A School Where the Students Hire Their Teachers | Hacker News Reader

A School Where the Students Hire Their Teachers

wbez.org

This is great for students who want to learn but as something that is offered to the general public it will fail because too many students want to do the minimum possible to graduate. That being said I think it's a great idea to try in schools with highly motivated students.

It would seem odd to actually have 'children' do this, as it appears in the article. Trained adults can't pick the difference between a good teacher and a bad, I can hardly expect kids to find who isn't a good liar.

Are trained adults unable to tell the difference between good teachers and bad, or are they merely unable to do anything about it?

When I was in high school, everybody -- the students, the parents, the administrators, and other teachers -- knew who the good teachers were and who the bad teachers were. But they had seniority and were protected by the union, so the school couldn't get rid of them; and since the school couldn't get rid of the bad teachers, they had to assign students blindly (since if students could pick which English 11 class they took, nobody would take the one with the lousy teacher).

You're absolutely right, this is the problem that should really be solved. The other is a workaround because it's a lot easier to implement. Kind of like applying a quick hack to code rather than refactoring or re-architecturing.

Some teachers just had a toxic attitude, that was pretty clear as a kid. Also children can certainly be discerning in a subject they enjoy. Not completely related, but I once cried in class because a teacher was teaching BEDMAS wrong, 1 + 2 - 1 + 2 = 0 type of deal.

The Sudbury Valley school is one of the first US schools based on the original child-driven school called The Summerhill School, which is based in the UK:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summerhill_School

This "democratic school" movement has spread across the world since the Summerhill School was founded in the 1920s:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_democratic_schools

If you want to deep dive There's a book about The Summerhill School that was written in the 1960s:

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/178734.Summerhill

I think there are alot of crappy teachers out there, and this proposition would help weed some of them out. Now that I mention that, there are also alot of crappy students out there. This would be a great system to pair up crappy students that want crappy teachers and good students that want good teachers.

It is important to point out the issue of crappy students and their crappy parents too. The crappy students will not do work and when they fail they and their parents will complain about the teachers. No doubt, there are crappy teachers, and we must do all to weed them out. But so should the crappy students be weeded out if they do not change for better after given due time. If such students/parents are not weeded out of the school they will add to the poisonous atmosphere.

Sadly, nowadays, it has become politically incorrect to say anything against students/parents. I remember what Bill Maher has said about it [1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3vPkFhtGGI

This is an intriguing system, on the one hand I imagine this will prepare kids for the business world on an exponential level... on the other, I hope there are safety nets created through policy that regulate fiscal decisions.

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