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Comment by thrownblown | Hacker News Reader

Paying attention is a skill that needs to be taught in school. It's hardly the fault of the student if the schools don't engage and challenge them.

The American education system fed me lie after lie after lie.

All public schools teach lies, some even don't even pretend and teach creationism.

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I am reminded of my chemistry professor's lament. "I can't count how many students I've failed for not knowing things that were later proven to be untrue"

You had a chemistry classes in a public school? You're lucky.

No English teacher would write that sentence.

I can understand the spirit and frustration of the lament, but it presents the hazard of the unhelpful and fallacious interpretation that "I might as well not teach them any of this in the first place since some of it might end up just being wrong!"

Science is not about always being right. It is about knowing and building upon the best knowledge available, while maintaining the intellectual humility and curiosity to continually challenge the best available knowledge and revise it towards a measurably better state. That is how the mountain is climbed.

The real problem is that public education for the last few decades has been focused on the college-bound student. If your background, family financial status, or academic record indicate that you are not going to college, you are a non-entity (possible exception if you are athletically gifted).

If you are not college-bound you get no real attention or guidance. You are not taught about entrepreneurship, trades, or other options that might be good for you. You are not taught about managing money, personal finance, the traps of high-interest credit debt, or anything else practical. It's assumed you'll put in your time and "graduate" (or simply drop out), get some menial job, and that's your life. Nobody spares ten seconds of thought on you if you are not college-bound.

Paying attention is something that some students frequently have doing because their home life is so terrible and "teaching it" is already a problem. Students in many underserved communities come to school having trouble sleeping or eating, and this destroys performance in school. Most teachers overwhelmed with behavioral problems while trying to teach completely nonsensical curriculums established by non-educators simply punish these students with in school suspension or detention which further ostracizes these students that are oftentimes already picked on by peers.

Blaming schools entirely for root causes sometimes stemming from students coming from bad home lives is nonsensical just as much as it is to remove blame from students for their individual performance. Our most often cited statistics simply don't do a good job of decoupling social factors of aggregate academic achievement from the variables schools themselves do control.

You state that the education system taught you lies, and then generalize that all public schools teach lies. Did you attend every public school in the nation?

I attended a great public high school staffed by a faculty that, for the most part, actually cared about the people they raised into their community.

Some of them had good intentions with their lies (Creationists), but they're still lies.

Regardless, it was overflowing with lies. Especially history.

Would you mind identifying where? And when you went to school where they were teaching creationism?

I hate to challenge you on that, but really, where is this actually done in the US?

Huntland TN.

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