The ancient times, the history of philosophy due to the development of ideas, the recent modern times due to their relevance to today's neighborhood politics, are three topics that I am constantly interested in. With the exception of ancient history (maybe due to the dearth of established dates), school had problems teaching me those.
There are huge problems with locking an age cohort with wildly different interests, talents, abilities, and personalities into a room and expecting them to go through puberty together while also learning... something.
Even if you select for ability along some axis, you still get different interests and learning styles - and personalities.
Learning is basically industrial, uselessly abstracted [1] and commodified, when it could be individualised. A lot of talent is wasted because high school stunts the really bright kids. And given how brutal it is, it seems to damage everyone emotionally.
[1] Virtually none of the math you learn at school really makes any sense unless you're one of the small number of people who go into STEM - which is where you finally discover what it's for. Things are a bit better than they used to be, but basic financial math as a specific competence is far more useful to most of the population than even the most basic algebra and trig.
The dates are important if the kids are to draw their own understanding of history. They can be told that X caused Y and just accept that the X came before Y, or they can learn the dates well enough to examine the situation themselves.
For instance: How long was WWII? How long was Vietnam? When exactly did WWII start, before or after US involvement? Knowing those sorts of dates allows students to put today's wars into context. Has the US been in Iraq longer than WWII? Longer than Vietnam? They can memorize the dates and answer those questions themselves. That makes them informed citizens, and some of them eventual informed soldiers, better able to participate in very relevant current events.
You know what would be useful? Take all those events and ask the children to put them in a time-line. Let them search any book they need in the process.
You know what is completely useless? Telling the date each happened on their respective classes, and that this knowledge will be tested.
I disagree that it is completely useless. You're basically arguing that time is only useful as a relative measure, not an absolute one. While that is true in some sense (the ordering of events and the space between them is what matters), because history is so vast and interconnected and a total ordering is desirable, it just makes more practical sense to learn the absolute date of an event, not just the "relative" date
That would have been nice, if students actually internalized the dates they've been taught.
Memorizing dates is as dull as it can be, without having motivation from knowing the context. Dull things get crammed for tests and then forgotten, with near zero retention when those people grow up and actually want to use the context.
Even if dates were more important than causes, they stick less, reducing the utility of teaching them.
In my history classes we were never quized directly on things as dates. However, you were expected to be able to use those in context. Example of a question: "Some historians consider the Cold War to be an ideological conflict that already started in 1917, argue why:"
This is so true for a lot of liberal arts. I just think the social sciences are better left until later in the child's life. Younger children are more adept at learning math and science than we give them credit for, but we spend quite a lot of time explaining dinosaurs really poorly only to never return to clear that up.
> spend quite a lot of time explaining dinosaurs really poorly only to never return to clear that up
I wonder about this type of thing a lot when I think of my experience in school. a lot of the material they taught me in lower and middle school was just wrong. not like subtly wrong, but blatantly incorrect in a way that would be obvious to any undergrad major in that subject (which schoolteachers often are). I'm sure the teachers must have realized too. why spend so much time teaching stuff that needs to be unlearned as early as high school?
the best example I can think of right now is the answer to "why is the sky blue?". my lower school science teacher told us it was reflecting the ocean. I'm sure she realized this answer didn't make any sense, but that's what she taught us. I don't expect teachers to try to explain raleigh scattering to a group of third graders, but wouldn't it be better just not to explain it at all?
this was at a very well-regarded private elementary school in the midatlantic US (I try not to be any more specific than this on HN, although you can probably figure out the city if you delve deep into my comment history).
I can understand teaching general rules upfront with the expectation that exceptions will be covered later (eg, teaching lower school students that water boils at 212F/100C is okay, they can learn about vapor pressure later). but why would you teach that columbus was the first european to discover north america? not only is it completely wrong, but it's not a practically useful fact, nor does it create a solid basis for deeper understanding.
Blue light bounces around the sky a lot so we see it in all directions. At sunset, when we look at the horizon, we see light that traveled through a lot of sky without bouncing away, so it's less blue.
You know, I think that many teachers honestly do believe the things that they teach that are totally wrong. My eighth grade science teacher said, with a straight face, that hydrogen bombs are so explosive because hydrogen is very reactive.
It's actually worse than that, because public schools typically teach the government-approved version of history. It's not until much later that, after digging into multiple alternative sources and triangulating what is likely a more accurate story, does one realize how much of the history you were taught was distorted or omitted.
It’s history abridged. Hard to cover 3000 years of civilization in depth across 6 contents from multiple perspectives. Someone has to choose what to cut
That's very true, yet what's often cut is the most recent, and also the history that paints the host in the least pleasant light. I had history classes for probably 10 years, and so much of it was ancient civilizations, and middle ages.
I always thought this was odd too. I started learning history in second or third grade, but we never got past the first world war until tenth or eleventh grade. even then, we devoted only a couple weeks to the entire 20th century. modern US history (ie, 1945 to present) was a senior elective, and there was no analogous course for world history. in a well-regarded private school, it was entirely possible to graduate without having the faintest idea of what has happened since world war II. to this day, I know more about what happened in cyrus's failed campaign against artaxerxes than I do about the vietnam war.
in a weird contrast, we spent tons of time on the civil war and slavery (and not just the sugar-coated version either). we learned about thomas jefferson and sally hemings, and we learned about andrew jackson and the trail of tears. so I don't think it was out of squeamishness that they declined to cover more recent history.
I suspect that anything in living memory of the people who approve the textbooks doesn’t look like “history” to them, and also runs the risk of being considered overly political— it can be hard to be objective about events you lived through, so any stance the curriculum writers take will be attacked by the parents and grandparents that were on the other side if the issues.
I think there's definitely some of that to it, similar to /r/askhistorians "twenty year" rule. older events/topics can still be very controversial though. I went to high school very close to the mason-dixon line. there were a lot of parents who believed the civil war was primarily about states' rights, and some were very upset at the school's coverage of the civil war and european colonialism/imperialism.
I get that schools (especially private schools) ultimately need to satisfy the parents, but it strikes me as a massive disservice that my peers and I were able to graduate high school without learning a single thing to contextualize the two defining current events of our childhood: 9/11 and the iraq war. the film charlie wilson's war was the best explanation I got until I was in college.
Envious. My memory of history class here in Australia was pretty much entirely about the history of Australia. We are not a very old country. And then half of that was about how we oppressed our native population.
Surely that is an indication that pedagogy should change, not that we should replace the discipline with something else. Especially when the "practical skills" people often point to are very much the sort of rote memorization things people complain about (budgeting, taxes, etc).
Somethings this is based on how a subject is taught, but other times I think this is simply maturity and focus. I have a much easier time reading through a dense book as an adult. As a kid, I couldn't sit still, I couldn't make myself care about the topic.
Although to be fair, history textbooks are often really terrible.
We (collectively) want all children to have a good foundation of life skills by the time they reach adulthood.
Unfortunately there is no curriculum for what a parent must teach their children.
Luckily, there is a standardized curriculum in the form of schooling.
Instead of assuming all children get good parents (which is obviously a harmful assumption), let’s just take advantage of the fact that we can pretty much guarantee all students will learn the school curriculum and use it to teach important life skills to children who otherwise wouldn’t learn.
Children only have a certain amount of time in school. We can't just keep adding subjects that everyone needs to learn. Kids already spend a massive amount of time in school and on homework, so something's got to give if we want to add to the curriculum.
Life skills are not completely disjoint from current curriculum subjects. You don't need to dedicate an hour every day to a class called "Life skills" (and if you did I suspect many children would pay less attention).
Why not use that math class to teach personal finance, mortgage rates, basic economics, etc.
Why not couple English with a stronger focus on proper communication (especially negotiation, conflict resolution)
etc.
Teachers are given a document that says in X weeks you need to cover the following topics/units. Let's fix that document so that we can ensure everyone who graduates the public school system can confidently understand their credit card statement -- regardless of their parental upbringing.
I get your point, but the issue is that people don't grok the link between the fundamentals and day-to-day life.
> Let's fix that document so that we can ensure everyone who graduates the public school system can confidently understand their credit card statement
I'm pretty sure by age 14 my school math problems were along the lines of "John takes out a loan for $x, with a compounding interest rate of Y%, how much does he pay back in total?"
I agree that we could do better at teaching however!
> Unfortunately there is no curriculum for what a parent must teach their children.
I do not believe that having a specific curriculum is necessary to have a good foundation of life skills. In addition I would argue that the curriculum in schools is absolutely disappointing if this is the target.
> Instead of assuming all children get good parents (which is obviously a harmful assumption), let’s just take advantage of the fact that we can pretty much guarantee all students will learn the school curriculum and use it to teach important life skills to children who otherwise wouldn’t learn.
The issue here is that you are basically torturing these students that would end up learning (either due to their parents or to some other resource) regardless in order to improve the life of these that would not. I would understand your point however if school was not mandatory.
In 2020 specifically quite a lot of schooling has happened with the kids being quarantined at home. It's been quite messy, especially at the margins, but it provides a sort of natural experiment on what's actually going on.
There seems to be huge resentment on this site over the fact that kids being in school allows one of parents to get employment. No, it really does not mean the babysitting is the only or primary function and it is definitely not something bad.
And if quarantine changed anything, it is that I value school more then before. And I am not one of those people desperate to somehow making remote school and work function, thankfully we had no stressful deadlines during that time. But the kids still missed it and still learned better when in school then home alone.
> This is parenting vs schooling, ignoring the fact that many schools are really glorifed babysitting services.
While this may exaggerate the case, it will continue to largely be true so long as we relegate huge portions of our population to 2-3 jobs while the VC system sustained in part by Ycombinator rewards capital formation to a degree that is damaging to society.
Not multiple fulltime jobs, but in Germany there are 3.5 million people with multiple jobs (350,000 with jobs subject to social insurance contributions "sozialversicherungspflichtig"; 250,000 with "mini-jobs"). More than 50% in a poll give financial issues as the critical factor why they have multiple jobs.
That would sum up to one full-time job, more or less?
I understood the comment to be angry about some large injustice, I'm not sure whether they were meaning to essentially say "some people have to work for a living, it's outrageous". With (Western) Europe's extremely strong social systems, the number of people who are forced to work multiple jobs because they wouldn't be able to eat otherwise is minuscule, I believe.
The history curriculum really matters and it's almost impossible to generalise over. Mine was ok in the primary school and then degraded to "which army led by whom moved where (occasionally why)". Took me years to realise that if you learn more about the progress of wars than the reasons they started, it's worse than wasted time.
Physical Education is very much a “get out of it what you put into it” sort of thing, really like any class. And there’s going to be regional/world differences. It’s also partially there for the student athletes, in order for there to be job infrastructure and education/training. Source: father was a physical educator for 40ish years and is a good man
The financial education and time management lines really resonated with me from the parent comment. The problem is that there is not anything resembling equal footing at home. Rich kids, realistically the top 5-10%, are going to get financial education at home and the others will have to learn in the school of hard knocks. I had to learn “tough” lessons about finance because the resources for what I needed to know didn’t exist at home. And I talk to people now who are older about how they prep their kids for the world, and it’s just a classic information imbalance. You could do a lot of good by leveling the playing field here.
Physical Education wasn't my favorite class, but never once did anyone talk about the theory behind developing athletic performance or recruiting the proper muscles for a movement or anything like that. It was just "go run" or "play a game of baseball".
In my opinion, you can still get a lot out of PE just by doing it even with little instruction. Being made to play basketball will almost certainly develop team-working skills, hand-eye coordination, fitness etc, with no involvement from the teacher.
But I agree that there is some lost potential in terms of building a strong knowledge base about fitness and well-being. The paper below suggests there are likely a lot of moderating factors in the benefits of PE.
> This is parenting vs schooling, ignoring the fact that many schools are really glorifed babysitting services.
Modern school systems are pretty much entirely this... only they aren't really glorified. To be fair, a society in which every adult is expected to be working needs some kind of daycare for kids, but there are probably better ways to go about it.
If the applications of mathematics are not made clear, it is quite literally memorizing random formulas. Which is exactly the scenario you'd find in most public high schools in america.
Which, that sentiment applies directly to history.
Parenting vs schooling seems like a mistake to divide in that way. If everyone is expected to know it then it should be taught period, otherwise it is left to the "random" potentially lacking the abilities themselves let alone the ability to teach them.
