> One of the constant refrains which has bemused me during the pandemic is all the people saying how much kids want to go back to school.
My kid do want to go back to school. They were happy when they heard the school will start again and disappointed when it did not. To large extend, they want to be with friends again. To the rest of it, teacher is actually better teacher then us, they enjoy learning part in school more then in home.
It has nothing to do with what I remember about my school. It has to do with what they say to me now and what situation makes them happy.
From my point of view, the time home did taught them some things that were not present in school. But overall they were learning much less then when they went to school every day.
As an introvert with a little above average neuroticism I viscerally despised returning to school after a long holiday break from K to 12 without exception. Zero excitement or longing to return. I had good friends, too. I would have much preferred just staying at home and playing video games, getting my social interaction online and keeping in touch with a select few people of my choosing rather than forced interactions with 300 people.
Whether this would've been better for my health is another question.
Maybe your school sucked. Not mine - it was the only place where I could use a PC, write some programs. Also, math - I miss so much the times when I could study math and solve complicated math exercises... Ahh... It was a magnificent time. Also, most of my teachers were interesting people.
And in just in case: 0 sarcasm in this whole comment.
If you are trying to make a joke, then it wasn't funny. I meant what I wrote. I wrote it for those who might think that my comment is a form of sarcasm.
I moved schools several times growing up. Some of them were wonderful. Others were terrible. It mostly came down to the relationship between the teachers and the students (or, dare I say, between the teachers and their inner demons?).
My son has similar experience. He moved few schools already and every time teachers are mostly “meh”. This time we aren't changing the city of living, but looking for a better school for him :)
I don’t remember exactly what I hated about school but I remember promising myself no matter how bad things will get in high school or beyond, nothing in life will ever compare to the insanity of middle school.
College was a lot less productive than high school in terms of academics for me but it was also a lot more fun.
Even high school wasn’t so bad. I’d realized toward the end of high school that I never had an original idea of myself and was at peace with being mediocre.
Math lessons? Sure, real basic ones at a very slow pace, but nothing like "studying math" or "solving complicated math exercises." I doubt the teachers even knew had to solve complicated math exercises. No computers other than computers used for a word processing class, so not available for general use, and a couple in the library. The issue is there was not any time to use them, class took up all the school time. Even if anyone was given time to use them, there was no guidance on how to program or use them in any way.
I remember sometime in the mid to late 90's the teacher asked the class how many people had a computer at home and only about a third of the class raised their hand. The school however had plenty of computers since they were willing to pick up whatever the local business park was throwing away. "Computer free time" was probably the best part of the school day.
Summer breaks are great if you are going to visit cool places, make new friends on summer camps, ... Not if you are locked home with your parents and doing so many annoying homeworks + attending online lectures
My kid wants to go back to school. He tells me most weeks that he misses it.
He is currently doing all the work he would be doing but on our kitchen counter with his mother or I. He gets all the hard bits of school without the fun bits.
Perhaps the writer of the article should try asking the people he is talking about?
I asked mine. School sucks, friends not.
And it's too long.
We switched to 2 hours work, outside activities and you can meet with as many friends as you want.
I'll tell you te outcome in one year, but TBH they see it as the same as last year, plus the outside activity and without the dreaded Google Hangouts classes, which were frustrating.
They got to grades last year and we have the time to devote to home schooling
The author's very point is that the fun bits of school is just social time — and that school is many things, including learning, and that the learning time often sucks the joy out of learning for too many kids.
Presumably the author believes it's possible to structure more fun outside of school if the community were into it. It's too bad nobody is really on that discussion atm.
As a tangent, here is a photo of a German kindergarten.
Actually there is some middle ground called democratic schools. I believe in most parts of the world their legal status is that of homeschooling. In theory, these schools shoudl optimize for the aspects of schools children like and stimulate interest rather than boring drill. In practice, however, I doubt it works well for everybody.
The first point is almost exactly stated by the author. For the second point, he does not question why schools exists, he merely claims them to be inefficient at this target.
Which is supported by his personal anecdotes and he does not offer an alternative, so always an easy claim to be made.
Most couldn't even if they wanted because of their finances. But generally, it takes tons of hard work and patience to educate and entertain you kids for 12 hours every day.
> I used to amuse myself by asking recent university grads what they had learned, most of them could barely remember anything. Since I was widely read, often I knew enough to ask basic questions about their discipline, and they wouldn’t know the answers.
One has to wonder if the author's perspective on school might have been tinted by this kind of arrogance.
Do adults really not remember that not all kids are the same? I think most of them do, and that as they read the original post they know exactly who caused the 'social horror show.'
This thread is going to be full of personal experiences. I suspect that this follows an Anna-Karenina curve: "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."
So using that, "All happy students are alike; each unhappy student is unhappy in their own way"
I hated school. I was a good student taking "challenge" courses in elementary, then honors courses in middle school then AP courses, but the overall experience of k-12 was horrible for me. When I think about it, I cannot imagine having to go through it all again. It was horrible for me in my own way.
I think we were both unhappy the same way and I think there is going to be quite a lot of people with the same experience. While I love[d] learning new things I just hated high school, homeworks, ... as all of that was so boring.
I think that children want back to school as they miss their friends. Also, at least here, the online education not much less painful than going to school - there is more annoying homeworks, lectures are still super boring and attendance is still enforced.
The author seems like they're trying to disprove one subjective experience with their own, and act like it's an obvious fact - despite the author almost certainly never having months of school due to a pandemic. To continue this trend, I certainly enjoyed school.
Again though, anecdotes.
I look forward to seeing the actual data that comes out of this period and how it's affected childrens schooling. Personally I suspect it will be a net negative.
A lot of comments here make a point that kids do miss school because they miss friends. This is addressed in the Twitter thread [1] linked from the article:
> Some, yes, are lonely and miss their friends. But the vast majority expressed that that they don’t feel that disconnected, because their after school habits of texting, Discord, and video chats remain intact.
We have put in effort to make kids connected in lockdowns. They are not completely lonely. (Video chat is useless to them, messaging is useful and playing games together is useful. ) But, their social circles shrinked - they were in contact with more kids before. After first lockdown, some good friends had really hard time to adjust to more social way of living.
Examples of issues: a kid got very jealous whenever friend paid attention to other kids. That escalated to bullying of the "if you play with him I wont play with you anymore" kind. This worked well, because other kids were generally more needy then usual, so it was harder for them to say "so what".
Then there was reduced ability to solve conflicts or deal with them. They escalated much more quickly over much smaller things. Other kids having different opinions was sudden new shocking unpleasant experience.
Finally, reduced ability to deal with frustration. At home, you are not confronted with interpersonal issues nor new situations. Mostly, you get your routine and that is it.
I went to a brutal school not brutal as in you got yelled at by teachers brutal but left for dead in corridors after 10 on 1 fights that the staff allowed to happen brutal. And honestly, when I got suspended from school I normally would rather have had been at school. Even with all the stuff going on it was normally less boring that being at home. True boredom seems to be one of the things people want to avoid the most. Kids wanting to go to school to learn rather than sit in the house with their parents doing the same ole thing makes sense.
I can't stop grinning after reading this, school did suck but not as much as work does.
In recognition of Valentines Day, I will make the analogy: Remembering that school was good is like romantic couples who break up only to later in life get back together but just long enough to remember why they broke up the first time.
Or
School is the "cruel mistress" of childhood memories.
Even though I recognize all the things he says about school, I mostly liked it. Yes, they teach stuff slowly, but you are free to move ahead yourself, right? And yes you need to be babysat, but it was mostly socializing with peers.
