Ask HN: What do you think about the current education system?
Is it good, bad? What can be done better? What problems do you identify? Is it upsetting? are you used to it?
Having them do this at the expense of play (accelerated self-guided learning through social simulation, art and sports), at the expense of physical activity and in an insanely toxic social environment, is plain crazy.
Apprenticeship, where one learns what they need to learn when they need to apply it, and then uses the newly learned skills to achieve own goals beats that hand down. Look up Tobi from shopify and his posts about his learning to write software in Germany's apprenticeship programs.
Convincing kids that they are smart or stupid based on their teacher's opinion on the kids' obedience and ability to regurgitate uninteresting (to them) data is harmful at best. Convincing them that what they are experiencing in school is learning is even more harmful.
Schools are great at efficiently enacting a plan that has little to do with children's needs and little to do with learning.
Like a close friend who attended an elite private school with tiny classes and a lot of self-elected subjects, time allocation and projects said, "when I went to college I thought I was surrounded by idiots. Later I realized these were kids who didn't get a chance to learn good writing, or public speaking, or to plan, schedule and execute on their own nprojects, or to navigate bureaucracy."
I'd say same goes for other important life skills, like financial planning, media preparedness (understanding propaganda and advertising), job hunting, entrepreneurship, art, etc.
I've come to the conclusion that it's not about this information itself. It's more about learning how to learn. This is the skill that the education system helped me develop, and which is useful for me long after the "training data sets" the school used have fallen into complete oblivion. Personalized mnemotechnics.
First off, we learn best when our learning is motivated by something more concrete than "good grades". As an example, I had a hard time with advanced math in school. When I went on to build engineering projects that required advanced math, the same concepts that mostly eluded me previously became fairly straightforward.
Secondly, learning happens best when the material presented is varied, and revisited many times over a long period of time. Schools tend to compress learning about a given subject into a limited time frame, then only revisit it in final exams.
Third, learning occurs far better from trying to recall and apply information than from having it passively presented to you. Instead of having school be mostly lecture with a few exams, school should be mostly tests, with the teacher going back and clarifying only things that many students had trouble with.
In the end, school mostly teaches people to sit still and follow instructions.
And we all know that following instructions does not lead to fulfilling lives, and that sitting still for long periods of time is a sure predictor for a shorter lifespan.
Schools were institutionalized and were good for preparing cheap factory labor.
Our society no longer needs this.
So schools fail the economy and the kids. Preparing today's children for yesterday.
The very institutions that proclaim themselves as the beacon of knowledge and enlightenment act as the opposite.
Ironic.
It took me the better part of college to re-teach myself how to think, I largely attribute it to learning how to be a good CSer on my own effort. (To be clear, not that my effort was anything special, but it let me for once see how I wanted to approach the work, rather than a parent or teacher pressing their structure on it)
I'm not sure what my full takeaway from this is, I certainly expect my anecdote not to hold true universally, I think I mostly intend to warn against an inflexible framework for "teaching learning" (as schools so often tend to be, through natural if unmalicious incentives), lest the process become nothing more than an indoctrination into the life lesson of "you will sit here, do this terribly boring and unproductive thing, and have no say in the matter, and will likely be punished regardless".
I like how you describe the social environment in schools. Going through current schooling system, will most likely result in a damaged personality. And it takes quite a lot of time and effort, to heal the damage, and to re-evaluate experience/knowledge that had been infused.
I however think that treating the human mind as a bucket which can be filled with knowledge at a specific speed following a plan, is disastrous.
Children at young ages have dramatically different levels of development, interests, subject specific curiosities even at the same age. Treating them as if they are all the ideal child, ready to learn what the plan says they should, is ignorant at best.
To add some context to what I mean, the current system is largely based on the decisions of the Committee of Ten[1]. If you read that short note, you'll notice that it's pretty much applying the lessons of industrialization to education ie. assembly line approach.
The example of the assembly line approach is especially relevant for me because I don't think that it is applicable to humans. Different humans learn at different rates so it doesn't make sense to group them by age. Additionally, teaching everyone the same things, while making things nice and uniform, takes away the biggest motivation for learning - curiosity.
This is completely anecdotal, but the further away I moved from this assembly line education system (from high school to college, from college to self-taught developer) the better grades I got (college) or more money (work) and the more time I spent learning, even things that are unrelated to my main focus because the world is fascinating.
As for an idea on how to fix this, I admit that I don't have a concrete one. I've skimmed the topic and the thing that drew my attention most is the Montessori system[2] system of education. It proposes a few points relevant to what I wrote in the previous paragraph, but also one that I find particularly interesting to developers: "Uninterrupted blocks of work time, ideally three hours".