My wife used to teach these ‘useful’ classes. They used to call it home economics. Now they call it family and consumer science. Essentially the same things. How to cook, budget, raise a child, etc. Sadly many school districts are cutting these programs to make room for classes that help the students do better on standardized tests. It’s sad because there were a ton of kids who used to find their life’s passion in my wife’s classes.
This isn't a 'new' trend. It has pretty much been happening since they couldn't simply teach women how to cook and boys how not to cut their fingers off in shop classes.
I am 42. I had less than 9 weeks of cooking. Part of that 'cooking' was cooking once a week, a cookie contest that almost got me in trouble because I didn't cook while home sick, and how to set a table for a formal setting (i've never used this). The once-a-week cooking was in a group setting.
I had "financial education" in social studies class - taught by a car salesman friend of the teacher. We got extra credit if our parents went to look at used cars. I was in 8th grade: 13 years old at the time.
I had health class, which mostly taught us the parts of the body and sex ed over and over again. PE class at one point consisted of ping-pong for 6 weeks: I didn't learn anything that I could actually use in life - how to be do cardio, stretching, weight training, nope. Nothing like that.
Not once was I ever introduced to any sort of child development classes. You see, I took AP classes and had a full college prep schedule, so they didn't think these classes were important. Some others were so much better prepared than I was.
I'm not even sure if I told my parents, honestly - but I cringe when I look back on it (I was only 13, moved earlier in the year, and was already an outcast). I don't know how it was ever allowed.
The big problem with school districts is that they are so far down the chain of decentralized government that almost no enforcement exists to make sure the right decisions are being made. Almost every former teenager has a powertrip story involving a school official which is probably against some code or regulation; but the power imbalance between school employee and student makes it nearly impossible for those concerns to hold any weight. Students are also never informed of their rights except for a student handbook at the beginning of the year, and even then there's an implicit expectation that the teacher/principal/superintendent has the right to institute arbitrary rules at any point.
There are most likely illegal policies and activities taking place at every public school in the U.S., and it's not taken seriously because children cannot vote and many parents think the schools ought to be going hard on their kids anyways.
... and now I'm just realizing the only fear I had of dangerous stuff like that in school was the soldering irons in the DT block. Never blinked once at being in the food tech rooms with those same people.
Your opinion on whether 8 a.m. is too early somewhat depends on your local time zone and clock change customs: see thousands of comments elsewhere!
However, 08:00 local astronomical time does seem too early and most European time zones are ahead of local astronomical time, sometimes ridiculously so, making 08:00 even earlier. So I don't disagree.
Had to look up astronomical time - assuming my understanding is right and you use "noon" to define the hours, I don't think it would really help in high latitude hours - no amount of temporal wiggling is going to stop kids from going to school in the dark and coming home in the dark as well.
Yes. You get about 7 hours of daylight on the shortest day at a latitude of 55°. So nearly all of the population of England could avoid going to/from school in the dark. But Scotland is another matter.
I think the formal classes like history are no problem and have a place in the curriculum.
Kids learn at different speeds so a good education system takes that into regard. Systems should be transient that slow starters can catch up at a later time and reach higher forms of education.
We need more teachers and smaller groups. Eating healthy can be a course, but you quickly loose all the pupils that already learned that from their parents.
Mental health is hard to teach and there is little certain knowledge here, it only works individually. Aside from really hard cases, I think children have quite resilient minds.
I believe the reluctance to do physical exercise has other sources, not really lacking education. But PE is vastly to be preferred to medicating "unusual" behavior.
In my school there was little physical bullying. I cannot remember any to be honest. Psychological "terror"? Plenty. I am actually not that old, but 15 years ago it was mostly parents that mediated conflicts. Children are ashamed to admit they are bullied in many cases, so you need good teachers to notice and speak to parents.
I cannot honestly condemn teachers that disengage though. Classrooms get bigger, bullying happens digitally and out of reach, teachers and parents are critical of each other and pupils are the first to notice if they have free reign and know pretty well how to profit from such conflicts.
> Kids should be made aware of the psychological help they can receive if they have personal issues. We had a psychologist at school, but I don't think anyone consulted them.
Do you think this was an issue of not being aware of the offering, as opposed to it being difficult to get help for one's personal issues because of stigma or feeling like you can handle it if you just try a little harder?
In addition to that even if you do have access to psychological help it won't be any good if the school psychologist is worse than useless (which seems to be common in this kind of field).
My experience was that the school psychologists were not competent or reasonable individuals. For example, the one in 5th grade who decided that my friend and I were each being abused because we did absurd things with her dollhouse like put figurines on the roof and in closets, just to be silly.
I agree with you. In addition I would argue that the students should have more choice over what modules they learn (why should someone who wants to be a computer scientist and hates learning languages be forced to learn german/latin and poems for example - these students should have the option to select advanced mathematics, programming, and cs theory instead if they so wish, or even random trivia) and that homeschooling should be easily available as an option if the student so wishes, same for online learning.
I would also say that something needs to be done regarding bullying and teachers that are power-tripping.
If more computer scientists studied language then we'd see better-written CS papers. It would benefit the authors too: research is more valuable when you can communicate it clearly, so people are more likely to cite a well-written paper. I think Dijkstra's fame is as much a consequence of his excellent writing as his research.
But if you had students that had specialised at 14 done GCSE's and A levels in the subject they do at uni you could have three year degrees instead of four.
How much does a year at an American University Cost ?
Essay and report-writing is already part of the curriculum for these preparing to get into a CS school. I do not think demanding from students to explain what the poet was thinking or to learn spanish will help them with writing CS papers, if anything I would argue that the reverse is true. In addition I would argue that most CS papers are well written.
Abolishing homework will only lead to less knowledge transfer. Most teachers are not good, so self-study is essential. Teaching how to study is part of the curriculum on the schools I've seen.
Random trivia should not be taught, but cleaning and fixing? Next you'll want to teach morals.
We always have in many ways, but I catch your drift. I take issue with schools that teach kids what to think instead of how to think.
I don’t know if it is pandemic but I’ve seen some people complain about some very controversial curriculum creeping into schools. A person I saw on Twitter recently posted some curriculum their 1st grader was being taught which tells a story through the lens of critical race theory. In essence telling the children that the white kids are racist and need to work to be anti-racist.
It was shocking to me because it is applying controversial “Theory” that is very much opposed to liberal science ideals of falsifiability and injecting identity politics into minds that can’t even begin to understand the postmodern philosophy these ideas grew from.
If most teachers are bad then using homework to fix this is a shit solution: why are children being forced to endure 1st the bad teacher AND the homework.
>> Most teachers are not good, so self-study is essential.
It's not even about teachers being good or bad. It's about something called "illusion of competence". Basically, everything seems easy while teacher is explaining it on whiteboard, but when facing similar task on your own, outside of the classroom you are completely lost, don't know where to start. Homework helps dispell that illusion.
Tests get the same result. It is better to regularly tell the kids to solve problems without help than to make them to do it at home, since many kids wont do it at home.
but homework gets checked by teachers, right? I mean, from what I remember from my own high school teacher would spend first few minutes of each class asking about homework, somethimes simply providing the correct answers, sometimes randomly asking a kid in class to provide an answer. It wasn't graded, so much less stress than taking a test, but still you could verify that your solution to the assignment was correct.
Agreed. Self-study is the most important part in going to school and doing things yourself leads to it. Lots of intelligence self starters here on HN claiming homework is not essential because they were able to absorb the material some other way.
That's like saying you're a great natural basketball player and practice should be abolished.
Homework: What if we made 10-15 minute lecture videos for each class. Student would have to watch/take notes for 50 minutes at night. Then, in school, they do exercises together to practice, not just sit and listen. My favorite math class was 10 minutes of method demo and 40 minutes of practice questions: effective and relaxed.
Practical skills: History is useful, yes, especially for governance and historical equity. If Americans didn't know history well, more Southerners could get away with the false states rights narrative for the Civil War. But, on the whole, I agree we overly focus on literature and ancient history relative to modern skills, IMO.
I can guarantee you that, had this been the format, whoever I was assigned as a partner
would not have completed the lecture video from the previous night.
I have had courses in this style before, known as "flipped learning". It works reasonably well in my experience, although it's much easier to fall behind if you have other obligations outside of school, and having to note down questions and hold on to them until the next class is awkward.
Homework shouldn’t be abolished. It should be orchestrated. Someone should know vaguely how much homework teachers are putting out and ensure they don’t overlap too much or all assign huge projects at once. It’s much easier than it seems.
That said, abolishing HW is great too. It’s become a crutch for bad teachers.
As a child, and now as an adult, I've always thought homework was an insane proposition. If you had a job where you showed up in person for 7 (realistically more than 7) hours a day, but then assigned arbitrary multi-hour long projects afterhours, you'd quit, 1000%.
> In my opinion, 8AM is too early.
First bell for us was 7:18. Meaning the bus showed up at 6:30. Meaning wake up was 5:45.
Looking back, my four years of high school were probably the worst years of my life. I'm glad, at least for a brief minute, current high school students are getting some kind of reprieve.
> Housework (fixing things, cleaning etc), finance, time management, how to actually learn/study effectively, mental health awareness, working out with correct technique and not ruining your body, how to eat healthily
Everything on your list except housework was part of my required curriculum in High School in 1990s California (and the housework stuff was offered as an elective called Home Economics). Now I wonder if it's still there.
Which the UK does - not that's with out its problems i.e. having two tier gcse's aka reintroducing the old CSE exams - for those (working class) kids that where supposed to leave school at 16.
During the NATO bombing of Serbia 20+ years ago, for us, teens, life was never better - no school, no work, parents worrying about basic stuff (i.e. not us) - just plenty of outside socializing and random activity. Everybody remembers that as good old times :)
I can imagine the same to be true now, not to that extent.
There's still a lot of outdoor and online activities going on. There's much less indoor activities and outdoor activities with big groups or in close proximity, but there's still a lot of activities going on.
My general feeling (which includes my own family's behavior) is that people have returned to hanging out with whoever they used to. They just don't go to restaurants or other social settings to do it.
There aren't "organized" activities, but I see kids out playing on my street every single evening.
Honestly it's refreshing to see kids behaving organically for once instead of their parents shuttling them from one activity to the next.
True. Things have gotten better, but for a few months nothing really happened at all, at least where I live. I don’t think that was a good time except for those kids that spend all their time playing videogames anyway, which would’ve included me when I was in school, but not most people.
NATO intervention in the Yugoslav civil war wasn't carpet bombing civilian houses and hostile invasion, they bombed key military and infrastructure targets and sent troops in to stop a genocide. Though of course there were plenty of civilian casualties.
I used to work with a guy at British Telecom who had been in the under 21 national football squad of one of the waring nations - he was drafted and lost his lower leg to a mine.
He was medevac'd to the UK and with support from a local business man did a degree at Manchester I think
As a teenager I liked being sick, because it allowed me to stay home from school and gave an exemption from PE classes for a week or two. Feeling awful physically seemed like a small price to pay for that.
It doesn't at all surprise me that teenagers feel better when they don't have to go to school.
I used to be rather anxious during some of my school years, dreading all the social interactions I would be forced into, with people that I did not want to be part of my life. I think that's normal and perhaps a necessary part of human development. I'm fine now, at least.
I agree it’s an uncomfortable, but necessary part of human development.
One of the worst things you can do for your mental health is avoid uncomfortable feelings. All that usually accomplishes is making those feelings even worse.
That’s why exposure therapy is such a big part in dealing with phobias and anxiety. It’s counter intuitive, but being stressed and anxious (within reason) helps you develop coping mechanisms that come in really handy in life.
Wiki: "Exposure therapy is based on the principle of respondent conditioning often termed Pavlovian extinction.[16] The exposure therapist identifies the cognitions, emotions and physiological arousal that accompany a fear-inducing stimulus and then tries to break the pattern of escape that maintains the fear. This is done by exposing the patient to progressively stronger fear-inducing stimuli.[17] Fear is minimized at each of a series of steadily escalating steps or challenges (a hierarchy), which can be explicit ("static") or implicit ("dynamic" — see Method of Factors) until the fear is finally gone.[18] The patient is able to terminate the procedure at any time."