One thing that struck me while reading this was the influence of American culture. You often see school depicted as a sort of weird jungle with jocks-vs-nerds dynamics coming from America. Some of the kids at my international school emulated that and it wasn't pleasant, but I got over that eventually as well.
In general, most people I know across cultures think back fondly to their school days, minus Americans. My American friends are the ones most likely to point out the things Ian mentions. The jumping through hoops, wastes of time, the production of wage slaves.
> In general, most people I know across cultures think back fondly to their school days, minus Americans.
Yep. I don't remember jocks vs nerds or any other gang warfare forms when I was in school. Neither does my kid and she only finished high school recently.
Must be an American thing, or an american movie thing?
> Must be an American thing, or an american movie thing?
Very much, and the American kids made it seem more real. Otherwise we'd have just ignored it. But a bunch of them decided they had to have popularity cliques with in-and-out people, just like in the movies.
Luckily our sports teams were so terrible it didn't create a second substrate for this.
I'm 50, so nerds vs jocks was a thing in the US in the 1980s, but not so much these days when "nerdy" things align more with pop culture. Also, back in the 1980s, except for severe cases where physical violence was involved, bullying was more or less tolerated and the advice to the bullied was just not to react, which was supposed to cause the bullies to lose interest. These days even name calling by bullies is taken seriously and can result in punishment of the perpetrators.
I'm 42, jocks versus nerds was still a thing in the 90's, can't speak to after that. I hope and would like to believe things have gotten better, but that's probably only on the social fronts (less social division between cliques these days), and that the problem of a one size fits all approach inherent to didactism is still there. This has long been a recognized problem with the "standard" schooling institution, just look into deschooling or unschooling.
In what school system are you “free to move ahead yourself”? Pretty sure at most schools you’re expected to participate in the current curriculum and take the tests as scheduled.
Can't you take the tests ahead of time if you ask? Even if not, driven by curiosity you'll find math and science tests in school pretty easy if you've bothered to read ahead.
I remember (West Europa, not US), from middle school already feeling no motivation to move ahead in the material, because I was forced to keep following the lessons anyway. No skipping of classes/tests. Of course I don't really know how that could've worked if you take into account the social function of school.
Or you can just read the textbook after you understand something. That's what I did, after it became apparent that reading other books during class was strongly discouraged.
>Can't you take the tests ahead of time if you ask
No
I moved ahead by studying computer science at the university when I was 13 years old. Thereby I was taking courses at school and university in parallel. But the school courses were all at regular paces. Then I had to repeat topics at school that I learned years ago at the university. I had almost finished my bachelor degree before I had finished high school. The school was a complete waste of time.
I also got demoted by one or two grades in school for "not asking enough questions in classes"
I studied english extracurricular and was far ahead of school curriculum - we were plabbing to emigrate so it was part of preparation. The school English teacher felt that it was undermining her authority. She kept coming up with random reasons to discipline me and mark me down.
Eventually this cultinated in a row between my parents, the tracher and the headmaster.
Because mu parents had my back, she stopped creating dramad but I never got the grades i was meant to.
Definitely not over here in this post-communist country, and there are few standardized tests - most are invention of a teacher so good luck 'finding' them beforehand.
It's hard to move ahead yourself when you are forced to sit in a chair for 6 hours per day plus 2-3 hours of activities around it (waking up early, breaks, homeworks). I remember it and it was like a torture. I don't intend to have children but if I had them I would never impose public schooling on them. I would home-school like my sister does. I am from Poland btw. For me school was traumatic 12 years which killed my curiosity, will to learn and faith in humanity. I still managed to learn quite a bit on the side but to this day I can shake out the thought of the best years of my life being wasted by the system.
As to jocks and nerds my elementary school was full of bullies and it was basically a prison culture where any kind of deviation from the norm was severely punished. Short? Walks in funny way? Not so good complexion? You were treated as an alien and bullied around while no one cared. If you made stand you were punished for stirring trouble.
> In general, most people I know across cultures think back fondly to their school days, minus Americans.
I don't know how American school system and culture works but I get the same idea from the things I've read.
Sure, the methods of teaching at school were slow and even boring at times but it was always fun with friends and even teachers. There were some boring time periods here and there but overall it was really great.
Almost if not all the people I know have very fond memories of school days.
I grew up in Western Europe and experienced exactly what the author of the article is talking about so it’s not just an American experience.
However, there was a strong American cultural influence e.g. shows like Saved by the Bell, Fresh Prince of Bel Air, Simpsons etc were all popular and had strong nerd as social outcast themes.
However I don’t think they were the cause of this social dynamic, it was much older and entrenched.
This may be very dependent on individual class composition too. I was always a nerd, and can say my school experience was very nerd-inclusive, bully-exclusive. I attribute this to the strong girl groups in my class who seemingly had a rather clear sense of what's right and ethical. Any bullying was shot down very quickly.
As a caveat, it could of course be that someone else in my class had a completely different experience of the same events.
We moved from the US to Sweden while I was in the middle of elementary school in the 90's. In the US there was very much the culture of "school sucks!", and when we were let out for summer vacation, everyone would cheer that school was out for summer!
Imagine my surprise when we were let out for summer in Sweden and kids were crying they wouldn't meet teacher until next school year.
Of course, there's also the variance in the schools I went to in the US and Sweden - the US one was more urban than where we ended up living in Sweden. But I remember there was much more of a media (TV) culture of "isn't school lame and boring?" with patronizing PSA style "no actually learning is cool!" propaganda that fooled nobody and actually served the opposite purpose
I hated most of my schooling and I have no illusions about that. But the OP has a kind of reverse nostalgia which is just as deceiving as it's positive counterpart. Many people enjoyed school. Some people had better or worse school cultures. My kids school is like a Hippy paradise compared to what I experienced and of course they like it and miss it.
The kinds of things that sucked to me (sit still and listen for hours), there might be additional things or other stuff that sucked to others (slow to learn reading, math, etc.). The format didn't suit me, and another format would be beneficial. Learning is personal, and school having just one format aside private/experimental schools, absolutely sucks.
What would suck more would be no school, or weed-school (get high on weed).
Work is a bit different. Sometimes there are interesting projects and you get engrossed in work, which also shouldn't take over too much of your life. Other times, the politics and fakery absolutely sucks.
I don't think we can expect things to not suck at all, ever.
The article leaves out the cases where the parents at home are maybe disfunctional in parenting and school is maybe really the better place for the children. Other than that I have the same experience, besides friends school time sucked. My English teacher told me I never will learn a foreign language since I’m interested in music (I still don’t understand this reasoning). One of my music teachers didn’t think everything outside classical music is worth studying. My physics teacher made me memorize formulas instead of understanding relationships. At university I barely remembered linear algebra from school and had to learn it again. And since I’m from Germany my Computer Science at school was optional and ended with the blink Tag and marquee in JS. I had to learn programming from books from the library which had a lot of outdated books on basic...
> The article leaves out the cases where the parents at home are maybe disfunctional in parenting and school is maybe really the better place for the children.
Not really. TFA does say that for some (or most?) parents, school is a babysitting service. The author says, despite that, school isn't a terribly good place for a child to be growing up either.
The babysitting service argument is a bit too general for me. I’m talking more about the situation where parents don’t care at all or are just not able to cope with their own life. The authors argument sounds more like lazy parents. I agree that school is not an ideal solution though.
Reading through that again: School had also a lot of nice things besides the time with friends. I really wanted to learn, every book we read I went through in 1-2 days, I read books about biology,... so in hindsight I wished we would have gotten better stimulation for the brain, less Latin and quality control for the teachers.
