Valedictorian Speaks Out Against Schooling in Graduation Speech | Hacker News Reader

Valedictorian Speaks Out Against Schooling in Graduation Speech

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360 pointsbluesmoon207 comments

<rant>

ok, for all you school-haters out there on HN, one thing that i think is often overlooked in the 'discussion' of how public schooling is such a mind-numbing rote memorization grind is the fact that it is a way of developing grit, discipline, whatever you call it ... the ability to endure through boring or tedious tasks to achieve some measurable goal. i think that for most people, the biggest determiner of 'success' or 'happiness' in adult life isn't raw intelligence or inspiring creativity, but rather the ability to just finish something! even the most anti-establishment f*-the-man entrepreneurs here on HN would never have succeeded in their businesses without GRIT.

how many friends do you know who say "oh i'm so much smarter than all these tools who got good grades" but then they can never actually finish any one of their 'divinely-inspired' projects because they quit as soon as some part gets tedious or boring?

in short, yes, public schooling can be improved in many ways (so can the registration process at the DMV or other bureaucracies), but i hope people out there realize the value of developing grit through doing seemingly boring rote work.

</rant>

I can spend 8 hours programming a computer with just 1 or two 20 minute brakes for eating or a mug refill, but i found it impossible to concentrate for a 40 minutes high-school chemistry class. Could it be that school is just BORING?

I can read a thick book on a hard subject(programming, philosophy, history), but could never finish a fucking chapter from a high-school text book, without falling asleep. Could it be that the textbooks are badly written?

I can spend days and weeks writing an essay on something that interests me, but i fucking hated writing 3 paragraph short essays in school. Could it be the topics, the format and especially the time constrain made me write badly?

If school taught me anything is that unless im working for myself on what i want, its better to just half ass everything, and not do your best, because all it takes is to not be your worst. It probably made me even less disciplined because my natural rebelliousness made me pride myself as an undisciplined misfit. I was proud of being lazy, stupid, stubborn, rebellious and all of that precisely because they wanted me to not be like that. Fuck school. It messed me up, and caused me great suffering with very little benefit, when at least in my case, there was a clearly better way of doing things.

If school taught me anything is that unless im working for myself on what i want, its better to just half ass everything, and not do your best, because all it takes is to not be your worst

This is so true. I realized this very thing myself in the second year in high school. I thought: what the hell am I doing trying to get good grades—from every subject?

I had been doing precisely that just because I could and with the eerie awareness of the fact that I would forget 95% of anything deemed uninteresting right after the course. When it came to subjects tangential to my interests, I realized that I was certainly not going to learn something in school that I couldn't learn by myself.

If I ever needed to cross check which European country invaded which other European country in the 1600's, how to translate "dear girl, I want to marry you for the rest of my life" to German should the opportunity arrive, or desperately need to exercise in some molecular calculations, then I was convinced that I would still have the chance to learn that stuff.

Except for the subjects of my interest, I then dropped all my effort to the very, very minimal level and as a result my grades dropped slightly. It was probably the 20% of effort, 80% of results scheme in action. In some subjects that I had decided to completely ignore, like religion courses (yes, we had those in Finland...), I let my grades drop to the minimum that was required to avoid flunking and was actually pretty proud of that result.

I graduated with good grades in everything I cared about. My high school diploma then exhibited real value for the period of a mere month until it claimed its purpose and I got accepted to the university. I've never needed it after that.

And, by the way, except for mathematics, 99% of what I learned in high school I have never ever needed since. I'm 32 now and I'm glad my teenage realization turned out to be correct.

careful on dismissing which European country invaded which European country etc. Unless people have a good understanding of history, they're doomed to repeat it. Something that becomes very clear in times of strife such as the recent world financial crisis.

One thing that school is good for is exposing you to ideas that are normally outside your sphere of interest, thus attempting to give you a balanced view of the world.

Granted, they're not completely successful at this but I think a lot of that has to do with our immaturity and privileged upbringing as much as it has to do with boring subjects.

"Why do I have to learn this", "I'll never use this", etc etc. The catch cries of a generation of students who have never had to fight for an education and don't have the awareness of how tough life can be to be grateful for the chance to gain one.

Granted, they're not completely successful at this but I think a lot of that has to do with our immaturity and privileged upbringing as much as it has to do with boring subjectss

That is mostly caused by the school systems. Our parents go to their job, and we go to schools.

We are forced into an artificial society of children, and with teachers as authorities. So, we learn what other children like, missing altogether the wisdom and experience(if there are any) of the adults.

So children become very shallow in their taste and what they think is cool.

Ironically the people behind the recent financial crisis are the product of the best our educational system can produce.

Zing!

Or are/were they exhibiting the shallow results-driven sentiment reflected in statements like "99% of what I learned in high school I have never ever needed since."?

Yes, school sucks: http://www.hulu.com/watch/169534/louie-pta-meeting#s-p1-sr-i...