I think there are some key differences between the above and what school permits.
It's a tough problem conceptually. At some point you "grow up" and your fears, biases, and immaturities are crystallized. What is the difference between a preference, and something that you must overcome to mature? To me it seems (mostly) arbitrary. The distinction primarily being that once you're an adult, you can choose when to remain comfortable, and when to keep pushing yourself. When you're a child, it's forced on you.
And for sure, a child who was never put outside of his comfort zone would make a bad adult. It's just hard to know until hindsight. Some things are simple bad, and should be avoided, but other things are immaturities, and you could grow out of them.
Struggle to think of something more cruel and with less value you could legally subject children to than public schooling. If one good thing comes out of 2020 it will hopefully be a mass realisation that you shouldn't be entrusting your child's future to these people.
If the whole of schooling can be replaced by a few videocalls during 2020, what value was it ever really providing.
It will be fascinating to see the studies years from now. Comparing things like people who graduated in 2019 vs those who graduated in 2020 (a few months of school disrupted) vs 2021 (more than a year of school disrupted). There may be difficult confounders to deal with, like "the economy also changed a lot due to the pandemic", so it's hard to compare across years; "having already found a job before the pandemic" would also be significant, so it's hard to compare differently-aged people during the same year.
The best would be something like comparing people from different U.S. states or cities that are roughly similar, but one city shut down school much longer than the other. (Perhaps even comparing schools, although "whether a school decided to err on the side of staying shut down" probably correlates with something that would affect kids' performance.)
Anyway, let me pre-register my prediction that, if good studies can be done, they will show that kids who were forced to miss a year of school (or in-person school, at least) will not have been measurably negatively impacted by it.
Babysitting children is a huge value for society, and it's how schools were formed in the first place. Video schooling had limited success in teaching grade material, but I feel it was mostly put in place to maintain continuity and upkeep pupils' habits.
Maybe now's the right time to talk on how to improve public schooling, or what to replace it with.
>and it's how schools were formed in the first place //
I'd be pretty sure that wasn't true. If you're thinking towards our tribal ancestors then I'd expect that children would be brought on with skills and work as quickly as possible in order to strengthen the tribe.
The oldest school establishments in the UK - from Late Antiquity/Early Middle Ages - certainly weren't for "babysitting" (ie provision of nutrition and as much care as needed to prevent injury).
In the 1980s they built a biodome out in the middle of the desert and planted trees inside of it. The trees would grow faster than anticipated and then come crashing down. Turns out without the stressor of wind, trees look happier, at first, but do not build the strong stress wood needed to support their natural height.
If anything this is an argument to let the kids be taught by their parents and let the kids help with the parents work like the "good old days" rather than in the biodomes that are schools.
You need a proper dose of the right kind of stressor for the person. I don’t know what’s proper and right for each person, but it’s worth avoiding the simple assumption that “stress/anxiety = bad thing, therefore less stress/anxiety = good thing.”
You're not wrong, but I disagree a lot with your metaphor. Measuring stress and anxiety is important for mental health. The solutions are not necessarily binary, but the measurement is important.
Framing anxiety as the wind in this analogy, I'd say the _unnatural_ amount of social concerns we impose on children---and people as a whole---is more like growing trees in a wind tunnel.
Yeah, anxiety is a natural response. And we've developed biological mechanisms to adapt to it. But the application of anxiety has changed _so much_ in just the last few centuries. Anxiety sources have proliferated. Beyond food and shelter, we have anxieties about grades, waking up early, approval from peers, et cetera. This compounds, especially if you come from a family that struggles to even provide food and shelter. Children are also then told they live in a meritocracy and therefore should internalize their shortcomings and bad marks.
I digress, but I don't think we can appeal to nature and argue our current situation as natural. We can be doing better.
State your conclusion. Not doing so forces us to guess what you mean and is just poor communication. You're forcing me (and everyone that reads this comment) to guess what you mean.
Based on what _I think_ you're trying to say, I think this is a terrible take and I hate everything about it. People aren't trees. Society, people, and children especially shouldn't be forced to be exposed to anxiety inducing, depressing, and stress inducing situations. (But that's what I'm guessing what you're saying, since you have not put a real conclusion or clear statement there.)
Anyone interested in this should definitely read John Taylor Gatto.
His book 'Dumbing Us Down' gives a good overview about how school influences children.
That was to be expected. Less stress in school, less bullying and so on. Interestingly, my anxiety has risen dramatically during the pandemic, because of the fear of job loss.
> Rebecca from Cardiff, who has a son aged 14 with Asperger's Syndrome and a 12-year-old boy who is also on the autism spectrum, said both children were happy before but the drop in their stress levels has been "unbelievable".
This is a common anecdote. Aspies report being more comfortable and less bullied at virtual school vs physical school.
It's not really surprising to anyone I think. School is hell for lots of teenagers. You're forced into a prison like setting with strict rules and little freedom, and you're forced to interact with a huge number of immature people of similar age - of whom the chances are a few will make your life hell, and you have no choice in getting away from it.
I would have been 100% happier as a kid if I could have simply done my education on my own or virtually, and spent my time with people I actually enjoyed the company of. Sort of what it's like to be an adult actually. The modern school system is such a terrible model.
A big part of what makes school uncomfortable is related to the physical space in which it takes place. As you said it, it has many attributes of a prison. Too crowded, which means too noisy. Closed, which means there's no room for breathing when things get socially too heated. Little privacy. In many places of the world, included rich ones, schools are in a state of disrepair. And in general, they display a situation where users have no input in the design process.
American schools resemble actual prisons in many ways. From the architecture of buildings to the freezing temperature (prisoners fight less when cold) they are shockingly similar. And they have to wake up unnaturrally early.
I think it all comes down to how students are seen by architects and the school system in general. I wonder if private schools are different.
My high school had windows you couldn’t see out of at all. They were made of plastic when built in the 70s and the material degraded within a few years and turned opaque. Class started at about 7:20, which meant I “woke up” at 6 (usually after staying up super late hacking on things on the late 90s Internet). Lunch was at like 10:45 and was barely food with no water, if I ate at all.
It definitely felt like we were trapped in there and held against our will.
I think Japanese schools are something to learn from. They usually have openable windows to let fresh air in, the "commons" area is usually outdoor and students cleanup and care for the school itself -- which teaches students to be responsible and it makes them feel like they are an essential part of the school, not brains to be herded. I don't care much for the uniforms though.
Now I am curious how schools in scandanavia are, given their famous prisons.
There's a lot to...not like, about Japanese schools, but the whole "students take care of cleaning" thing is something I do think would be nice to see in the US.
But that's the same part of me talking that wishes everyone was "forced" to work a retail or food service job for a year or two of their life. Probably impossible to actually do and enforce here, but would definitely make people overall be nicer and more considerate of others (and in the case of cleaning schools, more likely to clean up after themselves).
Come on, if you are referring to schools in the U.S this is a gross misrepresentation of reality. School lunches are mandated by federal law (milk and/or juice is to be provided). Its hardly 'no food at all'. The fact _you choose_ to stay up all night hacking on things does not matter in the hours of school operation. What about the people that go to bed at 8 and are morning people?
You went to bed at 8 as a 16 year old? That seems... atypical for a teenager or even an adult. Even my father, who is definitely a morning person and wakes up at 4:30 or 5 every day, doesn’t go to bed at 8.
I was and am a vegetarian, and maybe in wealthy districts they have better lunch options, but certainly not in mine. The fact that we largely tie school funding to property taxes is a huge problem. Regardless, let’s not pretend that school lunch, at least in the 90s, was actually healthy or good or even at a reasonable time for lunch.
We had three lunches per day, mostly overlapping with other classes. As in, you were either on A, B, or C lunch while the other kids were in class. Often, A lunch wasn't prepared yet and C lunch didn't have enough by the end of it. This was a chronic condition in a few CA schools when I attended.
My SO was a teacher for a few years too. Despite Free and Reduced Lunch (FRL) being offered and encouraged, many kids' parents still could not be bothered to sign their kids up until late in the year. My SO kept food in the drawers of the desk for these kids. In addition, FRL did not cover the weekends, so many kids would come in on Monday having not eaten for that weekend. Though not common, it was again chronic with these kids.
Food scarcity in the US is still very much a 'thing', unfortunately.
I remember being very hungry most of the day. If I ate, it was usually because I had enough change to buy junk-food snacks from a vending machine. I didn't know until recently other people also had similar experiences.
The CDC and other health orgs actually recommend starting schools a bit later [1]. Going through puberty plus some people naturally waking up later (sleeping early just means waking up most of the night) has serious health implications when waking up too early consistently.
Probably, but interestingly in my local school district they have moved up the start time even though there is no bus service offered past elementary school…
The fact _you choose_ to stay up all night hacking on things does not matter in the hours of school operation.
That's pretty frustrating to read. I was sleep deprived enough to sleep 15 hours a day on the weekends during high school, but actually going to bed before midnight still just resulted in staring at a dark ceiling for an hour.
Sleep hygiene is important, but at a certain point the circadian rhythm will put its foot down.
The unfortunate reality is that people have to meet up at some point and overlap for much of the day. This is as true for an adult as for a child. I say this as a night owl myself; the world hasn’t picked our way.
True enough, but starting at 9:00 AM instead of 7:30 AM still leaves plenty of time for that. It wouldn't have been enough for me, but an extra hour and half of sleep would have been way better than nothing.
I also suspect that starting at 11 AM-1 PM and going until 4-5 PM, despite being less overall time, would produce vastly better academic outcomes in high school just due to the average teenage circadian rhythm and the resulting zombification of current students. The noneducational duties of high school could be handled by letting students show up earlier as needed with breakfast/lunch provided- the structured classes would just start later.
Maybe give the early arrivers a place to take a nap while we're at it.
Starting at even 8:30 would have been life changing for me. I, like you, just couldn’t fall asleep before midnight (still don’t). Not that I think we should accommodate people like me that naturally are later, but the average 16 year old isn’t happily waking up at 6 am.
I totally agree that if we focused on getting kids a reasonable amount of sleep and a healthy meal or two (and hydrated!), we’d likely be able to have much better outcomes.
The CDC recommends schools start at 8:30. I have the same sleeping habit as you, regardless of my work schedule (including graveyard shift over the years), I naturally wake up later than 7-8am and I am most productive late noon or after 1am.
We need to fight for our rights. Build systems that will weed out the early risers. :D
I was taking prescribed sleeping pills because I couldn't fall asleep and had anxiety attacks late at night if I forced it. My school started at 6 am so I got up at 5 am. It got pretty bad at some point.
My dad and grandfather both have problem sleeping early but I am worse.
> American schools resemble actual prisons in many ways.
It's not just american schools. All schools resemble prisons because all school systems around the world essentially adopted the american model which borrowed heavily from the prussian model.
All schools were compulsory indoctrination centers which buttressed the burgeoning nation-states.
Modern education system, along with national media, government, etc are pillars of the nation-state. You can't have a nation-state without one nowadays.
I've seen how schools are in other countries both in person and on video. In the US down to the doors and walls they are almost identical. Perhaps the US does it a bit too well?
That was the impression I always got from my 1984-built Elementary school building. It was all concrete block construction with odd roof angles taken low to the ground. Many fond memories of using the Macintosh LCs in a completely-windowless freezing-cold chamber in the center of the building.
Not just the cold war. My elementary school was originally from the early 20th century and it had the vestiges of the subsequent wars: bomb shelter signs, eerie hallways without windows, heavy metal doors to transition between sections of the building.
> My elementary school was originally from the early 20th century and it had the vestiges of the subsequent wars: bomb shelter signs, eerie hallways without windows, heavy metal doors to transition between sections of the building.
Some/all of that have less to do with war and more to do with general disaster preparedness.
* Bomb shelters provide shelter from...bombs, yeah
* Windowless hallways provide shelter from tornadoes (no glass to break/become shrapnel)
* The heavy metal doors are firewalls that automatically close when the alarm goes off (most are hollow, won't do shit against assault weapons and predate even Columbine)
An example: most schools in northeastern US are built around windowless hallways; most schools in the southwest and California have classrooms that open directly into the outdoors, with mezzanines, walkways, and staircases exposed directly to the elements.