I think the pandemic has shown us just how much school sucks, and how ineffective and incompetent the political system behind it truly is. I’m Danish, and our school system is run largely by the public sector, so keep that in mind.
When the pandemic struck, and we closed down from April to late may, our schools actually reacted decently. It was a stressful situation, everything was new and has to happen here and now. So the lower quality and chaos was to be expected, but I think our teachers and school administrations pulled through and did really well given the circumstances.
What troubles me is that when the second lockdown hit in November, nothing had changed. We knew it was coming because it was happening in other countries before it hit us, and still, we were as unrelated as the first time?
Why didn’t we have videos of the curriculum prepared nationally instead of still relying of thousands of individual teachers to teach classes as though students were in a class room? Why weren’t we prepared to let students go through material on their own, and then have “classes” with teachers in smaller groups of 4-6 with the teacher preforming a mentor role, which is what worked best during the first lockdown?
I mean, it’s really just silly that we’re still pretending the online class room is similar to the real physical class room, and it’s leaving weaker or challenged students behind.
I do think children are wanting to go back to school though. Not because of school, but because of the social life going back to school brings them.
> Why didn’t we have videos of the curriculum prepared nationally instead of still relying of thousands of individual teachers to teach classes as though students were in a class room?
We're talking about school, not university, right? Kids don't do lectures, it's all interactive.
Plus what do you reckon the teaching unions would think about that plan? You want them to just put all of education on YouTube, and then be done?
Have you ever met a teacher in school who was better at using a computer than you? (Assume you're a dev). How could you expect them to have everything done between April and November when they're as lost as the kids?
In any case, we are talking about grade school kids, from a few years old to maybe 12. You cannot just plop them in front of a computer to view content at their own leisure, and then expect them to come up with intelligent questions to fill in the gaps. That's what you do with university students.
I have both of these in my household, and I can assure you that while it works for the master's student, the kids have a tough time without interaction.
I guess you think only intentional straw-men arguments exist. This isn't the case. They can also arise from misunderstanding, which I think is what happened here. To spell it out: user moksly described an instance of the inverted classroom. You selectively quoted and misunderstood this to be about (university-style) lectures, and proceeded to argue against lectures.¹ I resent that you didn't take my clue to learn about the inverted classroom concept, that way you could have noticed your mistake.
¹ FWIW: I agree that lectures are not suitable for school pupils.
My deepest apologies, I didn't know that what he was describing was what you call an "inverted classroom" until you replied and I looked it up.
The thing is, I don't see how it really matters. You still end up requiring kids to sit still when they can't do it. I guess my focus is on smaller kids. I fully agree with modern comms you can do the inverted classrooms with people older than maybe 12 or so, I'm unsure where the line is.
A strawman is a claim or argument falsely attributed to an interlocutor, not just an assumption (stated or otherwise) that is not shared. At worst, what we have here is a non sequitur. The fact that you have misused the term twice in this discussion suggests that either you don't really understand it (a commentary on the dangers of ad hoc education?) or that you're merely using it as a rhetorical club instead of a good-faith counterargument. Either way, please don't.
> Why weren’t we prepared to let students go through material on their own, and then have “classes” with teachers in smaller groups of 4-6 with the teacher preforming a mentor role, which is what worked best during the first lockdown?
Because in practice, this amounts to one teacher for 4-6 kids and assumption that kids are good at individual preparation.
> I think the pandemic has shown us just how much school sucks, and how ineffective and incompetent the political system behind it truly is.
It's a tool to condition people to become obedient little serfs who don't question authority so they will become good cogs in the corporate/industrial machine. It's also there to be daycare so parents can go be good cogs in the corporate/industrial machine. Education is a distant third at best. At least this is how it is in America.
All these people talking about the socializing are probably the same people who hate telework and miss the office because that's where they do a lot of their socializing. It's completely orthogonal, socializing should not be dependent on school or work, and maybe if they are such a huge part of our life we either admit they are broken and restructure them, or commit to less time dedicated to these activities.
This author brushes over the importance of social peer interactions at school. Even if kids would be allowed to hang out with their friends, it would still deprive them of social interactions with non-friends. Ignoring the academic element, school prepares children for a live as an adult.
They learn to interact with other kids at school. But as adults people need to interact with adults. Nothing one learns at school has any relevance for that
At school they learn to interact with their peers, who will grow up to be adults. Adults interaction with adults is mostly picked up during their formative years at school and university.
They do. School sucked hard but seeing your friends and goofing off in certain classes was the real reason to enjoy it. Sometime, a good teacher would show up and teach you about the world in how their subject fits in it.
This take is so common on HN but I dislike it so much. First off, comparing not having to go to school with the pandemic situation is wrong because kids can't physically meet outside of school either, so that sucks in an entirely different way and is a bad comparison.
Secondly though, school is not terrible for everyone. I didn't have a great household. My parents didn't read me books. I made a lot of friends in school, and I had good teachers who helped me chosing an education and career path my parents wouldn't have offered me. So getting out of my home environment into a different social one was vital.
I'd call the authors attitude the 'nerdy privileged kid' experience, who most likely had bad social interactions as well as a household educated and affluent enough to get a rich education outside of the education system. It's not how it works for many, probably most kids.
There's also an important aspect implicitly ignored in the article. That a lot of parents who cannot work from home, like say cashiers or construction workers who still have to go out, do not even really know right now how to manage their kids. People like that rely on having a school system that works.
Totally agree with this. My parents were good in some ways but in terms of anything related to academics they were both in the negative. They never helped me with my homework even a single time growing up.. homeschooling with them would have been.. awkward.
Education definitely needs to reform, speaking here in terms of North America, but HN is not a a good sample pool for the general public.
I’m so jealous of people from good families. Like when I hear so and sos parents went to Yale so they did to.. here I am like: my dad sold drugs :/
Don’t all of you go about underestimating your good luck.
> I’m so jealous of people from good families. Like when I hear so and sos parents went to Yale so they did to.. here I am like: my dad sold drugs :/
I went to private school and my best friend's dad worked as a middle level exec at Phillip Morris, other than the fact they had far more financial security and that time he gave us that 'only idiots smoke' speech with details about how his Industry worked (incidentally years before Thank you for smking came out) I don't think they had much of anything you would call a relationship.
His son was more like an employee than a child, he would have new cleats every other football game but only because his father insisted that he scored the most touchdowns and 'make a name for himself for scholarship money' kind of arrangements. There wasn't anything I'd say I envied of his situation.
Another colleagues father was from a poor family but an amazing mechanic with engineering and fabrication leanings, some of his patents were bough by Yamaha and even did a few years at Raytheon. Of his 3 children, 2 became an account and a physician but both tried to commit suicide as did his wife due to horrible upbringing.
My childhood was marred with things more like your own than my friend's as I came from a working lower middle class so despite my parents sending me to private school to shield me from the realities at home they were still painfully real.
If I'm honest I much prefer being an autodidact that grew up on the Internet as I know that anything I want to learn is within my grasp and and that its likely a community of people who are dedicated to this is out there too if I really want to learn from.
I lost track of my friend when we went to separate highschools as his dad got relocated to the East Coast but I'd later find out from a mutual friend that he never really amounted to much, either. Why that was isn't clear, but I know for a fact he despised being his father's only son despite him being a well paid exec that managed 100s of people.
Your pain can be your guide for success if you learn to channel it and use it in your favour, which is why I'm now seeing it a gift despite all the drawbacks it had in my past. It also probably gave you a sense of empathy for children in similar situations that you may have ignored entirely had you not grown up in such a dysfunctional situation.