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_of_Ten [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montessori_education
1/ Dividing kids in age based groups is very poor. They only learn negative behaviour from each other. Skill based would be more interesting as the younger kids would learn from the older students and the older ones learn some responsibility towards the older students
2/ Scientific research has proven teacher based education to be sub-optimal. You take away the inquisitive nature of the kids. They will take what the adult says as true and fail to look for different ways to reach the same goal.
3/ School just isn't fun. Information is pumped into children which they forget once it has been tested. Let them discover things in a playful way and they will remember it much longer.
4/ Exams really only test how well one can game exams and tests, not how well one understood the matter. Test should be used as a personal measure to check if you understood everything and if you are ready to move on to more complex issues, not as a benchmark compared to others.
And so much more.
There were exceptions, like one student (may have been a savant) finished his high school certificate in four subject areas 5 years early.
This curriculum had its weaknesses. I accelerated in Math at the age of 13 after starting high school. I was then in a class with no friends, and without much social interaction, I'd zone out and spend the lesson trawling the internet.
Since that class, I've struggled with maths ever since and ended up eventually returning down to a standard level for my final two years of high school.
Happy to answer any other questions about having a vertical curriculum for those that are curious.
And even still, today's education system might be the best there's ever been . . . most people learn how to read . . .
This doesn't address higher-education, which is a whole 'nother shit-show . . .
Further to that, instead of focusing on minimalism and utility, each subjects goes to depths far beyond of what most kids need to know to make use of. Lo and behold, they're going to forget majority of it in a month. And some subjects have gone completely off the rails, like English, with the main focus on past literature. That's not what natural languages are most used for. Arguments, public speaking, legal, journalism, marketing. These matter day in day out, not what Shakespeare spewed while he was high on an Autumn afternoon. That's fine too but let the kids do it on their own time and focus the efforts in equipping them with critical thinking, etc for when they enter the wild!
Education is about making up what is important for us as a society. If we are to allow million of people to starve and get convince that what we see is just a natural state of affairs, then we have defined education as a system not about us as a society but about you as an individual. Society must speaks out with their pockets: If you are paying low wages to scientist, teachers and doctors, you are educating people about what to do with their lives. Forget about the shiny words, education is a lot about economic, incentives and giving people a decent life. Education can't be build without a framework and a clear purpose. Today all of us know what is the purpose of education: save yourself, stay alive, survive. The rest is just a hollow mud of words, deceitful, vain group of vacuous words.
In this forum virtual reality can be turned into a platform for education. We can use virtual reality to replace opium and get people sideway of our way, that is convert into passive, sleeping minds.
But otherwise, we could transform virtual reality into a platform for action, were people are actively engaged into learning and helping others to create and promote knew ways of learning and discovering what is being a human being in the 21th century.
We all want feedback, learning is about communication for action not for self-oppression. I am for an education for action. Now, go, ruin the idea, sell the product, crook the intention, ban the action and feed the vultures and continue educating for succeed.
It's very possible to perform very well on tests with minimal actual comprehension of the material through memorization. In fact, it's quite possibly easier to memorize solutions than to actually learn to solve them.
I think possibly regular problems. E.g. with learning code, you put each question into a solution by learning the way to do it, and then implement a solution.
Secondly, globalization without universal cultural appreciation has done a lot of damage to what we could consider our collective human heritage. A great dream would be to have schools that rotate around the continents, so that students/scholars/people would be exposed to the best of what other parts of the globe have to offer. It would forward-leap humanity a lot if there were simply better crosstalk between tribes.
Thirdly, the emphasis of education should not be to create/fuck/produce/consume but to actually emphasize co-reliance of beings, species, environment, nature. We cannot exist without our planet, and although we can drive fast places, most people do not realize at what a cost this simple luxury comes. Sure we can advance and make up for some damage, but not making damage in the first place is generally the best idea.
I suppose my main beef is that education is not looked upon as a topic worthy of evolution, when it is in fact the head of the inch-worm of humanity-at-large.
That said, these problems are widely known and discussed. Alternatives such as Montessori education are becoming more available. Most American 18-year-olds are reasonably numerate and literate; some even manage to pick up some scientific, historical or foreign language knowledge as well.
In hindsight, the weirdest thing about it was how difficult it was to find suitable times to go to the bathroom.
We can't fix education without fixing the rest of society. The system is so complex and inconsistent, we simply can't expect a kid that keeps what makes him good (curiosity, honesty, idealism) to thrive in the real world.