Which one is supposed to be prison-like? Both just seem like utilitarian architecture to me (and so are prisons I guess). You don't want students to have to walk out in the elements between rooms in the middle of winter in New York, and you'd want to maximise the number of windows that classrooms have (since that's where students spend the majority of their day), so where else would you put hallways?
I suppose you could put windows between the classrooms and hallways, but those have their own associated problems to overcome: increased noise, more windows for students to break, safety in emergency situations, etc.
As for non-connected classrooms, where you need to walk outside to go between rooms, I've always thought that was to solve the same problems. Cheaper to build/renovate/modify/expand, easier to clean, less noise and fewer students running into each other.
The east coast school hallway is more prison-like, by far. There's a reason it's a horror movie cliche. Windowless, clinical, institutional, often with tiles on the walls and floor to make cleaning easier.
The doors are part of the response to massive gun ownership in the US. To try to keep schools safer, many have airlock-style entrances, metal detectors, and other systems to try to prevent people with guns from getting inside.
My high school looks indistinguishable from a prison. When I have to drive by it now while visiting home I always kind of shudder. Giant mostly windowless buildings with a giant fence surrounding.
Everything in the US is a prison. The 1980 Olympic village in Lake Placid was built to be a federal prison, briefly functioned as the Olympic village housing athletes, and has functioned as a federal prison ever since then.
The other issue to consider is that the vast majority of American high schools have start times that are far too early for the typical teenager's circadian rhythm.[1]
Sleep deprivation has a major effect on generalized anxiety[2]. The research I would like to see done, is to test whether the groups of students with the earliest starting schools saw larger drops in anxiety during the transition to full remote.
My high school experience was very different from this. We were given a lot of freedom and treated like young college students. I guess that isn't the norm so I'm thankful for the experience. I can imagine that things might have tightened up since 2002-06.
YMMV. I have a good friend who went to an American international school in Belgium that did the IB. It was a lot like you describe - many more freedoms and the teenagers were treated more like adults. He had a very good experience there. My experience at a large state school in the Bay Area was pretty much the opposite.
I agree that school is challenging for kids. However, isn't work also "a prison like setting with strict rules and little freedom, and you're forced to interact with a huge number of immature people of similar age"? I agree we need school reforms but kids also crave schedule and interaction. I'm not sure how they get those while their parents are away at work. We can argue about what the perfect interactions are for kids. People can also decide to do home schooling if they don't like the existing systems. In the end, life is complicated and anxiety inducing. We all need these life skills to deal with these stresses. I think we need more classes specifically around teaching coping skills and learning how to interact with others. I think that will be more beneficial than kids just staying in their bedrooms everyday.
"Most of us"? Really? I absolutely acknowledge that some jobs do this as other commenters have noted. But "most" sounds like an extreme stretch. I've he;d plenty of low-paying, manual labor jobs and never even heard of the practice until the last few years. It's the overwhelming norm at schools and - as far as I've seen - fairly exceptional at a job.
You're right. giant companies like amazon don't make you ask permission to use the bathroom. they just fire you for not performing at a pace where you fail if you use the bathroom, so then people start peeing in water bottles.
You think you can just take a bathroom break every time you like when you're working retail? Most people I know have worked a retail job or service industry job where they have assigned break periods, and bathroom usage outside of those would be impossible, or very frowned upon.
I guess some people in this industry had parents with enough money to avoid ever having to do a non-tech industry job? That would surprise me.
Some manual or skilled labour jobs would permit random breaks, I guess. But most people I know worked service industry. You don't get to just leave a cash register unattended because your bladder says to.
In my experience, the problem of needing to go to the bathroom while also needing to man a register was overcome by a quick "yo, could you cover me for a sec?" to a coworker.
My original comment certainly didn't have much nuance in it, but I would certainly draw a distinction between a reasonable need to schedule bathroom breaks around job duties and the need to raise one's hand and ask someone's permission, which they can arbitrarily deny.
It's not so much the low-payingness as much as the corporate-behemothness.
People that work at Walmart, Amazon, major grocery store chains, etc. (i.e. the major employers in America) are expected to man their post until it's time for their legally mandated scheduled bathroom break.
I suspect most people did have a job like that once in their lives. Then again, the last time I actually had a job like that I was actually still in high school, so that sort of policy didn't seem too strange to me at the time.
In some situations you can pee whenever you want, but you might miss your quota as a result and get fired. Weren't Amazon warehouse workers having to pee into bottles to keep up, or was that just exaggeration?
The difference is that work pays you and you are free to choose a different job/business/employer and if you are highly paid (or work on your skills to become highly paid) you are able to save money and not have to work at all for a certain period of time and live off savings.
School is a prison you're forced to go to, are not paid and are typically not able to change schools like you would change jobs (you could potentially go to a private school, but that would depend on your parents having and willing to spend the $$$).
At work, you're by and large subject to the laws of the country, not a mix of arbitrary "policy" dreamed up to keep administrators out of trouble and the law of the strongest and most violent.
For example: If you are assaulted on work grounds, you have a right to self-defense which will be respected by the police, who will show up, as opposed to being punished the exact same as the person who committed the assault by a school administrator who has decided that Zero Tolerance/Fight-Free Schools means everyone who is involved in an altercation is automatically equally guilty.
> I think we need more classes specifically around teaching coping skills and learning how to interact with others.
This is a good thought, but it runs up against the fact it would involve teaching students to stand up to arbitrary and capricious authority, which is the strategy a number of teachers use to maintain class order. Being able to cope and interact with the world necessarily entails being able to push back against the worst abuses of many school systems, religious organizations, and, yes, to some extent work environments.
Not just that, but they’re also actively isolated from people who aren’t of similar age. Teenagers (who don’t happen to have an older sibling) go through the identity-crisis period of puberty entirely without role-models to, well, model. Other than the made-up, exaggerated ones they see in TV shows.
It’s no wonder the adopted behaviour of most teenagers feels instead like some sort of cargo-culting of adult behavior, rather than a gradual acquisition of actual maturity; and no wonder that it’s such a mental shock for many teenagers when they either enter college or the working world, and so get exposed to non-age-segregated collaborative settings for the first time.
> a mental shock for many teenagers when they either enter college
The typical live-in-a-dorm college experience is not so much a mental shock as is about putting off adult life for another four years, while you party.
And, while older (30+) students do exist, most of them don't live in dorms (And those that do, don't live with all the 18-20 year olds.) They will be, at best on the distant periphery of your peer group.
For most people, college does not solve this problem.
Although undergrad is an opportunity to work in a research lab where you start to collaborate with graduate students and the professor that runs the lab. Additionally universities have many "students" (TAs,SAs,PLAs, there's many titles for them) running classes, so it provides a role model for students in a digestible n+1 format.
The overwhelming majority of students who go to college never see the inside of a lab - unless they need to stop by the 'computer lab' to print something off.
Most people, as it turns out, don't pursue technical degrees. Fewer than 10% of degrees are in STEM fields, with another ~10% being in a medicine-adjacent field.
The number of undegraduates who actually go on to do meaningful, novel, work in a lab (As opposed to just using a facility for a few hours, in order to pass a course) is even smaller than that.
I tuned out to those the moment I got to middle school and realized that I did not have to write all my assignments in pen, use cursive, or risk having my assignment shredded if I forgot to put my name on it.
Being an authoritarian asshole is probably a coping mechanism for teachers who struggle to navigate the same hellscape the students must. Teachers aren't immune from the school yard popularity contest: the charismatic teachers seem to have a much easier life than the rest.
I found it was usually older teachers who were authoritarian luddites. I don't think it was a coping mechanism, I just think that's how they genuinely thought the "real world" still works, as they had been teaching for 40 years and had no idea what non-teaching jobs and university were actually like.
Maybe those who teach secondary school do so because they have difficulty handling the real world.
* I both work as a full time developer at a fortune 100 company and teach a few sections of a college level programming class each semester. So I don’t know what this says about me.
> rather than a gradual acquisition of actual maturity
I don't think that's for the reasons you outlined, but rather because adolescents are treated like children right up until they've turned 18 and finished high school.
They go from basically having the rights and responsibilities of a child, to those of an adult, rather than a gradual growth of those rights and responsibilities as they mature.
Also, is it not common for teenagers to have jobs any more? I got my first job when I was 15, and haven't been unemployed for longer than a month since (I'm in my late 20s now).
That was one of the most fascinating things I've read this year. It put into words, many things that now seem obvious in retrospect, but that I couldn't quite articulate before. With the absence of role models, we form these mini-societies at an age when we are at our most cruel and judgemental, largely because there isn't anything else that seems more important at that age than social dynamics.
> Where or how would you meet real people that have similar interests?
From your family/friend/neighborhood groups? Are you saying schools are where you go to meet people of similar interests? How can that be when schools are for everyone?
> Humans are social creatures
Humans are social creatures with in-group bias. Especially young kids. Schools are an unnatural system for humans. It's why kids universally don't like school. It's why you have to force, trick and brainwash them into liking school.
You might want to read up on the history of modern education system. They certainly weren't created to meet people with similar interests.
The problem we have right now is that schools were closed but other social avenues weren't/aren't open.
We have the option here in Ontario to keep our kids home and do home learning. But anything else the kids might do to get social exposure and even physical exertion is effectively closed.
Real home schooled kids usually have clubs and so on that they attend to hang out with other kids. That avenue is closed off.
My kids have to go back, just for their own mental health. As awful as the schools might be right now, they'll be better than being stuck at home playing Dragon Quest Builders II through for the third time.
Kids don't universally like anything (good or bad for them--thats kids in general), so that argument is irrelevant.
Family? Mom and Dad are 2 people? Did you follow the footsteps of either? Probably not as you have unique interests and tastes. Neighborhood groups? I grew up in an area where I was the only child within 6 blocks? Am I out of luck? Schools _are_ the neighborhood group!!!
Edit: I am well-versed on both the history and current status of the education system. Both my parents and my spouse are full-time teachers.
> Kids don't universally like anything (good or bad for them--thats kids in general)
Didn't say they did. Just said there is a reason why they universally don't like one thing - school.
> so that argument is irrelevant.
The argument isn't irrelevant because it goes against your assertion : "Humans are social creatures". Schools weren't created to be social environments for kids. They weren't created for socializing. Kids don't socialize in a group of 1000 kids. Schools, in fact, prevent socialization. Kids tend to socialize after school. Everything you've said so far is indoctrination nonsense. If you wanted kids to socialize, school is the last thing you'd build.
> Family? Mom and Dad are 2 people? Did you follow the footsteps of either?
So no siblings, uncles, aunts, grandparents, cousins, etc? Also, do you have to follow in their footsteps to get your social needs from family?
> I grew up in an area where I was the only child within 6 blocks? Am I out of luck?
I wonder what people like you did before schools were invented 150 years ago? Is there a reason why you can't go out 7 blocks?
So you only had a father and mother in your family and were bound to a rule that limited you to 6 blocks?
> Edit: I am well-versed on both the history and current status of the education system. Both my parents and my spouse are full-time teachers.
Now I understand why you think the way you do. Just because your parents are school teachers doesn't mean they or you know the history of the education system. Actually, the fact that your parents worked for the system incentivizes you to ignore the history of the modern school system. It's what happens when you rely on the system for a paycheck.
Wow, you truly are delusional. If you think there is no social aspect to schools then i'm wasting my keystrokes. Read up on what modern families look like, rarely (except for immigrant families mostly) are they 'extended'.
I'm replying to the parent comment that stated online and virtual learning are superior to attending schools. It was implied the ONLY purpose of school is to ascertain knowledge when that's merely one (small) aspect.
"Schools, in fact, prevent socialization" is maybe one of the most divorced from reality statements I've ever read on HN.
Good luck on your future journey.
Edit: Created 20 days ago explains everything
You say this in a country that has a fairly sizable immigrant population. And you don't have to live in the same house to be able to visit grandma on the other side of town.
Just said there is a reason why they universally don't like one thing - school
That’s demonstrably false. I have plenty of friends in university right now who love school and have great memories of it going all the way back to kindergarten.
I didn’t love high school but I enjoyed elementary school and I love university. I can also think of a few changes that would have made high school a much better experience. Now that I’m in university, I see how much better it could be!
Totally agree. Schools act as a social hub for kids K-12. Most kids spend a great deal of time socializing, in, around, and in activities related to their school.
Why do these threads and many other political things become zero-sum?