Sidenote: I was big fan of 'Malcolm in the Middle' in grade school but lost interest when I got to HS and forgot all about it until the pandemic and random youtube videos, so I've been watching some of the later seasons as they're new to me and I forgot how poignant that show was at highlighting some of the points of wealth inequality and the pernicious effects of wasting Human Capital and potential: particular in systems like Ivy Leagues.
“My childhood was marred with things more like your own than my friend's as I came from a working lower middle class so despite my parents sending me to private school to shield me from the realities”
My mom used to smoke crack in front of me when we were about the same age. Poor people do not have a monopoly on being shitty parents but let’s stay on topic here: the school system is necessary for the lower classes.
> My mom used to smoke crack in front of me when we were about the same age. Poor people do not have a monopoly on being shitty parents but let’s stay on topic here: the school system is necessary for the lower classes.
What they/we need(ed) is a better school system if and when necessary and an opt out entirely for basic skills training for gainful employment for the lower class, of which I was a part of back then and only until recently.
Not everyone was meant to go to University, Society cannot function without the essential workers we have who still work to this day despite COVID, most of whom do not have more than a secondary school education--this pandemic showed just how non-essential a stock broker or a contract lawyer, or even a Software engineer is in maintaining Society's core functions that we all rely on, and we would be remiss to conflate schooling with education or skills for that matter.
The school system in question was a place that kept people like me from attending University lectures by guest lecturers or seminal speeches on various topics I took interest in because I disobyeyed my teachers, walked out of class and left school when I got bored and corrected their mistakes and still had a 3.x GPA without even trying and openly told them I spent more time on the internet and in university lectures than in their class or homework so it was best to just ignore me and let me go at it alone instead of trying to make an example out of me, which they did and tried to get me on a technicality saying I didn't attend the 'minimum days' my senior year to graduate, proving to me it was racket for financial gain at it's core rather than a place to get an education or even a proper skills set.
These very same people sent recruiters and head hunters from universities on my behalf by my junior year as they wanted a success story to tell, when I refused because I had already got accepted at another university with a near full ride (something very important to me as I had all my money tied to up to my first start up) they were offended. A not so dissimilar thing happened in my freshman and sophomore year oat the first University I attended (I went to 3 by Junior year of a BSc because of countless budget cuts and politics in impacted majors that cared more about cashing in on out of state and foreign tuition rates than educating their own populace) when I got honors when the semester before I was put on academic probation for trying to take 16 units worth of classes at a another university while working 2 jobs (call center and my 2nd startup), but I digress...
That same HS education system tried to send me into Honors Classes on campus a year before but I disliked the hands on approach those teachers had to have with me for me to be accepted, as I had already committed to a life of autodiaditic learning by 16.
Had I simply had access to more things like lathes, CNC machines and welders when I was in HS instead of make-shift garages in apartment parking lots I would have been a very successful fabricator as I would later live with a very famous roll cage and suspension fabricator and a professional driver in motorsports who offered me a role in his operation as he wanted to expand and make more in house designs and felt I had something to contribute. I declined and instead I chose biology and got burned and then went into tech as is so common a story here on HN as I refused to play the academic game and still did more outside of it then I ever could inside, which is why I focused on Ag and culinary.
> I’m so jealous of people from good families. Like when I hear so and sos parents went to Yale so they did to.. here I am like: my dad sold drugs :/
Don't feel envious! My dad was also a small time drug dealer when I was a kid, and it taught me a lot about class and policing and corruption through direct experience. Going through DARE propaganda in my public school with dad in jail for selling weed was an especially potent lesson.
I hated school with a passion, but realistically what is the alternative? My parents did their best and it sounds like we had similar situations, but of course they didn't help with school or homeschool, because how could they? Too busy working and paying the bills. I literally have no clue what the equivalent of this pandemic would do to a family in their economic situation. It certainly would have been worse than going to school, though.
I never went to Yale, didn't go on to become famous or do great things. But once they were able my parents got a computer and a modem so I could follow my passion despite their economic situation - more than a lot of kids had, for sure - and I learned a lot along the way. Maybe rich and connected parents would have eased my path, but I doubt it would have made me a better or happier person.
Absolutely agreed. In addition, I feel like for many people the strongest friendships they have in adulthood are forged in school, be it junior, middle or college level. Could these bonds be forged elsewhere? Maybe, but I don't see an activity which could replace this social aspect of school.
Disclaimer, I know school can be very traumatic for some people, and I am sorry if you had such an experience.
Totally agreed. It reads as a rant by someone who’s not yet over highschool and didn’t take the effort to consider how the same system might work incredibly well for others.
That said, I do feel more effort should be put in making students who struggle succeed instead of conform.
His argument about knowledge retention also completely misses the mark. My high school chemistry teacher said it best when asked why we needed to learn stuff we'd just forget about after the exam:
"I don't expect you to remember anything you learned in my classes after you leave high school, but when a time comes later in life that you need this knowledge you'll know how to learn it again."
It's not about being able to recite all the answers to the exam questions at any given time. It's about having gone through the learning process.
I've heard this adage several times and it doesn't match my experience.
I've been trying grasping some physics recently and I had do it from scratch, I didn't even know basic facts.
I was pleased to see I still remember trigonometry though, and I perfectly know why: instead of studying back in school I spent time making 2d games and I often needed trigonometry.
The way we do education in school is broken. If not for everyone, at least for my brain.
Eh, for secondary education it's more of a "breadth, then depth" minmax pruning exercise -
you go through 10 or 20 courses like biology, physics, economics, drama, calculus, journalism, etc. and then you winnow those down into things to pursue further, rinse, repeat...
By the time you're 3 years into med school or a graphics designer job, forgetting trig or how a Constitutional amendment is ratified is a feature, not a bug.
Children are learning machines. They do it faster than adults, and they could be retaining everything. The reason no one retains things from school is because there’s no effort put into long-term retention. There’s no effort put into much of anything outside of memorization. Math is memorizing formulas, French is memorizing vocabulary, English is memorizing plots and literary devices. The best classes are the ones that the teacher asks for synthesizing something that is not explicitly given. Take some base knowledge and ask people to use it to make something new, and the learning is way more effective.
Language learning works on this principle, thus why “immersion” is the best learning method. It forces you to speak. Math is like this too, playing around with the formulas and learning to come up with new ones reinforces the principles. Writing is far more effective at teaching students to read than just reading is. Creative writing in the same style or using the same devices as a book will internalize them.
Learning is about synthesis, and it’s vanishingly rare in the education system.
Agreed. My kids go to a Waldorf school, and it's all about synthesis. They don't get teaching material, they make it themselves.
This also reinforces a can-do attitude.
I compare it to my university education, where we spend most of the time (2/3) each semester doing a project in a small group. The engineering faculty of the university I attended was recently rated in the top 4 with Stanford and MIT and a Chinese one (above Oxford). I guarantee you it's not because of the quality of the staff - it's the method.
My math was not memorizing formulas and French constantly tortured us with writing essays. And my school system was more tilted toward authoritarian memorizing then my kids school is.
Also, kids don't retain everything, school or not. Yet also, my kids are in elementary school and I definitely learn faster at this point. They will learn even faster then I am learning now, but they are not there yet.
Even if you forget what you've learned, having learned it once makes the acquisition faster the second time.
Though really what matters most is wanting to learn it. The problem with most formal education is that you're taught stuff that you don't really care about at the time.
