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Comment by tvanantwerp | Hacker News Reader

One of the unintended lessons I learned in school was that pushing myself was not a requirement for success. Tests and homework were easy for me. As a result, school became that place I had to go during the day until I could come home and play video games or otherwise goof off.

It took a very long time for me to internalize the values of hard work and studying, since I never needed either in school. It depresses me to speculate on where I could be and what I could have accomplished if I'd been pushed harder at an age where I was too naive to know that I should push myself.

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The worst thing is the discouragement that public schooling gives gifted students when they do push themselves. I was always getting in trouble for reading ahead in English class, or moving too quickly through the lessons in math. Creates too much work for the teachers grading, I suppose. They also don't like it when you point out that they are teaching falsehoods.

And then on top of that, there's the discouragement from your peers. It wasn't a particularly good thing to be the "smart kid". There's a lot of peer pressure to be average, and the outliers don't gain any popularity points.

More the just not earning popularity points, being ahead of the curve can often make one the target of bullying and ostracism. Especially if one's social intellect lags behind their book smarts.

I went to school in Iowa. Just the opposite - I was encouraged to read ahead, to ask questions, to push myself. But Iowa is known for having some of the best schools in America, for about a century now. Maybe we don't need to go to the Netherlands for examples of good schools.

Having gone to high school in Germany and gotten my Masters degree in the US I'm really surprised by this. All the teachers I had would have loved you for studying ahead. Teachers even enjoyed arguing with me when I thought they were wrong.

I still remember a student getting yelled at for working ahead in the book in 1st grade. I guess I learned my lesson because I never did it.

He wasn't even a very good student, and my reaction (that I was wise enough to not vocalize) was "well, he's finally doing some work, this is a good thing, right?"

There are a bunch of people in school administration who have as priority #1 "make the system as easy to run as possible." Priority #2 is to drive out anyone who questions priority #1.

One thing to keep in mind in this kind of discussion is that the US is really big. It has 13,500 school districts. Its population is almost half that of all of Europe. Put another way, it has a population roughly the same size as Germany, France, the UK, Italy and Spain all put together.

Among other factors that result from thus, there's a lot more variance in experience across US schools than there are in many European nations.

In my experience at a (well-off) US public school, I had some teachers who were annoyed at my reading ahead/knowing things before they were taught, a select few who encouraged it, and a majority of teachers who mostly ignored me.

Edit: It's -> Its

Very much this. My favorite teacher in Middle School was a Spanish teacher who would actually give me information and printouts about "things we haven't learned yet" when I asked about something we hadn't covered yet.

So many language teachers, if I'd ask about some other part of the grammar after class, would tell me not to worry, and "That's next year." or "You don't need to know that.". So it was a revelation, and a moment I still remember clearly, when I asked something about the future tense, she said "Great question, here, let me make you a copy from next year's book".

I've now completed a Ph.D in Linguistics, and I can't help but think that her finally fueling my interest to learn probably played a role in language being my field.

Oh man same here. I look at what some people I know have accomplished through consistent hard work at a young age and I kick myself for my laziness which was so consistently reinforced during school. Oh well, those thoughts just push me to study harder and improve myself now.

I don't wanna tell you that you learned the wrong lesson, but consider that the very negative lesson you learned was to equate success with victories on tests and homework.

What changes in a lot of people is not that they learn the value of "hard work" which is kind of neutral in itself, but their goals shift to objectives that require work and long-term investments in developing skills.

Maybe that's the same thing or too subtle a distinction, but it seems like an interesting idea to me.

Yep, I didn't really know what it meant to push myself, either, until I got to college.

I was foolish enough to get talked into taking 19 credits for my first college semester. I ended that semester with a GPA of 1.6, but it shot up and rose steadily as I started learning--for the first time in my life--how to truly focus.

The whole education system is broken. People learn at different rates and they should learn different things. Having dozens of kids in a classroom all trying to learn the same things is definitely not the most efficient way to teach kids IMHO.

> People learn at different rates and they should learn different things. Having dozens of kids in a classroom all trying to learn the same things is definitely not the most efficient way to teach kids IMHO.

Its almost certainly not the most effective in terms of any reasonable outcome measure without considering efficiency. It may be the most efficient, for at least some subjects, depending on what the resource usage you are trying to optimize in producing whatever the outcome measure is you are looking at.

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