You can have an alternative alongside current standard school structure. You don't need to abolish the current schools but run the alternative and see which one performs better. I find it upsetting how people don't want to introduce alternatives or let man have a choice. Why do people don't want others to have a choice?
You can see this almost everywhere. Take apple walled garden threads. Just why?
Have diverse schools and structure. Some can have bigger breaks and start at noon. Some can be stretched out age wise and be more sociable place. Others can be like prison.
It's bizzare how similar schools are here (India). Some of it is forced by bureaucracy of the state and central government but a lot of it is self imposed while handing out creative and diversity points in their advertisement pamphlet.
When I was a kid I had a lot of friends in the local neighborhood. Kids used to just go outside and play with each other. Plus my parents were involved in the local community and knew a lot of other parents with kids, so they organized social stuff for me and my siblings. These were some of the best experiences I had growing up.
But you're right - school is the place where most people form friendships, just like adults at work. It's harder to form friendships if you're not regularly put into social situations with others. I'm not sure what the best answer is institutionally, but I don't think the current state school system is the right one.
I think you had a specific, but not unique, experience at school. Lots of people find it, as well as the rules and structure, an escape from their home life which is much worse than school could ever be.
We already have enough difficulty having constructive arguments or disagreements. If we removed the social aspect of schooling we would have an entire generation of people with the softest skin imaginable. No conflict resolution abilities whatsoever.
I have seen the "conflict resolution" results - it is better described as actively misteaching. It leaves some scarred for life while teaching others to actively be bad actors. They would be better off without that and the hazing mentality.
I would bet it has less to do with school being hell and bet it had more to do with less Instagram bragging. Everyone is basically at home on lockdown with is fairly equal. No one is really out traveling or doing anything cool.
good points i totally agree. now that they have it online, they can relax in knowing that they don't have to worry about being trapped with multiple kids that you hate for 7 hours every day.
I don't think this is accurate reflection for most people although I do agree it can be stressful.
That 'life can cause anxiety' doesn't mean it's bad.
Learning anything, exams, trying new things - it's all going to cause some degree of stress and anxiety.
School has constraints, but most of those constraints exist for self-learning anyhow - it takes a fair degree of composure or focus anyhow.
School is not 'living hell' for the vast majority of kids, I don't even know a single person who ever described it that way, though I'm sure it exists.
Structured learning has really no equivalent, especially for those who want to engage.
There are obvious reforms that could be made, not the least of which would be students approaches. Also - a lot more sports (daily), music, and longer term projects and probably some kind of structured free time.
While I kind of agree with you - why do you think that coming out of the school is any different from being in the school itself?
You will still be forced to interact with a bunch of immature kids after school except this time they will not even know they are still children and may be responsible for paying your salary, too.
Sitting around the house playing video games and watching netflix all day makes teenagers happier than going to school, getting some exercise and having a job? What a revelation.
Wow, the claim that increases in teen suicide would be greater than COVID-19 deaths looks even more silly now than it did then, which was already pretty silly.
I read this in the article "There was a 2% decrease in boys at risk of depression and a 3% increase in girls at risk of depression" but I guess that's not considered a "large" change.
The study also reported specifically that "Students at risk of depression pre-pandemic showed a reduction in depression scores in comparison to students with no depression pre-pandemic (HADS score of 0-6) who showed an small increase in depression scores." So it was the very students most likely to be depressed before the pandemic that are doing (slightly) better, and the small increase (from 3.0 to 3.9) does not raise students into the range considered most dangerous (7+)
Please try to avoid personal jabs and rule-breaking questions, thanks.
The projection of increased suicide in that study is based primarily on unemployment rate, but unemployment in 2020 is considerably different from unemployment in 2018 (the year they used as a baseline) due to unusual federal benefits that left as many as 68% earning more while unemployed than they did while working[0]. Actual suicide rates do to seem yet to be climbing as predicted, although it will take some time to see what the actual deleterious events turn out to be.
The only reason I got through highschool is that I realized that nothing would happen if I skipped classes. From then on, I would wake up in the morning, pretend I would go to class, go to the Virgin megastore instead and read manga all day. Of course I would still go to exams, and of course they ended up calling my parents a number of times, but it worked out in the end. I passed the exams, and I went to uni.
I can only imagine how awesome it is to be a teenager right now. You have a natural advantage against the virus due to your age, and you/your buds don't need to attend school. Fire up the Xbox and grab your Mtn Dew boys it's time to drop into Verdansk.
A lot of folks in here are pointing out that this makes sense because the kids get to wake up later.
We'll soon have some real data on this. California passed a law last year that requires high school start after 8:30 am. Schools have until the 2022 school year to implement the law, which means we'll have a natural case study as different schools implement it this year (once we return to in person school) and next year and the year after.
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 180 ms ] threadThe list of problems that schools face (overcrowding, parental pressure, curricula packed with superfluous stuff no one will ever need again, curricula not even close to incorporating modern technology, buildings obviously in disrepair, way too early start times) is long, and it hasn't shrunk for years now.
I suggest medically induced commas for 8 hours a day. It's quite a safe technology with minimal long term negative effects.
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You're getting downvoted for the coma comment, but this here is spot on. When the schools got locked down because of the 'rona, the most pressing problem for parents was that they had no place to put their kid into or a way to care for the kids themselves because rents these days require that both parents work...
It was just a modest proposal.
So really, let's focus on what matters, the original point of holding down a job was clearly to enjoy the A/C at the office.
Besides, those who suffer with it the most either don't vote or have little political relevance or maturity to make a stand. And parents are not good mediators, since they tend to focus on the outcomes, not the day to day life of the student.
That's how you reach the unfortunate situation we have today.
I do not think that countries where people under 18 years old can vote are common.
> but never so broken that it actually demands a top to bottom reform.
I would challenge that, it's just that it does not affect adults which is why it has been ignored until now.
Every cohort of teenagers since ancient times has believed, it seems, that their parents didn't understand. I think then one finds the ignorance was usually balanced in the other direction. Parents in general do want their offspring to grow to be self sufficient, which does require some pain - we're not going to be here forever to care for our kids - but most parents want their kids to get through their whole life with fulfillment and happiness. Sometimes that means a little hardship for a greater life overall.
This I think accounts for parents, in general, seeming to be hard on teenagers. Those teenagers will either realise it was for good or initiate a revolution in how they treat their own teens. That revolution hasn't happened yet.
My observation is that we go in cycles - parents are liberal, their children are more conservative (when they become parents), so their children respond by being more liberal, etc..
These paleo-conservatives are who elected Trump and they are correct in exactly one thing: there is a cultural war against their outdated views.
I'm not sure that makes it unecessary, or bad.
The study is for anxiety of school, not anxiety in general. Now that people are at home, of course they are going to be less anxious of schooling.
Quote:
“With children and young people having been out of the classroom for so long, and with many students in this study seeing improvements in mental health and wellbeing during that time, the case to address issues weighing on their quality of life at school is stronger than ever.”
https://www.bristol247.com/news-and-features/news/anxiety-in...
"With children and young people having been out of the classroom for so long, and with many students in this study seeing improvements in mental health and wellbeing during that time, the case to address issues at school weighing on their quality of life is stronger than ever."
When in doubt, consult the primary source: https://sphr.nihr.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Young-Peo...
Quote: "Compared to pre-pandemic, there was an overall decrease in risk of anxiety, and an increase in wellbeing but no large change in risk of depression"
I seen no evidence for that claim, in either article.
"A first-of-its-kind report by the University of Bristol reveals younger teenagers across the South West felt less anxious and more connected to school when they were away from it during the Covid-19 lockdown."
Note:
"felt less anxious and more connected to school when they were away from it".
Note:
"school"
Note:
"when they were away from it"
- Homework should be abolished
- School should start at a reasonable time. In my opinion, 8AM is too early. Kids that live far away have to wake up at 6AM, which is not a normal time judging by when kids wake up during summer break (9-10AM). 9AM would be acceptable. Not sure how much it would affect teachers' lives though.
- Kids should be made aware of the psychological help they can receive if they have personal issues. We had a psychologist at school, but I don't think anyone consulted them.
- Kids should be taught practical life skills over random trivia. Housework (fixing things, cleaning etc), finance, time management, how to actually learn/study effectively, mental health awareness, working out with correct technique and not ruining your body, how to eat healthily are all things that I value more than knowing the intricate details of how the European Union came to be (knowing history is useful and interesting, but I'd have rather spent that time on the aforementioned things). Of course, a lot of kids are going to complain many things in this list are boring, but they will value them once they grow older. PE in my school didn't teach any theory, which is just stupid looking back. Our body is with us for the rest of our lives, we should have the knowledge of how to take care of it.
Also, certain degree of freedom is something that everyone wants and values in their life. It would probably be expensive and hard, but if possible, I'd try to give kids a way to choose a small part of their study path.
An entire essay on the subject: https://www.alfiekohn.org/article/getting-hit-head-lessons/
A big problem with school for me was that very little of it was framed in a way that made it seem useful. In subjects where I either understood the value (math for example, as I learned to program in my teens, so saw value in it to do things I wanted. While many of my peers followed the “it’s only useful if you want to be a math teacher” philosophy) or had some kind of extra interest in, I did well in, but even in subjects I chose to do, liked and was good at (eg German), I struggled trying to find the motivation to do any homework. Being forced to didn’t help, I would rather stare into space for an hour than actually spend the time on homework.
A big part of it, I think, was I needed downtime. I had already spend many hours in school and now was being told I needed to spend my time doing more school stuff? No thanks!
Even now, a couple of decades later, I need downtime to process the things that happened during the day. I’m a huge believer in Hammock Driven Development because of how important I feel thinking, reflection and downtime is.
EDIT: hell, I did really bad on one subject I used to be great at because of the homework: the homework load was too high so I dropped to the lower level class instead, which was the start of my downward spiral: it was too easy so I didn’t do much in it, the teacher didn’t push me and a few years later I struggled and never recovered. If the homework load were less, I would have stayed in the higher level class and, while I’m not certain, I’m pretty sure I could have at least maintained my ability instead of it deteriorating. I still believe I would have done better in my final exam at age 13 than I did at age 17 because of this.
It all boils down to not wanting to put any effort in the end.
Would you also say that programmers writing code on computers instead of pen & paper just "don't want to put any effort in"?
In the school during lesson, there is less privace as people look at you struggling and plus there is always someone to instantly nudge you.
I strongly believe that tests are an underutilized way to teach. Many seems to believe that you can't learn anything during tests, that they are only there to evaluate kids. However actually sitting and thinking about stuff is really important and tests helps with that.
Tests are not place for individual problem solving nor for figuring stuff out, they are for when you already learned that stuff and is proving to others that you did.
I do agree that's a useful life skill, but that is really scraping the barrel for reasons why homework works.
The problem there is we can find examples where there is no homework and a functional, thriving society behind it [0]
0: https://www.bbc.com/news/education-37716005
To me school is mostly about teachers checking on students instead of them actually explaining things. Once I was on a summer school in the Netherlands during university and I remember one of the professors saying that during the first 2 semesters they need the students to unlearn destructive behaviours from school. E.g. admitting when they don't know something and to ask. I'm from Germany but to me it seems like a problem occurring in many countries.
The Montessori Method of Education, developed by Italian physician Maria Montessori, is a child-centered educational approach based on scientific observations of children. The method views the child as naturally eager for knowledge and capable of initiating learning in a supportive, thoughtfully prepared learning environment. It attempts to develop children physically, socially, emotionally and cognitively.[1]
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montessori_education
I used them, they were great for scoring high quality drugs. All I needed to do was memorize a list of symptoms, regurgitate them and get referred to a specialist and do the same again.
Which is why as an adult I find the whole area of psychiatry to be bunk. And that's supposedly the harder of the psychological sciences. If you can't deal with false positives you have no place in medicine.
If I came in to a doctors office and demanded they reattach my missing leg, while clearly having two legs I'd be met (rightly) with skepticism, somehow when it comes to the mind it doesn't work that way. Surely someone would have figured out a way to measure the missing serotonin by now?
The total failure of positivism in clinical psychology is what resulted in the current state of affairs, pushing for more of it won't bring about any imagined golden age of psychology, only further `the pandemic of mental anguish that afflicts our time' [0]. Positivism is a flawed doctrine and at this point should be considered nothing but dangerous dogma -- at least in the case of psychiatry.