Your last point is made explicitly in the article when it calls school a babysitting service. If you take out the explicit goal of education away from school, you get tax-funded babysitting. In many schools, the funding is low enough that the education system is mostly that.
It takes a lot more money to actually educate kids in a way that gets them to their maximum potential. That’s why affluent families have that rich education outside of the system: society doesn’t spend enough money on it.
While the education system has some good aspects, with a couple of them even being education-related. The focus of society should be on reducing the number of children with bad home lives.
besides private schooling and private tutoring, how do children of wealthy families obtain an edge? surely there's a way to replicate it without the money.
> That a lot of parents who cannot work from home, like say cashiers or construction workers who still have to go out, do not even really know right now how to manage their kids.
And further confusing the issue, many other parents / families who are forced to stay home do know how to interact with their children productively, and those children have a much better time of it.
Agreed, this is written by an upper middle class kid, who had a great home life. Most working class people can't exactly work from home, hunger among children who can't get school lunches anymore is rampant.
I know my home life was so bad, this would have definitely been rough. For lots of kids school provides a necessary reprieve
School brings its own traumas. School can be a bit prison lite both in structure and social dynamics between children. But for some children school is still a more plesant experience than whatever is happening at home and so it is an important and life saving escape.
High school gave me severe social anxiety and I was “popular.” I know many others had it much worse than me. College was a good change of pace for me and I got over it, but then a few years into my career I worked at a place that was very high school like and all of the trauma and anxiety returned and then some. Took years to recover my confidence.
This. I mean, if the prison lite that is school (love that term) is better than a child's home life, doesn't that speak to deeper issues? Maybe GP should try not to excuse the stories from the Hellmouth[0] that is school by saying that home life is worse for some children.
I for one, don't see how my being stuffed into a locker was conducive to any sort of "learning experience", and I've always had problems staying awake in lectures since as far back as I can remember. Give me books any day of the week.
A one size fits all approach is shitty for everyone, both those "privileged" to suffer at school, and those for whom it is an escape from a broken home.
I thought this article really jumped the shark when he started referring to everybody as "slaves"
The one aspect of what he said I do agree with is that most of what is taught in school is not useful, remembered or applied in daily life. It's where the "mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell" meme comes from. You spend large swathes of your childhood being expected to memorize useless information and regurgitate it back and if you aren't effective at that or motivated to do that, it's a big problem that has consequences from getting punished by your parents to affecting your ability to get into college and train for a career.
And that does suck. Imagine how different our society would be if instead of precalculus or trigonometry, there were courses on personal finance and critical thinking skills. Or practical application of the types of logic you learn in math courses (programming.)
That, and uprooting current systems must surely take into account its second-order consequences [0].
Though, the author, in fairness, isn't off the mark, either. The current system could be better (today, it does optimize / self-select for the median). This pandemic, if nothing, presents an added incentive for folks to rethink education [0] (now that the VC money is there) one piece at a time, if not all at once.
I don't think that you're quite comprehending how bad the "nerdy privileged kid" experience is. I don't remember most of school. I remember all of the facts just fine, I remember some of folks' names and faces, but I mostly simply have a massive black hole in my memory where the first fifteen years of my life should be.
I didn't get "a rich education", I was repeatedly recommended to do special coursework which was different from my peers' work. My household wasn't "educated and affluent enough", but the school insisted that I be treated differently or else I would have to go to special needs. I was involuntarily medicated because they thought that it would improve my performance.
Bentham was right to imagine schools and prisons as having the same basic social structure. Maybe it was alright for you, but it was traumatizing for many of us.
Having neither had a great family, let alone parents who read to me, I can say school was a catastrophe and I very much agree with OP. The primary lesson of school, the training that happens every hour of every day of school is this: Sit down, shut up and listen. School is not about teaching and education, it is about training obedience, apathy, resignation and of course baby sitting. It is an institution from the 19th century, developed for a society of farmers, factory workers and dutiful drones of cannon fodder.
> School is not about teaching and education, it is about training obedience, apathy, resignation and of course baby sitting. It is an institution from the 19th century, developed for a society of farmers, factory workers and dutiful drones of cannon fodder.
All of this! I can't understand why people don't see it. I'm not one to argue change for change's sake, but we moved away from being a factory worker economy a long time ago, and even longer still has it been since we've been agrarian.
People wonder why we are falling behind in R&D, well it's quite plain when you see that the lessons of school aren't for independent thinkers, it's conditioning for obedient/subservient drones.
You're GD right that our current school models were designed in the 19th century for farmers, then factory workers. Something needs to change, otherwise we can expect stagnation at a minimum, but more likely regression as a society.
I don't understand the need to force an universal on everyone, instead of letting systems cohabit. Every time someone says WFH is great someone else can't refrain to say it's hell for them or others. School was great for you, then good for you. Parents that cannot work from home? School is good for them too. That doesn't change the point that it sucks for some others.
> And most of what is taught in school and university is quickly forgotten.
This is, of course, why parents aren't concerned with getting their children into good schools, why there aren't any universities that can command huge tuition fees, and why you will never see a job advert asking for a degree or an employer hiring from a certain school.
That epidemiologist measuring the R0 rate isn't using math and knowledge they learned in school - no doubt they taught themselves because of their passion for the subject, and it's completely coincidental they were in a school studying the subject.
You write that with /s but there's easily another dynamic that explains why people want expensive schools and universities.
For instance people actually don't learn all that much in school, it's all about the connections you make. Then it makes sense again to pay up for it, even though you don't learn how to do anything specific.
It also means there's plenty of opportunity to read up on how R0 works if it happens to tickle your interest.
I agree author has wrong expectations when it comes to how/what people learn. I see a lot of it in such threads and by people who postulate that all schools should be shut down.
School or university material is very basic and that is true. Unfortunately too many people expect that school is going to give them tools to deal with everything in life. School is giving only basic tools upon which one can build his own. Epidemiologist got his basic math in school but to be able to measure R0 he had to put in his own time, otherwise he would not become a specialist.
School system has to provide set of tools to large quantity of people. Where mostly people who nag about school, look at it from "gifted child" perspective.
There is a large body of knowledge that schools completely ignore, they absolutely should lay the groundwork for personal finance, basic understanding of law and psychology, basics of health and common medicines.
Finally, basics of how things are built and repaired.
A lot of people never go to uni, and the schools seem to do their damnest to avoid teaching kids anything practical.
Primary school maths is the absolute groundwork for personal finance. I believe calculating compound interest is covered in basic math education. Addition and subtraction is enough for paying bills and not spending money on stupid things, if someone cannot do that there is no school in the world that will help.
For basic understanding law and psychology you have reading assignments. Reading novels is meant to show basics of human psychology, after reading assignment there is always class discussion on what you understood from the lecture. I also believe that if you have history classes you get basics of law and how that law was created. Not to mention that in reading assignments you probably also get in touch with basics of law, let alone that you are learning how to read and understand what was written.
I understand that some people need more hand holding to connect the dots.
If it were true that Oxford was uniquely better at teaching than anyone else, they would be expanding to educate as many people as possible. But the higher education game is one of exclusivity and elitism, it's like Roll-royce - if everyone has it, its worthless.
Its a self reinforcing system, top universities pick top students, arguably these people are so bright you will get noble prise lauriates even if you educate them in rural mongolia.
My parents were always clear that this is a game in pursuit of a paper certificate that open doors to the next stage, and your wellbeing depends on it.
They were never under impression that your wages are fairly adjusted for your knowledge.