20 minute brakes

Holy Crap! They're some inefficient brakes!

Developing grit and discipline in the pursuit of the asinine is as just as harmful if not more, than not developing grit and discipline in the pursuit of the sublime.

Much of what passes for education much more closely matches the former than the latter.

- A 9th grade dropout.

An education is what you make of it. Those of us that "survived" the pursuit of the "asinine" found a way to take advantage of the many resources a schooling system offers to compensate for any deficiencies and learned a great deal. Those resources are your fellow classmates, your teachers (imagine that), clubs, sports, and I can go on and on.

Not to engage in the no true scotsman fallacy, but then by definition, your subjective experience was not the pursuit of the asinine. That doesn't mean other people's subjective experiences do not fall squarely within that realm.

Correct. Subjectivity is key--and thus, my point was regarding your second statement. My point is, while you may have dropped out because you thought going to school is a pursuit of the asinine (or parts of it maybe?), some of us didn't see it that way.

Which is why I used the word "much" rather than "all". I may be a ninth grade dropout, but I have been a prolific and voracious consumer of all things educational, sourced ridiculously large amounts of recorded lecture content online on even larger amounts of subjects in general. I know there's a lot of good information and a lot of that information comes from educational institutions, at the same time I know there is much pointless rote droning by people far more interested in a by the book approach than one that works.

Someone makes that point every single time, more like. It strikes me as a rationalization: would you design schools the way they are, to teach grit? They seem better adapted to produce submission: showing up for the job every day and doing what you're told. This is related to the discipline to finish your own projects, but like with a sign change along important dimensions.

I beg to differ. People that develop a grit are the ones telling those that didn't what to do. If they couldn't get the work done, how else do you expect them to lead? You can't define a submissive person as simply as above. A submissive person is also one that didn't have the grit to develop his communication skills, his people skills, his critical thinking skills, and his creativity, etc.

Let's put that grit argument another way:

Surviving prison develops grit. Therefore it is beneficial to go to prison.

Counting the grains of sand on the beach develops grit. Therefore, it is beneficial to count the grains of sand on a beach.

Point: not all activities that develop grit are beneficial. The implication of the grit argument is that any tedious activity has some benefit - if not for anything else, then at least for the development of 'grit' itself. Which is a ridiculous argument; some tedious activities are tedious because they are pointless. A better lesson to learn is to spend your time wisely - on activities that are tedious for a reason.

So is school tedious for a reason? The answer is no, not really - but to prove that to you would likely take some time. I recommend you read up on John Taylor Gatto, which the speaker references above. See: http://www.cantrip.org/againstschool.html and http://www.cantrip.org/gatto.html

I bet reading those will develop grit... :)

Ironically, most of my startup ideas are the result of 'grit' developing activities.

There certainly are lazy people claiming to be smarter than those with good grades.

But in my experience, the students with perfect grades are far more likely to excel at school than at anything else.

When I started teaching at NYU, I ran into a lot of these students. They typically rocked my calculus 1-2 classes; they took calculus in high school but wanted to maintain a 4.0 GPA so they took it again in college.

Even in school, past a certain point, it doesn't serve them well. In Calc 3 or Linear Algebra (two more advanced classes I've taught), you must think for yourself to pass, rather than just applying the differentiation algorithm. That's when the 4.0's get pwned.

It gets even worse when I interview them for a job and ask them an open ended question: "Looking at XXX data, how can you estimate YYY? What other data would be useful?"

Many of them are reasonably smart. But they've spent years preparing themselves for schooling, not for actually building things. I'll take the kid with lower grades + open source project any day .

I don't know if it's this way at every level, but the one quarter of an MSNA (I think that's the acronym) prep course I had to take in tech school was chapter after chapter of lists of steps. If that's the way the other three quarters are, I don't know how a Windows administrator fresh out of school could handle an unexpected situation.

"Go through these menus to achieve x" won't help you when some joker breaks explorer and forces you to work with the command line.

Either way, I'm glad I went the Linux admin route. The instructor for the classes was about as quirky as you'd expect a Linux admin teacher to be, and all four quarters were a load of fun.

If any of my grade school classes had been like that, I wouldn't have hated it so much.

I think all our children should be sent to retraining camps and made to work fifteen-hour days assembling electronics. That will create true grit and allow them to value whatever small rewards later life will give them.

I get your larger point, that a sour-grapes excuse of "Well, school was booooring" doesn't necessarily indicate a successful individual - but just because losers also hate the system doesn't mean the system actually works for any real purpose.

I hear China is nice this time of year...

But why? You can develop grit by doing things that really suck, but ultimately get you somewhere you want to go, or that leads to some sort of innovation down the line. But to force people to do things that are completely unrelated to what they want to do in life, just for the sake of doing it, is a huge waste of time.

You gain grit by doing things that need to be done, hopefully in pursuit of some greater goal (more than likely, just getting paid). Not by for-the-hell-of-it forced work. That just turns you off everything.