Back in the early 1900s, and even through a significant part of the century, teaching was nearly the only place for graduates of top women's colleges, at least until they got married. Upwards of 90% of employed graduates of these schools were teaching. Whether that was a matter of it being the most respectable or the most lucrative thing for women to be doing, the fact is that it had a pretty great talent pool to work with. By the 1980s/90s, when you looked at the top 10% of women in terms of academics, only about 10% of them had any interest in teaching as a profession [1].
Now, both the money and the respect are lacking. The perception is that any idiot can become a teacher as long as they can make it through their four years of college. Some people will be quick to say that you can't teach for the money. While that's certainly the case in the US right now, and it agrees with the overall notion that it's much better to be in a job you love, it ignores a lot of the problem. Top students, when they pick what area of studies to pursue, are bound to think about the prestige and earning potential of their future careers, though the amounts of those will differ for different people. If you could easily be headed for a job where you'll make upwards of $100k, accepting $40-50k is a lot for some people to swallow. Suppose I think I'd really enjoy teaching, and hopefully even be good at it, but asking me to be unable to retire for ~40 years, versus the 7-10 I can manage otherwise, is a bit much. Even if I'm not doing my ideal job, I can afford some hobbies that will make up for that. I like sailing, skiing, and traveling, and I'd like to get my pilot's license. Teaching isn't going to pay for any of that. So I make my trade-off, reducing by one the pool of potential teachers. And there are a lot of others doing the same thing.
I have many more things I could say, but I should wrap up my rant. I also believe that home life has an enormous influence on school performance, and I think land use patterns in the US increase this effect by reducing community cohesion, and along with it possibility of parents who struggle being assisted by the people around them.
[1] Somerville College Report, 1987 and 1996. (I've used statistics from Oxford here, but the trends are similarly mirrored for US. I just don't have a resource handy.)
> Top students, when they pick what area of studies to pursue, are bound to think about the prestige and earning potential of their future careers [...]
To support this point, if the profession is lucrative and respected, it attracts both people who love it and people who just want prestige. If the profession is not prestigious, less people who would love it choose it (i.e. only those who want to work in it despite its status), the rest being filled with drop-outs from other areas.
The solution is to preserve curiosity and honesty. These are the only traits that matter.
Garbage. An almost complete waste of time and energy. For grades K-12 a lot of it is just babysitting, to give kids a place to be and keep them out of trouble while their parents are at work. I value my primary school education very little.
While I wouldn't go so far as to say that college is a scam, I would say it is often one of the poorest financial investments people make, and it's even worse because we trick naive 18 year olds into doing it. College is not for you to find yourself, and it's not for you to waste time pursuing a degree that can't help you support yourself and pay back the insane amount of debt you took on to go there.
The current generation of kids was told that you need to go to college or you'll be a failure in life. My dad constantly was saying that if we fucked up and didn't get into a good college we'd be "Making hoagies at Wawa". They say your major doesn't matter, it just matters that you have a degree - you can figure out the rest later.
It's a shame no one sits kids down and says - "Hey, you're about to take out one of the largest loans of your life, one that you'll have to pay many years, maybe even decades. Why are you doing that? What career do you want? Will this degree get you there? What can you expect to earn with this degree - can you pay down these loans with it? If your loans are X, you will be paying at least Y a month."
Most people I know did not get a talk like that from their parents, or high school teachers/guidance counselors. I wish they did.
Some things to improve the current system:
1. Not every kid needs to go to college. Are you bad at that book learning stuff? That's fine - push more kids into trade schools.
2. In the upper grades of primary school, focus on teaching kids the things that will actually matter and are useful. Financial things - how to do your taxes, how to use and maintain a budget, how to pay your bills on time. Life things - applying for jobs, finding an apartment, what careers pay best and how to get into them. Civil rights - how to protect yourself from the police. Real life things that will actually benefit them.
3. Encourage kids to do community college for two years then transfer to a real college to save money. The "college experience" isn't worth the price most pay.
4. Hammer it into kids' heads that unless you're going to MIT, Harvard or Yale, where you go to school doesn't matter. Your degree and the field you choose to go into matters a lot more. Require all colleges to provide what the average jobs and starting salaries are for all majors before a student is allowed to pick one.
Education is important, but the system we have today sucks.
The problem of education is not how it is done but the current purpose of "education" is wrong i.e it is "what" that needs to be fixed about education.
By the way "You do not attract high quality staff by offering $0 salary" is exactly whats wrong with education.
The fundamentals and mentality need to change. However a wise man once taught me that it is human nature is to cheat and find easy ways out - which is why KPI's never work if they are implemented for more than six months or so. So it is necessary to keep goals fresh and change things every so often.
But more to the original point and a specific solution, more things should be taught of how to be an adult, morals, values, goals, communication, persuasion, how to do your tax etc.