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[ 6.0 ms ] story [ 256 ms ] threadMy kid do want to go back to school. They were happy when they heard the school will start again and disappointed when it did not. To large extend, they want to be with friends again. To the rest of it, teacher is actually better teacher then us, they enjoy learning part in school more then in home.
It has nothing to do with what I remember about my school. It has to do with what they say to me now and what situation makes them happy.
From my point of view, the time home did taught them some things that were not present in school. But overall they were learning much less then when they went to school every day.
As an introvert with a little above average neuroticism I viscerally despised returning to school after a long holiday break from K to 12 without exception. Zero excitement or longing to return. I had good friends, too. I would have much preferred just staying at home and playing video games, getting my social interaction online and keeping in touch with a select few people of my choosing rather than forced interactions with 300 people.
Whether this would've been better for my health is another question.
A few days ago the school organized a poll and around 70% says they prefer normal school whereas the rest prefers online classes.
And in just in case: 0 sarcasm in this whole comment.
That sentence reads very sarcastic. Could you clarify?
I simply read the sentence and read it in a very honest voice and then in a very sarcastic voice.
The very sarcastic voice sounded more approriate, so I asked you to clarify.
College was a lot less productive than high school in terms of academics for me but it was also a lot more fun.
Even high school wasn’t so bad. I’d realized toward the end of high school that I never had an original idea of myself and was at peace with being mediocre.
I remember sometime in the mid to late 90's the teacher asked the class how many people had a computer at home and only about a third of the class raised their hand. The school however had plenty of computers since they were willing to pick up whatever the local business park was throwing away. "Computer free time" was probably the best part of the school day.
I loved the long summer breaks, but I also loved going back to meet all my classmates afterwards.
He is currently doing all the work he would be doing but on our kitchen counter with his mother or I. He gets all the hard bits of school without the fun bits.
Perhaps the writer of the article should try asking the people he is talking about?
Presumably the author believes it's possible to structure more fun outside of school if the community were into it. It's too bad nobody is really on that discussion atm.
As a tangent, here is a photo of a German kindergarten.
https://i.redd.it/l9ghxqjqhdh61.jpg
OK let's listen to them, and just delete school and see what these kids say in 20 years?
Maybe kids don't like school, but school doesn't exist because kids like it, it exists for different reasons such as :
- parents can work in the mean time
- kids can be taught things
Kids not liking school is not a point in the "school should be open" debate. It is one in the "how to make kids pleased to go to school" debate though
> I used to amuse myself by asking recent university grads what they had learned, most of them could barely remember anything. Since I was widely read, often I knew enough to ask basic questions about their discipline, and they wouldn’t know the answers.
One has to wonder if the author's perspective on school might have been tinted by this kind of arrogance.
So using that, "All happy students are alike; each unhappy student is unhappy in their own way"
I hated school. I was a good student taking "challenge" courses in elementary, then honors courses in middle school then AP courses, but the overall experience of k-12 was horrible for me. When I think about it, I cannot imagine having to go through it all again. It was horrible for me in my own way.
Again though, anecdotes.
I look forward to seeing the actual data that comes out of this period and how it's affected childrens schooling. Personally I suspect it will be a net negative.
> Some, yes, are lonely and miss their friends. But the vast majority expressed that that they don’t feel that disconnected, because their after school habits of texting, Discord, and video chats remain intact.
[1]: https://twitter.com/kingsleymalo/status/1354129303919800323
Examples of issues: a kid got very jealous whenever friend paid attention to other kids. That escalated to bullying of the "if you play with him I wont play with you anymore" kind. This worked well, because other kids were generally more needy then usual, so it was harder for them to say "so what".
Then there was reduced ability to solve conflicts or deal with them. They escalated much more quickly over much smaller things. Other kids having different opinions was sudden new shocking unpleasant experience.
Finally, reduced ability to deal with frustration. At home, you are not confronted with interpersonal issues nor new situations. Mostly, you get your routine and that is it.
In recognition of Valentines Day, I will make the analogy: Remembering that school was good is like romantic couples who break up only to later in life get back together but just long enough to remember why they broke up the first time.
Or
School is the "cruel mistress" of childhood memories.
Happy VD everyone :P
One thing that struck me while reading this was the influence of American culture. You often see school depicted as a sort of weird jungle with jocks-vs-nerds dynamics coming from America. Some of the kids at my international school emulated that and it wasn't pleasant, but I got over that eventually as well.
In general, most people I know across cultures think back fondly to their school days, minus Americans. My American friends are the ones most likely to point out the things Ian mentions. The jumping through hoops, wastes of time, the production of wage slaves.
Yep. I don't remember jocks vs nerds or any other gang warfare forms when I was in school. Neither does my kid and she only finished high school recently.
Must be an American thing, or an american movie thing?
Very much, and the American kids made it seem more real. Otherwise we'd have just ignored it. But a bunch of them decided they had to have popularity cliques with in-and-out people, just like in the movies.
Luckily our sports teams were so terrible it didn't create a second substrate for this.
No
I moved ahead by studying computer science at the university when I was 13 years old. Thereby I was taking courses at school and university in parallel. But the school courses were all at regular paces. Then I had to repeat topics at school that I learned years ago at the university. I had almost finished my bachelor degree before I had finished high school. The school was a complete waste of time. I also got demoted by one or two grades in school for "not asking enough questions in classes"
Eventually this cultinated in a row between my parents, the tracher and the headmaster.
Because mu parents had my back, she stopped creating dramad but I never got the grades i was meant to.
As to jocks and nerds my elementary school was full of bullies and it was basically a prison culture where any kind of deviation from the norm was severely punished. Short? Walks in funny way? Not so good complexion? You were treated as an alien and bullied around while no one cared. If you made stand you were punished for stirring trouble.
I don't know how American school system and culture works but I get the same idea from the things I've read. Sure, the methods of teaching at school were slow and even boring at times but it was always fun with friends and even teachers. There were some boring time periods here and there but overall it was really great. Almost if not all the people I know have very fond memories of school days.
However, there was a strong American cultural influence e.g. shows like Saved by the Bell, Fresh Prince of Bel Air, Simpsons etc were all popular and had strong nerd as social outcast themes.
However I don’t think they were the cause of this social dynamic, it was much older and entrenched.
As a caveat, it could of course be that someone else in my class had a completely different experience of the same events.
We moved from the US to Sweden while I was in the middle of elementary school in the 90's. In the US there was very much the culture of "school sucks!", and when we were let out for summer vacation, everyone would cheer that school was out for summer!
Imagine my surprise when we were let out for summer in Sweden and kids were crying they wouldn't meet teacher until next school year.
Of course, there's also the variance in the schools I went to in the US and Sweden - the US one was more urban than where we ended up living in Sweden. But I remember there was much more of a media (TV) culture of "isn't school lame and boring?" with patronizing PSA style "no actually learning is cool!" propaganda that fooled nobody and actually served the opposite purpose
What would suck more would be no school, or weed-school (get high on weed).
Work is a bit different. Sometimes there are interesting projects and you get engrossed in work, which also shouldn't take over too much of your life. Other times, the politics and fakery absolutely sucks.
I don't think we can expect things to not suck at all, ever.
Not really. TFA does say that for some (or most?) parents, school is a babysitting service. The author says, despite that, school isn't a terribly good place for a child to be growing up either.
When the pandemic struck, and we closed down from April to late may, our schools actually reacted decently. It was a stressful situation, everything was new and has to happen here and now. So the lower quality and chaos was to be expected, but I think our teachers and school administrations pulled through and did really well given the circumstances.