[0]: I believe it was Mark Fisher that said something to this end but I digress.
By any objective standard - suicide rates, lost days of work, self harm, substance abuse, murder, etc. - we are worse off or no better today than in 1960 when we were supposedly emotionally stunted and oppressed. Every extra dollar spent on psychology/psychiatry since then has been a waste.
That's not even touching on the crisis of reproducibility that has made a mockery of the entire field and put it somewhere between catholic confessionals and recreational drug use in terms evidence based outcomes.
You brought very little in defense of positivism, so I'm at a lose as to what I can respond with there. What I will say is that, by relying on a macroscopic outcome and declaring that any increase must be caused by the psychiatric field, you ignore the very obvious fact, something positivism constantly struggles with, that the world has changed since the 60's. Is the rise of social media the fault of psychiatry? Is underemployment? How about Fortress Europe?
By most microscopic measurements, clinical psychology is a cure that does help the majority of patients. Both in the long-term and short-term.
That is where we disagree.
Clinical psychology makes people feel better about themselves in the short term, long term there is a distinct lack of evidence of positive outcomes. And a lot of unrepeatable experiments that show positive trends which disappear when looked at more closely.
As for psychological help, maybe those who consulted them just didn't talk about it?
Absolutely agree on your last point though.
That's also probably only going to work for highschool aged kids. The reality is that they're probably capable of getting themselves to school if you have to leave early
THIS !
Cooking, Nutrition, Medicine, Drugs & Vitamins, Finance, Basic electronics etc. Practical stuff needed every day.
Schools mainly get funded through local property taxes. If you compare curriculum in towns that are generally middle and upper middle class with towns that have a larger lower middle class population you’ll probably see different curriculum. More AP classes, electives, life planning, etc.
The town I live in has pretty high taxes but it’s mainly to fund the local school system which ranks high. Just about everyone with kids uses the public school system because of this and it’s a big selling point to new residents home-shopping.
But we pay for it.
The curriculum broadly is determined by the school board.
The school board tends to be made up of more "well off" people.
They will prioritize the types of classes that they took to get them where they are.
If you are on the school board, you are most likely not a house wife, not a mechanic, not a seamstress, etc.
So you get a prioritization on classes that lead you down the "four year degree, rise to management" type of life.
Also, not sure 15 year old me could have imagined something less interesting than finance lessons where I get to figure out how to manage all the money I don’t have.
We had health class for a few years at my school.
> Finance
We had some basic finance, but I would have liked more. We covered writing a check and balancing a checkbook. I'd have liked to see more about calculating compound interest, as well as a primer on how taxes work. I can see the tax lesson failing, though, if it was too long before I got an actual job.
> Basic electronics
This was covered in college, but not high school. I'm not sure this is very practical for most people, either. People need to know how to use computers, but not necessarily how to design a circuit board.
I did in the 1970's computer programming at my comprehensive and we started with adders, half adders and machine language programming BTW this was for the CSE stream (this not going to university)
Professors teach, are they in that position because of some ineptitude? Of course not, the opposite.
Students' parents, guardians, extended cohabiting family, etc. have an impossibly diverse range of skills (and ability to communicate, etc.). Even if these people were available at all times, they remain a hugely variable source. If we're saying that practical life skills are important, we should aim to provide a consistent experience to avoid inequality in society.
I'm sure everyone has stories about how the people who raised them taught them a few things well and were terrible examples of others. Some of these will be funny, but others can have life changing consequences.
Should the school system be designed for ideals that don't hold true, or for the real world?
Sometimes YouTube (or online courses) can help: https://www.youtube.com/c/DadhowdoI/
But sorting good information from bad is a skill on its own. People come up with all kinds of heuristics with varying efficacy.
Eh, no; they're probably more available on average these days. Average working hours are down quite a lot in most developed countries, and far more people have regular scheduled employment (vs working on a farm or similar, which could frequently be every waking hour for most of the year). But the assumption that most parents either know these things or are good at teaching them is... optimistic, to say the least.
I was cooking some of my own meals from when I was 14 or so - Ok this was only simple stuff
They wake up that late because they're staying up late. They should be waking up when the sun tells them to, and go to sleep when their body tells them to, which doesn't happen because they're surrounded by light that messes up their circadian rhythm. This has a huge impact on things like anxiety.
Consequently, there can't be one time that is optimal. Why do we work the hours that we do, year round? It doesn't make sense biologically, it's an artifact of industrialization.
> “Research to date has shown that the circadian rhythms of adolescents are simply fundamentally different from those of adults and children,” said lead author Gideon Dunster, a UW doctoral student in biology.
> “All of the studies of adolescent sleep patterns in the United States are showing that the time at which teens generally fall asleep is biologically determined — but the time at which they wake up is socially determined,” said Dunster. “This has severe consequences for health and well-being, because disrupted circadian rhythms can adversely affect digestion, heart rate, body temperature, immune system function, attention span and mental health.”
Seen similar information from other sources, but this came up first after a quick search. Of course screen light probably makes the problem worse, but there do seem to be significant biological factors.
The one thing that disrupts the circadian rhythm dramatically is light. This is well-established and also mentioned in the article you linked.
Secondly, I probably don't disagree all that much on the (lack of) merits of the public school systems. Having said that, you can live a life within that system and not make it actively worse for yourself, no matter who is at fault. That's personal responsibility.
Regardless of our opinions, I think the goal of this entire thread is to discuss the shortcomings of the system and how we can make it better and not just blame the kids for not coping well with it?
The point is that no matter how injust "the system" is, no matter who is to blame for your predicament, there's always a way for you to make your situation worse still.
If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.
> Kids should be taught practical life skills over random trivia.
This is parenting vs schooling, ignoring the fact that many schools are really glorifed babysitting services.
And more importantly, history isn't "random trivia". While the merits of a degree in history may be debatable, if the majority of the UK had a passable knowledge in why the EU exists, and what the UK did to become an empire, the attitude towards integration with the EU would likely be very different.
> PE in my school didn't teach any theory, which is just stupid looking back.
PE is the bare minimum amount of exercise and movement a child could have without being considered "entirely sedantry". For many kids it's the _only_ exercise they get.
As much as I agree with other points, I can only strongly disagree here. It strongly implies a condescending attitude that stupid and uneducated decided about British future. If only they could be brainwashed^H taught they would choose the “right” option.
It's not condescending in the slightest, and debate around Brexit revealed that although theres's nothing wrong with being against european integration, a lot of people have almost no idea of what the EU does and does not do.
If people at large understood what happened and why we have the institutions we currently have, they are shown to be far more likely to be in favour of them.
For serious analyses of the Brexit question by extremely well equipped academics (I rather think they 'understand') and others try https://briefingsforbritain.co.uk/
I completely agree that the physical activity is important, but then let's not pretend that it's educative when it isn't.
It feels like PE was 2-3 years of gymnastics followed by 6-7 years of "let's just play basketball/volleyball/soccer" with a semester of swimming here-and-there. Certainly no instructions or structure to any of it.
As a fat kid, I was always the happiest when sitting out entirely (or swimming, where it turns out natural buoyancy is actually helpful).
Always getting Ds and Fs and being chosen last for any team activity led to me spend my college years on the couch.
Only through getting back pain and posture problems I found out 5 years later that I enjoy jogging and yoga and weightlifting and isometric exercise - if properly instructed.
It feels like I missed out on the years in between simply because PE at school never had the goal of helping kids be healthy - just keeping them busy in any way possible.
Workspaces aren't educative, of themselves, but they're a pretty important facet of running a school.
Due to all my previous negative experience, I chose to sort-of-quit PE altogether. It was impossible to actually quit, but you could compensate it with an equal amount of extra credit, so I happily replaced it with Arts credit.
Surprisingly, no one as much as batted an eyelid at that. The snobby attitude of "who needs PE anyway" was certainly prevalent in my age group.
A study has shown that PE in schools have show it has zero benefits and only teaches some kinds to skip classes.
You'll need a slightly stronger argument to meaningfully shape this debate
The discipline isn't, but the way at least I've been taught it unfortunately is... It didn't take me until I graduated to take an interest in history, when I could learn the cause and effect chains without getting distracted by rote memorization.
If I'm being honest with myself, my answer is probably no. "If only they taught _" for me, can be boiled down to "If only I was 30 in grade school"
Even if you select for ability along some axis, you still get different interests and learning styles - and personalities.
Learning is basically industrial, uselessly abstracted [1] and commodified, when it could be individualised. A lot of talent is wasted because high school stunts the really bright kids. And given how brutal it is, it seems to damage everyone emotionally.
[1] Virtually none of the math you learn at school really makes any sense unless you're one of the small number of people who go into STEM - which is where you finally discover what it's for. Things are a bit better than they used to be, but basic financial math as a specific competence is far more useful to most of the population than even the most basic algebra and trig.
For instance: How long was WWII? How long was Vietnam? When exactly did WWII start, before or after US involvement? Knowing those sorts of dates allows students to put today's wars into context. Has the US been in Iraq longer than WWII? Longer than Vietnam? They can memorize the dates and answer those questions themselves. That makes them informed citizens, and some of them eventual informed soldiers, better able to participate in very relevant current events.
You know what is completely useless? Telling the date each happened on their respective classes, and that this knowledge will be tested.
Memorizing dates is as dull as it can be, without having motivation from knowing the context. Dull things get crammed for tests and then forgotten, with near zero retention when those people grow up and actually want to use the context.
Even if dates were more important than causes, they stick less, reducing the utility of teaching them.
I wonder about this type of thing a lot when I think of my experience in school. a lot of the material they taught me in lower and middle school was just wrong. not like subtly wrong, but blatantly incorrect in a way that would be obvious to any undergrad major in that subject (which schoolteachers often are). I'm sure the teachers must have realized too. why spend so much time teaching stuff that needs to be unlearned as early as high school?
the best example I can think of right now is the answer to "why is the sky blue?". my lower school science teacher told us it was reflecting the ocean. I'm sure she realized this answer didn't make any sense, but that's what she taught us. I don't expect teachers to try to explain raleigh scattering to a group of third graders, but wouldn't it be better just not to explain it at all?
I can understand teaching general rules upfront with the expectation that exceptions will be covered later (eg, teaching lower school students that water boils at 212F/100C is okay, they can learn about vapor pressure later). but why would you teach that columbus was the first european to discover north america? not only is it completely wrong, but it's not a practically useful fact, nor does it create a solid basis for deeper understanding.
Who's Rayleigh?
in a weird contrast, we spent tons of time on the civil war and slavery (and not just the sugar-coated version either). we learned about thomas jefferson and sally hemings, and we learned about andrew jackson and the trail of tears. so I don't think it was out of squeamishness that they declined to cover more recent history.
I get that schools (especially private schools) ultimately need to satisfy the parents, but it strikes me as a massive disservice that my peers and I were able to graduate high school without learning a single thing to contextualize the two defining current events of our childhood: 9/11 and the iraq war. the film charlie wilson's war was the best explanation I got until I was in college.
Although to be fair, history textbooks are often really terrible.
We (collectively) want all children to have a good foundation of life skills by the time they reach adulthood.
Unfortunately there is no curriculum for what a parent must teach their children.
Luckily, there is a standardized curriculum in the form of schooling.
Instead of assuming all children get good parents (which is obviously a harmful assumption), let’s just take advantage of the fact that we can pretty much guarantee all students will learn the school curriculum and use it to teach important life skills to children who otherwise wouldn’t learn.
Why not use that math class to teach personal finance, mortgage rates, basic economics, etc.
Why not couple English with a stronger focus on proper communication (especially negotiation, conflict resolution)
etc.
Teachers are given a document that says in X weeks you need to cover the following topics/units. Let's fix that document so that we can ensure everyone who graduates the public school system can confidently understand their credit card statement -- regardless of their parental upbringing.
> Let's fix that document so that we can ensure everyone who graduates the public school system can confidently understand their credit card statement
I'm pretty sure by age 14 my school math problems were along the lines of "John takes out a loan for $x, with a compounding interest rate of Y%, how much does he pay back in total?"
I agree that we could do better at teaching however!
I do not believe that having a specific curriculum is necessary to have a good foundation of life skills. In addition I would argue that the curriculum in schools is absolutely disappointing if this is the target.
