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You can break reading, writing, math, and code all down to the simple act of logical reasoning.

Reading is a man made system of information conveyance. To master reading, you master the rules of it, while understanding the intent and purpose. Writing is the same - a man made system of information conveyance, except for creation rather than consumption. It has rules, and you need to understand intent and purpose to master it.

Math is the patternized structural implementation system of the universe. Again, to master math, you learn the rules, and understand the intent and purpose.

Code is a man made system of information conveyance meant to implement math for practical applications. You need to learn the rules and understand the intent.

All of your examples just demonstrate that fundamentally, education starts and ends with the ability of someone to understand a system - to interpret it rules, understand its intent, and use that knowledge for purpose to apply the rules with intent.

That fundamental abstraction is horrifying, because it becomes so obvious that these stills are never acquired. I'd postulate a majority of public school graduates in the US cannot use structured logic to adopt new ideas and structural systems in a consistent way, which belays the fundamentals of what education is meant to accomplish.

More punctual orators call this "learning to learn". It is a lacking subject in almost all educations, something you are meant to hopefully acquire on your own, but the absence of which is worse than any other failure of development. Living without critical thinking is akin to a failure to thrive.

You can't teach somebody to learn in a generic manner. However, you can teach even several subjects that will be useful everday that approach a range of ways to learn, building the foundation required for the person to "learn to learn" by him or herself.

This is what we are supposed to do.

This is not, however, what we do in school.

School is now doing :

- baby sitting

- killing creativity and autonomy

- blending all kids into on uniform bowl

- giving them examples on how to avoid admiting your are wrong, using fear, cheating, power abuse, bad food, fact distorsion, memorizing and forgetting...

- ranking kids against each others according to arbitrary yet not objective metrics

- teaching kids to pass, and fit a disfonctional system, at all cost, or be ashamed

I have been a student to 11 schools due to my father moving a lot for his work, from the worst in the hood to the best private ones. None of them prepared me for my life. Most of the kids that went in there came out without required basic skills, and yet passed. The most expensive ones are the less evil, so money is an issue.

> You can't teach somebody to learn in a generic manner.

Nonsense.

However, the fact that this is often considered a valid view shows how little philosophy/ethics are part of common education..

Once someone realizes it is their duty to learn, and that learning is a virtue that is rewarding on its own and brings benefit to themselves and others, the 'skill' is rapidly acquired.

Seems like a whole bunch of things that basic coding might help with. eg '- follow instructions in a book to do a simple task' becomes write instructions in a computer to do a simple task '- write a letter explaining directions in a clear way' becomes describe how to use your program '- understand correlation is different from causality' debugging your program will help here etc.

It's just a question of priority and numbers of hours in a day. You can't write code without knowing how to read and do calculus.

> do calculus

What? I have university-level calculus (up to multi-variable integration etc), and can't think of the last time I needed it for coding.

Basic maths. French here.

I managed to learn how to code when I was that young all while learning everything else the state required. AND I did band / marching band / video production. What I think should be mandatory is instead of sticking kids right into algebra/calculus/etc make them take the "consumer math" class I opted for. It does everything you suggest in addition to how to pay taxes and save for retirement - you know stuff you actually need to know how to do.

People on HN are a terrible sample. People here would have got the basics even without school.

Agreed. My oldest is turning ten, and especially in math they have moved to a lot of estimates and guesses, which is fine but should not be the end goal. It's one of the few subjects where there are methodologies that give you the actual, honest to goodness answer, yet her teachers can't or won't teach them. They go very broad but never particularly deep, so word problems are a huge struggle.

New Zealand constantly ranks among the top countries in the world for Maths, Science, and Literacy. It's started to fall recently but they're still much better than any other anglo country like the US, Canada, Australia, the UK, etc. So they do have that base of math to build upon.

I recently attended primary school in nz and I can say that I learnt all of those. My school (Northland School) was rather well known however.

Careful though, people on HN are not a good sample. They would have learned those with or without school.

But you can't compare education systems between countries, NZ has a fairly unique education system with a different focus than most countries, it has been very successful for NZ but has never worked when other countries (most notably California) tried to copy it.

Probably because the edu system is only the reflection of the community it's working in. You can have the best boat in the world, it won't take you far on a highway.

this is an oddly specific set of tasks

Surely you sense the common theme? It's not expected of everyone to demonstrate outstanding mastery of literary or numerical skills, however some tasks are generally useful and require a basic understanding of the fundamentals. The list above illustrates a sane basis I'd expect from the people in my community for one. Many other skills are window dressing as they say.

Teachers, especially here in France it seems have taken to the notion that one teaches better through abstraction and unrelenting positive encouragement. I don't want to be the grumpy old fart, but maybe a stricter enforcement of realistic & basic requirements like those listed in your parent are a good first step.

Let those who want a diploma/certificate work for it and encourage students by all means, but sometimes not good enough is just not good enough and that should be OK for national education to recognise and adapt to.

> not good enough is just not good enough

This is our problem here. When the system fails, it has no way to react in a sane maner. If a kid, 3 years in a row, cannot aquire the skills he/she should, the system then will pass her/him automatically.

Because the current society is claiming being smart is unpopular, kids have no insensitive to apply themself to learning. The new generation of parents doesn't commit to make them to. And teachers are not allowed to. This leads to a very tricky situation.