What troubles me is that when the second lockdown hit in November, nothing had changed. We knew it was coming because it was happening in other countries before it hit us, and still, we were as unrelated as the first time?
Why didn’t we have videos of the curriculum prepared nationally instead of still relying of thousands of individual teachers to teach classes as though students were in a class room? Why weren’t we prepared to let students go through material on their own, and then have “classes” with teachers in smaller groups of 4-6 with the teacher preforming a mentor role, which is what worked best during the first lockdown?
I mean, it’s really just silly that we’re still pretending the online class room is similar to the real physical class room, and it’s leaving weaker or challenged students behind.
I do think children are wanting to go back to school though. Not because of school, but because of the social life going back to school brings them.
We're talking about school, not university, right? Kids don't do lectures, it's all interactive.
Plus what do you reckon the teaching unions would think about that plan? You want them to just put all of education on YouTube, and then be done?
Have you ever met a teacher in school who was better at using a computer than you? (Assume you're a dev). How could you expect them to have everything done between April and November when they're as lost as the kids?
In any case, we are talking about grade school kids, from a few years old to maybe 12. You cannot just plop them in front of a computer to view content at their own leisure, and then expect them to come up with intelligent questions to fill in the gaps. That's what you do with university students.
I have both of these in my household, and I can assure you that while it works for the master's student, the kids have a tough time without interaction.
¹ FWIW: I agree that lectures are not suitable for school pupils.
The thing is, I don't see how it really matters. You still end up requiring kids to sit still when they can't do it. I guess my focus is on smaller kids. I fully agree with modern comms you can do the inverted classrooms with people older than maybe 12 or so, I'm unsure where the line is.
Because in practice, this amounts to one teacher for 4-6 kids and assumption that kids are good at individual preparation.
It's a tool to condition people to become obedient little serfs who don't question authority so they will become good cogs in the corporate/industrial machine. It's also there to be daycare so parents can go be good cogs in the corporate/industrial machine. Education is a distant third at best. At least this is how it is in America.
All these people talking about the socializing are probably the same people who hate telework and miss the office because that's where they do a lot of their socializing. It's completely orthogonal, socializing should not be dependent on school or work, and maybe if they are such a huge part of our life we either admit they are broken and restructure them, or commit to less time dedicated to these activities.
Secondly though, school is not terrible for everyone. I didn't have a great household. My parents didn't read me books. I made a lot of friends in school, and I had good teachers who helped me chosing an education and career path my parents wouldn't have offered me. So getting out of my home environment into a different social one was vital.
I'd call the authors attitude the 'nerdy privileged kid' experience, who most likely had bad social interactions as well as a household educated and affluent enough to get a rich education outside of the education system. It's not how it works for many, probably most kids.
There's also an important aspect implicitly ignored in the article. That a lot of parents who cannot work from home, like say cashiers or construction workers who still have to go out, do not even really know right now how to manage their kids. People like that rely on having a school system that works.
Education definitely needs to reform, speaking here in terms of North America, but HN is not a a good sample pool for the general public.
I’m so jealous of people from good families. Like when I hear so and sos parents went to Yale so they did to.. here I am like: my dad sold drugs :/
Don’t all of you go about underestimating your good luck.
I went to private school and my best friend's dad worked as a middle level exec at Phillip Morris, other than the fact they had far more financial security and that time he gave us that 'only idiots smoke' speech with details about how his Industry worked (incidentally years before Thank you for smking came out) I don't think they had much of anything you would call a relationship.
His son was more like an employee than a child, he would have new cleats every other football game but only because his father insisted that he scored the most touchdowns and 'make a name for himself for scholarship money' kind of arrangements. There wasn't anything I'd say I envied of his situation.
Another colleagues father was from a poor family but an amazing mechanic with engineering and fabrication leanings, some of his patents were bough by Yamaha and even did a few years at Raytheon. Of his 3 children, 2 became an account and a physician but both tried to commit suicide as did his wife due to horrible upbringing.
My childhood was marred with things more like your own than my friend's as I came from a working lower middle class so despite my parents sending me to private school to shield me from the realities at home they were still painfully real.
If I'm honest I much prefer being an autodidact that grew up on the Internet as I know that anything I want to learn is within my grasp and and that its likely a community of people who are dedicated to this is out there too if I really want to learn from.
I lost track of my friend when we went to separate highschools as his dad got relocated to the East Coast but I'd later find out from a mutual friend that he never really amounted to much, either. Why that was isn't clear, but I know for a fact he despised being his father's only son despite him being a well paid exec that managed 100s of people.
Your pain can be your guide for success if you learn to channel it and use it in your favour, which is why I'm now seeing it a gift despite all the drawbacks it had in my past. It also probably gave you a sense of empathy for children in similar situations that you may have ignored entirely had you not grown up in such a dysfunctional situation.
Sidenote: I was big fan of 'Malcolm in the Middle' in grade school but lost interest when I got to HS and forgot all about it until the pandemic and random youtube videos, so I've been watching some of the later seasons as they're new to me and I forgot how poignant that show was at highlighting some of the points of wealth inequality and the pernicious effects of wasting Human Capital and potential: particular in systems like Ivy Leagues.
My mom used to smoke crack in front of me when we were about the same age. Poor people do not have a monopoly on being shitty parents but let’s stay on topic here: the school system is necessary for the lower classes.
What they/we need(ed) is a better school system if and when necessary and an opt out entirely for basic skills training for gainful employment for the lower class, of which I was a part of back then and only until recently.
Not everyone was meant to go to University, Society cannot function without the essential workers we have who still work to this day despite COVID, most of whom do not have more than a secondary school education--this pandemic showed just how non-essential a stock broker or a contract lawyer, or even a Software engineer is in maintaining Society's core functions that we all rely on, and we would be remiss to conflate schooling with education or skills for that matter.
The school system in question was a place that kept people like me from attending University lectures by guest lecturers or seminal speeches on various topics I took interest in because I disobyeyed my teachers, walked out of class and left school when I got bored and corrected their mistakes and still had a 3.x GPA without even trying and openly told them I spent more time on the internet and in university lectures than in their class or homework so it was best to just ignore me and let me go at it alone instead of trying to make an example out of me, which they did and tried to get me on a technicality saying I didn't attend the 'minimum days' my senior year to graduate, proving to me it was racket for financial gain at it's core rather than a place to get an education or even a proper skills set.
These very same people sent recruiters and head hunters from universities on my behalf by my junior year as they wanted a success story to tell, when I refused because I had already got accepted at another university with a near full ride (something very important to me as I had all my money tied to up to my first start up) they were offended. A not so dissimilar thing happened in my freshman and sophomore year oat the first University I attended (I went to 3 by Junior year of a BSc because of countless budget cuts and politics in impacted majors that cared more about cashing in on out of state and foreign tuition rates than educating their own populace) when I got honors when the semester before I was put on academic probation for trying to take 16 units worth of classes at a another university while working 2 jobs (call center and my 2nd startup), but I digress...
That same HS education system tried to send me into Honors Classes on campus a year before but I disliked the hands on approach those teachers had to have with me for me to be accepted, as I had already committed to a life of autodiaditic learning by 16.
Had I simply had access to more things like lathes, CNC machines and welders when I was in HS instead of make-shift garages in apartment parking lots I would have been a very successful fabricator as I would later live with a very famous roll cage and suspension fabricator and a professional driver in motorsports who offered me a role in his operation as he wanted to expand and make more in house designs and felt I had something to contribute. I declined and instead I chose biology and got burned and then went into tech as is so common a story here on HN as I refused to play the academic game and still did more outside of it then I ever could inside, which is why I focused on Ag and culinary.