> Instead of assuming all children get good parents (which is obviously a harmful assumption), let’s just take advantage of the fact that we can pretty much guarantee all students will learn the school curriculum and use it to teach important life skills to children who otherwise wouldn’t learn.
The issue here is that you are basically torturing these students that would end up learning (either due to their parents or to some other resource) regardless in order to improve the life of these that would not. I would understand your point however if school was not mandatory.
I think you need to face this fact to understand schooling in 2020.
And if quarantine changed anything, it is that I value school more then before. And I am not one of those people desperate to somehow making remote school and work function, thankfully we had no stressful deadlines during that time. But the kids still missed it and still learned better when in school then home alone.
It's better if school policy can be discussed admitting it has two main purposes.
While this may exaggerate the case, it will continue to largely be true so long as we relegate huge portions of our population to 2-3 jobs while the VC system sustained in part by Ycombinator rewards capital formation to a degree that is damaging to society.
Usually when people say they are working 2-3 jobs I believe they mean they get a couple of shifts a week from a couple of different employers.
E.g. 16 hours a week at a coffee shop, 12 hours a week at a restaurant and 2 nights a week as a cleaner.
I understood the comment to be angry about some large injustice, I'm not sure whether they were meaning to essentially say "some people have to work for a living, it's outrageous". With (Western) Europe's extremely strong social systems, the number of people who are forced to work multiple jobs because they wouldn't be able to eat otherwise is minuscule, I believe.
The financial education and time management lines really resonated with me from the parent comment. The problem is that there is not anything resembling equal footing at home. Rich kids, realistically the top 5-10%, are going to get financial education at home and the others will have to learn in the school of hard knocks. I had to learn “tough” lessons about finance because the resources for what I needed to know didn’t exist at home. And I talk to people now who are older about how they prep their kids for the world, and it’s just a classic information imbalance. You could do a lot of good by leveling the playing field here.
Physical Education wasn't my favorite class, but never once did anyone talk about the theory behind developing athletic performance or recruiting the proper muscles for a movement or anything like that. It was just "go run" or "play a game of baseball".
But I agree that there is some lost potential in terms of building a strong knowledge base about fitness and well-being. The paper below suggests there are likely a lot of moderating factors in the benefits of PE.
https://sci-hub.tw/https://doi.org/10.1080/02671520701809817
Meanwhile they prevent my generation from building houses and rob our pensions.
Modern school systems are pretty much entirely this... only they aren't really glorified. To be fair, a society in which every adult is expected to be working needs some kind of daycare for kids, but there are probably better ways to go about it.
Which, that sentiment applies directly to history.
I am 42. I had less than 9 weeks of cooking. Part of that 'cooking' was cooking once a week, a cookie contest that almost got me in trouble because I didn't cook while home sick, and how to set a table for a formal setting (i've never used this). The once-a-week cooking was in a group setting. I had "financial education" in social studies class - taught by a car salesman friend of the teacher. We got extra credit if our parents went to look at used cars. I was in 8th grade: 13 years old at the time.
I had health class, which mostly taught us the parts of the body and sex ed over and over again. PE class at one point consisted of ping-pong for 6 weeks: I didn't learn anything that I could actually use in life - how to be do cardio, stretching, weight training, nope. Nothing like that.
Not once was I ever introduced to any sort of child development classes. You see, I took AP classes and had a full college prep schedule, so they didn't think these classes were important. Some others were so much better prepared than I was.
That seems super shady. Did anyone end up filing a complaint with the school board?
There are most likely illegal policies and activities taking place at every public school in the U.S., and it's not taken seriously because children cannot vote and many parents think the schools ought to be going hard on their kids anyways.
Although in retrospect it was perhaps a bit ridiculous that my cooking class allowed only a microwave, while I worked an open forge in metalworking.
However, 08:00 local astronomical time does seem too early and most European time zones are ahead of local astronomical time, sometimes ridiculously so, making 08:00 even earlier. So I don't disagree.
Kids learn at different speeds so a good education system takes that into regard. Systems should be transient that slow starters can catch up at a later time and reach higher forms of education.
We need more teachers and smaller groups. Eating healthy can be a course, but you quickly loose all the pupils that already learned that from their parents.
Mental health is hard to teach and there is little certain knowledge here, it only works individually. Aside from really hard cases, I think children have quite resilient minds.
I believe the reluctance to do physical exercise has other sources, not really lacking education. But PE is vastly to be preferred to medicating "unusual" behavior.
Typical response By admin is to ignore the the Issue or minimize it.
I cannot honestly condemn teachers that disengage though. Classrooms get bigger, bullying happens digitally and out of reach, teachers and parents are critical of each other and pupils are the first to notice if they have free reign and know pretty well how to profit from such conflicts.
Do you think this was an issue of not being aware of the offering, as opposed to it being difficult to get help for one's personal issues because of stigma or feeling like you can handle it if you just try a little harder?
I would also say that something needs to be done regarding bullying and teachers that are power-tripping.
How much does a year at an American University Cost ?
Random trivia should not be taught, but cleaning and fixing? Next you'll want to teach morals.
We always have in many ways, but I catch your drift. I take issue with schools that teach kids what to think instead of how to think.
I don’t know if it is pandemic but I’ve seen some people complain about some very controversial curriculum creeping into schools. A person I saw on Twitter recently posted some curriculum their 1st grader was being taught which tells a story through the lens of critical race theory. In essence telling the children that the white kids are racist and need to work to be anti-racist.
It was shocking to me because it is applying controversial “Theory” that is very much opposed to liberal science ideals of falsifiability and injecting identity politics into minds that can’t even begin to understand the postmodern philosophy these ideas grew from.
It's not even about teachers being good or bad. It's about something called "illusion of competence". Basically, everything seems easy while teacher is explaining it on whiteboard, but when facing similar task on your own, outside of the classroom you are completely lost, don't know where to start. Homework helps dispell that illusion.
An excellent cowpath right? "The teachers are bad, so rather than fixing the teachers we make the students teach themselves afterhours."
That's like saying you're a great natural basketball player and practice should be abolished.
Practical skills: History is useful, yes, especially for governance and historical equity. If Americans didn't know history well, more Southerners could get away with the false states rights narrative for the Civil War. But, on the whole, I agree we overly focus on literature and ancient history relative to modern skills, IMO.
That said, abolishing HW is great too. It’s become a crutch for bad teachers.
As a child, and now as an adult, I've always thought homework was an insane proposition. If you had a job where you showed up in person for 7 (realistically more than 7) hours a day, but then assigned arbitrary multi-hour long projects afterhours, you'd quit, 1000%.
> In my opinion, 8AM is too early.
First bell for us was 7:18. Meaning the bus showed up at 6:30. Meaning wake up was 5:45.
Looking back, my four years of high school were probably the worst years of my life. I'm glad, at least for a brief minute, current high school students are getting some kind of reprieve.
Everything on your list except housework was part of my required curriculum in High School in 1990s California (and the housework stuff was offered as an elective called Home Economics). Now I wonder if it's still there.
Oh and massive grade inflation
School is for education and culture, that is those "random trivia".
Fixing things, cooking, and cleaning can be taught in a couple of classes (e.g. shop) or taught by their parents...
During the NATO bombing of Serbia 20+ years ago, for us, teens, life was never better - no school, no work, parents worrying about basic stuff (i.e. not us) - just plenty of outside socializing and random activity. Everybody remembers that as good old times :)
I can imagine the same to be true now, not to that extent.
My general feeling (which includes my own family's behavior) is that people have returned to hanging out with whoever they used to. They just don't go to restaurants or other social settings to do it.
There aren't "organized" activities, but I see kids out playing on my street every single evening.
Honestly it's refreshing to see kids behaving organically for once instead of their parents shuttling them from one activity to the next.
I suppose the impact probably also depends on age and the number of siblings.
We've got three that are two years apart and preschool aged. They were able to entertain each other pretty well through it all.
I could see it being a much bigger issue for only children or kids that have a bigger age gap between them.
I used to work with a guy at British Telecom who had been in the under 21 national football squad of one of the waring nations - he was drafted and lost his lower leg to a mine.
He was medevac'd to the UK and with support from a local business man did a degree at Manchester I think
It doesn't at all surprise me that teenagers feel better when they don't have to go to school.
One of the worst things you can do for your mental health is avoid uncomfortable feelings. All that usually accomplishes is making those feelings even worse.
That’s why exposure therapy is such a big part in dealing with phobias and anxiety. It’s counter intuitive, but being stressed and anxious (within reason) helps you develop coping mechanisms that come in really handy in life.
I think there are some key differences between the above and what school permits.
And for sure, a child who was never put outside of his comfort zone would make a bad adult. It's just hard to know until hindsight. Some things are simple bad, and should be avoided, but other things are immaturities, and you could grow out of them.
If the whole of schooling can be replaced by a few videocalls during 2020, what value was it ever really providing.
You could live on water and plain crackers for some time, but that doesn't mean it's a complete, healthy, nourishing, replacement for a normal diet.
The best would be something like comparing people from different U.S. states or cities that are roughly similar, but one city shut down school much longer than the other. (Perhaps even comparing schools, although "whether a school decided to err on the side of staying shut down" probably correlates with something that would affect kids' performance.)
Anyway, let me pre-register my prediction that, if good studies can be done, they will show that kids who were forced to miss a year of school (or in-person school, at least) will not have been measurably negatively impacted by it.
Maybe now's the right time to talk on how to improve public schooling, or what to replace it with.
I'd be pretty sure that wasn't true. If you're thinking towards our tribal ancestors then I'd expect that children would be brought on with skills and work as quickly as possible in order to strengthen the tribe.
The oldest school establishments in the UK - from Late Antiquity/Early Middle Ages - certainly weren't for "babysitting" (ie provision of nutrition and as much care as needed to prevent injury).
you mean how they ended up. babysitting wasn't an issue when public schooling started
As bizarre as that may sound, hospital was like a refuge for me.
And school wasn't even that bad.
Yeah, anxiety is a natural response. And we've developed biological mechanisms to adapt to it. But the application of anxiety has changed _so much_ in just the last few centuries. Anxiety sources have proliferated. Beyond food and shelter, we have anxieties about grades, waking up early, approval from peers, et cetera. This compounds, especially if you come from a family that struggles to even provide food and shelter. Children are also then told they live in a meritocracy and therefore should internalize their shortcomings and bad marks.
I digress, but I don't think we can appeal to nature and argue our current situation as natural. We can be doing better.
Based on what _I think_ you're trying to say, I think this is a terrible take and I hate everything about it. People aren't trees. Society, people, and children especially shouldn't be forced to be exposed to anxiety inducing, depressing, and stress inducing situations. (But that's what I'm guessing what you're saying, since you have not put a real conclusion or clear statement there.)
This is a common anecdote. Aspies report being more comfortable and less bullied at virtual school vs physical school.
I would have been 100% happier as a kid if I could have simply done my education on my own or virtually, and spent my time with people I actually enjoyed the company of. Sort of what it's like to be an adult actually. The modern school system is such a terrible model.
I think it all comes down to how students are seen by architects and the school system in general. I wonder if private schools are different.
It definitely felt like we were trapped in there and held against our will.
Now I am curious how schools in scandanavia are, given their famous prisons.
But that's the same part of me talking that wishes everyone was "forced" to work a retail or food service job for a year or two of their life. Probably impossible to actually do and enforce here, but would definitely make people overall be nicer and more considerate of others (and in the case of cleaning schools, more likely to clean up after themselves).
I was and am a vegetarian, and maybe in wealthy districts they have better lunch options, but certainly not in mine. The fact that we largely tie school funding to property taxes is a huge problem. Regardless, let’s not pretend that school lunch, at least in the 90s, was actually healthy or good or even at a reasonable time for lunch.
My SO was a teacher for a few years too. Despite Free and Reduced Lunch (FRL) being offered and encouraged, many kids' parents still could not be bothered to sign their kids up until late in the year. My SO kept food in the drawers of the desk for these kids. In addition, FRL did not cover the weekends, so many kids would come in on Monday having not eaten for that weekend. Though not common, it was again chronic with these kids.