Don't feel envious! My dad was also a small time drug dealer when I was a kid, and it taught me a lot about class and policing and corruption through direct experience. Going through DARE propaganda in my public school with dad in jail for selling weed was an especially potent lesson.
I hated school with a passion, but realistically what is the alternative? My parents did their best and it sounds like we had similar situations, but of course they didn't help with school or homeschool, because how could they? Too busy working and paying the bills. I literally have no clue what the equivalent of this pandemic would do to a family in their economic situation. It certainly would have been worse than going to school, though.
I never went to Yale, didn't go on to become famous or do great things. But once they were able my parents got a computer and a modem so I could follow my passion despite their economic situation - more than a lot of kids had, for sure - and I learned a lot along the way. Maybe rich and connected parents would have eased my path, but I doubt it would have made me a better or happier person.
Disclaimer, I know school can be very traumatic for some people, and I am sorry if you had such an experience.
That said, I do feel more effort should be put in making students who struggle succeed instead of conform.
"I don't expect you to remember anything you learned in my classes after you leave high school, but when a time comes later in life that you need this knowledge you'll know how to learn it again."
It's not about being able to recite all the answers to the exam questions at any given time. It's about having gone through the learning process.
I've been trying grasping some physics recently and I had do it from scratch, I didn't even know basic facts.
I was pleased to see I still remember trigonometry though, and I perfectly know why: instead of studying back in school I spent time making 2d games and I often needed trigonometry.
The way we do education in school is broken. If not for everyone, at least for my brain.
By the time you're 3 years into med school or a graphics designer job, forgetting trig or how a Constitutional amendment is ratified is a feature, not a bug.
Language learning works on this principle, thus why “immersion” is the best learning method. It forces you to speak. Math is like this too, playing around with the formulas and learning to come up with new ones reinforces the principles. Writing is far more effective at teaching students to read than just reading is. Creative writing in the same style or using the same devices as a book will internalize them.
Learning is about synthesis, and it’s vanishingly rare in the education system.
This also reinforces a can-do attitude.
I compare it to my university education, where we spend most of the time (2/3) each semester doing a project in a small group. The engineering faculty of the university I attended was recently rated in the top 4 with Stanford and MIT and a Chinese one (above Oxford). I guarantee you it's not because of the quality of the staff - it's the method.
Also, kids don't retain everything, school or not. Yet also, my kids are in elementary school and I definitely learn faster at this point. They will learn even faster then I am learning now, but they are not there yet.
Though really what matters most is wanting to learn it. The problem with most formal education is that you're taught stuff that you don't really care about at the time.
It takes a lot more money to actually educate kids in a way that gets them to their maximum potential. That’s why affluent families have that rich education outside of the system: society doesn’t spend enough money on it.
While the education system has some good aspects, with a couple of them even being education-related. The focus of society should be on reducing the number of children with bad home lives.
And further confusing the issue, many other parents / families who are forced to stay home do know how to interact with their children productively, and those children have a much better time of it.
I know my home life was so bad, this would have definitely been rough. For lots of kids school provides a necessary reprieve
High school gave me severe social anxiety and I was “popular.” I know many others had it much worse than me. College was a good change of pace for me and I got over it, but then a few years into my career I worked at a place that was very high school like and all of the trauma and anxiety returned and then some. Took years to recover my confidence.
I for one, don't see how my being stuffed into a locker was conducive to any sort of "learning experience", and I've always had problems staying awake in lectures since as far back as I can remember. Give me books any day of the week.
A one size fits all approach is shitty for everyone, both those "privileged" to suffer at school, and those for whom it is an escape from a broken home.
[0] - https://slashdot.org/story/99/04/27/0310247/more-stories-fro...
The one aspect of what he said I do agree with is that most of what is taught in school is not useful, remembered or applied in daily life. It's where the "mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell" meme comes from. You spend large swathes of your childhood being expected to memorize useless information and regurgitate it back and if you aren't effective at that or motivated to do that, it's a big problem that has consequences from getting punished by your parents to affecting your ability to get into college and train for a career.
And that does suck. Imagine how different our society would be if instead of precalculus or trigonometry, there were courses on personal finance and critical thinking skills. Or practical application of the types of logic you learn in math courses (programming.)
Though, the author, in fairness, isn't off the mark, either. The current system could be better (today, it does optimize / self-select for the median). This pandemic, if nothing, presents an added incentive for folks to rethink education [0] (now that the VC money is there) one piece at a time, if not all at once.
[0] https://fs.blog/2020/03/chestertons-fence/
[1] ex: https://infed.org/mobi/jiddu-krishnamurti-and-his-insights-i...
I didn't get "a rich education", I was repeatedly recommended to do special coursework which was different from my peers' work. My household wasn't "educated and affluent enough", but the school insisted that I be treated differently or else I would have to go to special needs. I was involuntarily medicated because they thought that it would improve my performance.
Bentham was right to imagine schools and prisons as having the same basic social structure. Maybe it was alright for you, but it was traumatizing for many of us.
All of this! I can't understand why people don't see it. I'm not one to argue change for change's sake, but we moved away from being a factory worker economy a long time ago, and even longer still has it been since we've been agrarian.
People wonder why we are falling behind in R&D, well it's quite plain when you see that the lessons of school aren't for independent thinkers, it's conditioning for obedient/subservient drones.
You're GD right that our current school models were designed in the 19th century for farmers, then factory workers. Something needs to change, otherwise we can expect stagnation at a minimum, but more likely regression as a society.
This is, of course, why parents aren't concerned with getting their children into good schools, why there aren't any universities that can command huge tuition fees, and why you will never see a job advert asking for a degree or an employer hiring from a certain school.
That epidemiologist measuring the R0 rate isn't using math and knowledge they learned in school - no doubt they taught themselves because of their passion for the subject, and it's completely coincidental they were in a school studying the subject.
/s
For instance people actually don't learn all that much in school, it's all about the connections you make. Then it makes sense again to pay up for it, even though you don't learn how to do anything specific.
It also means there's plenty of opportunity to read up on how R0 works if it happens to tickle your interest.
School or university material is very basic and that is true. Unfortunately too many people expect that school is going to give them tools to deal with everything in life. School is giving only basic tools upon which one can build his own. Epidemiologist got his basic math in school but to be able to measure R0 he had to put in his own time, otherwise he would not become a specialist.
School system has to provide set of tools to large quantity of people. Where mostly people who nag about school, look at it from "gifted child" perspective.
Finally, basics of how things are built and repaired.
A lot of people never go to uni, and the schools seem to do their damnest to avoid teaching kids anything practical.
More along these lines: https://genius.com/Boyinaband-dont-stay-in-school-lyrics
Yet he argues someone should teach him how to trade stocks and give financial advice.
This summarizes why Robinhood broker is a bad idea.
For basic understanding law and psychology you have reading assignments. Reading novels is meant to show basics of human psychology, after reading assignment there is always class discussion on what you understood from the lecture. I also believe that if you have history classes you get basics of law and how that law was created. Not to mention that in reading assignments you probably also get in touch with basics of law, let alone that you are learning how to read and understand what was written.
I understand that some people need more hand holding to connect the dots.
Its a self reinforcing system, top universities pick top students, arguably these people are so bright you will get noble prise lauriates even if you educate them in rural mongolia.
My parents were always clear that this is a game in pursuit of a paper certificate that open doors to the next stage, and your wellbeing depends on it.
They were never under impression that your wages are fairly adjusted for your knowledge.