Food scarcity in the US is still very much a 'thing', unfortunately.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6430a1.htm
That's pretty frustrating to read. I was sleep deprived enough to sleep 15 hours a day on the weekends during high school, but actually going to bed before midnight still just resulted in staring at a dark ceiling for an hour.
Sleep hygiene is important, but at a certain point the circadian rhythm will put its foot down.
I also suspect that starting at 11 AM-1 PM and going until 4-5 PM, despite being less overall time, would produce vastly better academic outcomes in high school just due to the average teenage circadian rhythm and the resulting zombification of current students. The noneducational duties of high school could be handled by letting students show up earlier as needed with breakfast/lunch provided- the structured classes would just start later.
Maybe give the early arrivers a place to take a nap while we're at it.
I totally agree that if we focused on getting kids a reasonable amount of sleep and a healthy meal or two (and hydrated!), we’d likely be able to have much better outcomes.
I was taking prescribed sleeping pills because I couldn't fall asleep and had anxiety attacks late at night if I forced it. My school started at 6 am so I got up at 5 am. It got pretty bad at some point.
My dad and grandfather both have problem sleeping early but I am worse.
It's not just american schools. All schools resemble prisons because all school systems around the world essentially adopted the american model which borrowed heavily from the prussian model.
All schools were compulsory indoctrination centers which buttressed the burgeoning nation-states.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussian_education_system
Modern education system, along with national media, government, etc are pillars of the nation-state. You can't have a nation-state without one nowadays.
Some/all of that have less to do with war and more to do with general disaster preparedness.
* Bomb shelters provide shelter from...bombs, yeah
* Windowless hallways provide shelter from tornadoes (no glass to break/become shrapnel)
* The heavy metal doors are firewalls that automatically close when the alarm goes off (most are hollow, won't do shit against assault weapons and predate even Columbine)
I suppose you could put windows between the classrooms and hallways, but those have their own associated problems to overcome: increased noise, more windows for students to break, safety in emergency situations, etc.
As for non-connected classrooms, where you need to walk outside to go between rooms, I've always thought that was to solve the same problems. Cheaper to build/renovate/modify/expand, easier to clean, less noise and fewer students running into each other.
Ref: https://www.lakeplacid.com/story/2016/02/olympic-prison-stor...
Sleep deprivation has a major effect on generalized anxiety[2]. The research I would like to see done, is to test whether the groups of students with the earliest starting schools saw larger drops in anxiety during the transition to full remote.
[1]https://www.cdc.gov/sleep/features/schools-start-too-early.h... [2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00057...
I've never worked anywhere that I needed permission to use the bathroom.
https://theconversation.com/companies-target-toilet-breaks-t...
https://nypost.com/2018/04/16/amazon-warehouse-workers-pee-i...
I guess some people in this industry had parents with enough money to avoid ever having to do a non-tech industry job? That would surprise me.
Some manual or skilled labour jobs would permit random breaks, I guess. But most people I know worked service industry. You don't get to just leave a cash register unattended because your bladder says to.
In my experience, the problem of needing to go to the bathroom while also needing to man a register was overcome by a quick "yo, could you cover me for a sec?" to a coworker.
People that work at Walmart, Amazon, major grocery store chains, etc. (i.e. the major employers in America) are expected to man their post until it's time for their legally mandated scheduled bathroom break.
I suspect most people did have a job like that once in their lives. Then again, the last time I actually had a job like that I was actually still in high school, so that sort of policy didn't seem too strange to me at the time.
School is a prison you're forced to go to, are not paid and are typically not able to change schools like you would change jobs (you could potentially go to a private school, but that would depend on your parents having and willing to spend the $$$).
For example: If you are assaulted on work grounds, you have a right to self-defense which will be respected by the police, who will show up, as opposed to being punished the exact same as the person who committed the assault by a school administrator who has decided that Zero Tolerance/Fight-Free Schools means everyone who is involved in an altercation is automatically equally guilty.
> I think we need more classes specifically around teaching coping skills and learning how to interact with others.
This is a good thought, but it runs up against the fact it would involve teaching students to stand up to arbitrary and capricious authority, which is the strategy a number of teachers use to maintain class order. Being able to cope and interact with the world necessarily entails being able to push back against the worst abuses of many school systems, religious organizations, and, yes, to some extent work environments.
Not just that, but they’re also actively isolated from people who aren’t of similar age. Teenagers (who don’t happen to have an older sibling) go through the identity-crisis period of puberty entirely without role-models to, well, model. Other than the made-up, exaggerated ones they see in TV shows.
It’s no wonder the adopted behaviour of most teenagers feels instead like some sort of cargo-culting of adult behavior, rather than a gradual acquisition of actual maturity; and no wonder that it’s such a mental shock for many teenagers when they either enter college or the working world, and so get exposed to non-age-segregated collaborative settings for the first time.
The typical live-in-a-dorm college experience is not so much a mental shock as is about putting off adult life for another four years, while you party.
And, while older (30+) students do exist, most of them don't live in dorms (And those that do, don't live with all the 18-20 year olds.) They will be, at best on the distant periphery of your peer group.
For most people, college does not solve this problem.
Most people, as it turns out, don't pursue technical degrees. Fewer than 10% of degrees are in STEM fields, with another ~10% being in a medicine-adjacent field.
The number of undegraduates who actually go on to do meaningful, novel, work in a lab (As opposed to just using a facility for a few hours, in order to pass a course) is even smaller than that.
The scary distant Real World turned out to be much easier to handle than the artificial one behind the walls of the schoolyard.
And to wit, by all objective measures, I ended up "handling" the Real World far better than any of the people who told me I wouldn't.
Maybe those who teach secondary school do so because they have difficulty handling the real world.
* I both work as a full time developer at a fortune 100 company and teach a few sections of a college level programming class each semester. So I don’t know what this says about me.
I don't think that's for the reasons you outlined, but rather because adolescents are treated like children right up until they've turned 18 and finished high school.
They go from basically having the rights and responsibilities of a child, to those of an adult, rather than a gradual growth of those rights and responsibilities as they mature.
Also, is it not common for teenagers to have jobs any more? I got my first job when I was 15, and haven't been unemployed for longer than a month since (I'm in my late 20s now).
The endless bureaucracy and inefficiency of the school system frustrates all kinds of people.
From your family/friend/neighborhood groups? Are you saying schools are where you go to meet people of similar interests? How can that be when schools are for everyone?
> Humans are social creatures
Humans are social creatures with in-group bias. Especially young kids. Schools are an unnatural system for humans. It's why kids universally don't like school. It's why you have to force, trick and brainwash them into liking school.
You might want to read up on the history of modern education system. They certainly weren't created to meet people with similar interests.
We have the option here in Ontario to keep our kids home and do home learning. But anything else the kids might do to get social exposure and even physical exertion is effectively closed.
Real home schooled kids usually have clubs and so on that they attend to hang out with other kids. That avenue is closed off.
My kids have to go back, just for their own mental health. As awful as the schools might be right now, they'll be better than being stuck at home playing Dragon Quest Builders II through for the third time.
Family? Mom and Dad are 2 people? Did you follow the footsteps of either? Probably not as you have unique interests and tastes. Neighborhood groups? I grew up in an area where I was the only child within 6 blocks? Am I out of luck? Schools _are_ the neighborhood group!!!
Edit: I am well-versed on both the history and current status of the education system. Both my parents and my spouse are full-time teachers.
Didn't say they did. Just said there is a reason why they universally don't like one thing - school.
> so that argument is irrelevant.
The argument isn't irrelevant because it goes against your assertion : "Humans are social creatures". Schools weren't created to be social environments for kids. They weren't created for socializing. Kids don't socialize in a group of 1000 kids. Schools, in fact, prevent socialization. Kids tend to socialize after school. Everything you've said so far is indoctrination nonsense. If you wanted kids to socialize, school is the last thing you'd build.
> Family? Mom and Dad are 2 people? Did you follow the footsteps of either?
So no siblings, uncles, aunts, grandparents, cousins, etc? Also, do you have to follow in their footsteps to get your social needs from family?
> I grew up in an area where I was the only child within 6 blocks? Am I out of luck?
I wonder what people like you did before schools were invented 150 years ago? Is there a reason why you can't go out 7 blocks?
So you only had a father and mother in your family and were bound to a rule that limited you to 6 blocks?
> Edit: I am well-versed on both the history and current status of the education system. Both my parents and my spouse are full-time teachers.
Now I understand why you think the way you do. Just because your parents are school teachers doesn't mean they or you know the history of the education system. Actually, the fact that your parents worked for the system incentivizes you to ignore the history of the modern school system. It's what happens when you rely on the system for a paycheck.
I'm replying to the parent comment that stated online and virtual learning are superior to attending schools. It was implied the ONLY purpose of school is to ascertain knowledge when that's merely one (small) aspect.
"Schools, in fact, prevent socialization" is maybe one of the most divorced from reality statements I've ever read on HN.
Good luck on your future journey. Edit: Created 20 days ago explains everything
You say this in a country that has a fairly sizable immigrant population. And you don't have to live in the same house to be able to visit grandma on the other side of town.
> Created 20 days ago explains everything
Not here.
That’s demonstrably false. I have plenty of friends in university right now who love school and have great memories of it going all the way back to kindergarten.
I didn’t love high school but I enjoyed elementary school and I love university. I can also think of a few changes that would have made high school a much better experience. Now that I’m in university, I see how much better it could be!
You can have an alternative alongside current standard school structure. You don't need to abolish the current schools but run the alternative and see which one performs better. I find it upsetting how people don't want to introduce alternatives or let man have a choice. Why do people don't want others to have a choice?
You can see this almost everywhere. Take apple walled garden threads. Just why?
Have diverse schools and structure. Some can have bigger breaks and start at noon. Some can be stretched out age wise and be more sociable place. Others can be like prison.
It's bizzare how similar schools are here (India). Some of it is forced by bureaucracy of the state and central government but a lot of it is self imposed while handing out creative and diversity points in their advertisement pamphlet.
But you're right - school is the place where most people form friendships, just like adults at work. It's harder to form friendships if you're not regularly put into social situations with others. I'm not sure what the best answer is institutionally, but I don't think the current state school system is the right one.
That 'life can cause anxiety' doesn't mean it's bad.
Learning anything, exams, trying new things - it's all going to cause some degree of stress and anxiety.
School has constraints, but most of those constraints exist for self-learning anyhow - it takes a fair degree of composure or focus anyhow.
School is not 'living hell' for the vast majority of kids, I don't even know a single person who ever described it that way, though I'm sure it exists.
Structured learning has really no equivalent, especially for those who want to engage.
There are obvious reforms that could be made, not the least of which would be students approaches. Also - a lot more sports (daily), music, and longer term projects and probably some kind of structured free time.
It's not bad at all, it's just far from perfect.
You will still be forced to interact with a bunch of immature kids after school except this time they will not even know they are still children and may be responsible for paying your salary, too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avP8IyKw5_w
> Compared to pre-pandemic, there was an overall decrease in risk of anxiety, and an increase in wellbeing but no large change in risk of depression
https://sphr.nihr.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Young-Peo...
Also, for all of the extremely attentive readers like pwinnski out there, I'm sure they've already come across research on increased rates of suicide due to economic despair https://wellbeingtrust.org/areas-of-focus/policy-and-advocac...
The study also reported specifically that "Students at risk of depression pre-pandemic showed a reduction in depression scores in comparison to students with no depression pre-pandemic (HADS score of 0-6) who showed an small increase in depression scores." So it was the very students most likely to be depressed before the pandemic that are doing (slightly) better, and the small increase (from 3.0 to 3.9) does not raise students into the range considered most dangerous (7+)
Please try to avoid personal jabs and rule-breaking questions, thanks.
[0] up to 68% https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/many-americans-are-gett... or 47% https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/47-percent-will-mak... https://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanguina/2020/04/28/some-earni...
High school was hell for me. I guess a point can be made that it makes you learn life the hard way.
We'll soon have some real data on this. California passed a law last year that requires high school start after 8:30 am. Schools have until the 2022 school year to implement the law, which means we'll have a natural case study as different schools implement it this year (once we return to in person school) and next year and the year after.
...Worth noting there were no school shootings for the first time in decades in March (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/coronavirus-first-march-without...)
Now I can always say "can't come, better safe than sorry!" and nobody bats an eye.
Before, it was always frowned upon if I didn't want to meet someone.