By my observation of the vast majority of people at school I would say... most people would just procrastinate and get nowhere if you just leave them to find something to work towards.

School sucks; but I think it is a bit of a dirty hack to keep kids minds on something for a few years. It needs a major revamp and broadening of the curriculum (so that those who do want to think independently can do their own thing).

But otherwise we risk a next-generation of total dropouts with no education and no life skills (it's bad enough anyway).

Yep; that's what society has come to. The fix is going to take more than just a few years.

When your stomach is not filled with food, you tend to work for what you need.

Try observing people not at school, e.g. pre-school (literally) children, or unschoolers, Sudbury school students, etc.

People are naturally curious. School kills curiosity.

Interesting to consider the zen statement. What if you ignore the goal and focussing just on the path?

You'll find yourself in some place beautiful.

I think it's the other way around.

Top pupils quit their post-school projects because they don't have teachers standing over them offering gold stars and punishments. They're so resigned to extrinsic motivation that it takes years to rediscover the creative, inner self: the guy that, without setting any goals, enjoyed lego and learning to speak english.

Translation: life sucks, better teach that to kids early.

Life doesn't suck, and we shouldn't deliberately make the lives of children boring and tedious.

"There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all." -Peter Drucker

I didn't learn grit from school. I learned that life is pretty easy, and I could do well with very little effort.

Unlearning that lesson in the real world is how I learned grit.

School may teach some people grit and discipline.

But for some people it's just too easy and boring, and they can just coast through. So it doesn't even teach grit and discipline to them.

Can't you do that for much less money in the military?

All my math classes felt like that. I was simply being told to memorize formulas so that later the teacher could give me numbers and I would plug them in. Rarely was I ever told why I would want to use those formulas.

My best class was a chemistry course taught by a 60 year old man that used to test missiles at one point. The grades never really mattered and as long as you knew the vocabulary he would pass you. But where he made a difference was giving us examples of why stuff worked along with how. For the final we had to determine what an unknown substance was. There was no right method to do this, just simply a number of different tests that we had to do and be able to understand what the results were. We then had to 'think' as to what it might mean about the substance we were testing. He set us free and we passed and failed on our own accord because it was up to the students to read the book to try and find just one more test that might give a better result.

The one lasting comment that my chemistry teacher told me was that he was not concerned with how well we memorized things because he knew we would forget. There would always be time to read up on whatever we were doing on the job. He wanted us to have the core understanding so that when we did look up the boiling point or specific gravity of a compound we would know what those facts would signify as opposed to learning stats on the more common elements. Best teacher I ever had because he didn't so much as teach me as he made me think for myself.

This is what i've come to experience myself. Often a solid grasp of the core fundamentals of your domain is more valuable that having a half-baked knowledge of various in-depth areas.

Like the old man said, (or didn't) , You can always google it from your exobrain.

I even recall Sherlock Holmes' character saying something to that effect; he says something about the human brain having finite usable storage capacity (with a low-enough access-time). I really liked reading that quote (confirmation bias. he he)

Yes, that was in the first Sherlock Holmes book if I'm not mistaken. Sherlock let it slip that he still thought the sun revolved around the earth. Watson was outraged at such an outdated belief but Sherlock pointed out how it had no bearing on what he did and therefor wasn't worth keeping up with.

I too was partial to this because I've always worked under a similar assumption (limited space in your head for all the things you need so don't waste it with useless info like who won the super bowl 3 years ago).

He also said he would try hard to forget that the earth went round the sun, so that he could reuse the memory space for other things.

If he'd spent some space on neurology, he'd know that forgetting things doesn't create space for new memories.

It's worth remembering that the first Sherlock Holmes book is of significantly lower quality than the rest of them, and doesn't fit the canon of the later stories.

The easiest way to win The Game is to cheat.

Oh come on now, Valedictorian, you can find plenty of important life skills to be learned in school if you only look hard enough:

  kindergarden    - learn how to play nicely together
  first grade     - learn how to read and write
  second grade    - learn how to add, subtract, multiply, & divide
  third grade     - learn how to spell
  fourth grade    - learn how to play a musical instrument
  fifth grade     - learn how to appreciate great literature
  sixth grade     - learn how we got where we are
  seventh grade   - learn a foreign language
  eighth grade    - learn how to type and use a computer
  ninth grade     - learn how the world is put together
  tenth grade     - learn about other people in the world
  eleventh grade  - learn how to balance a job and school
  twelveth grade  - learn how to plan for and dream about the future
  freshman year   - learn how many other kinds of people are out there
  sophomore year  - learn how to chug a beer, fill a bong, and get laid
  junior year     - learn how to stand upon the shoulders of giants
  senior year     - learn how to find your place in the world
  graduate school - learn how to play nicely together, all over again

If someone starts learning a foreign language at 7th grade something is wrong I think.

Question: Is this the general case for US Education?

US education in regards to foreign language varies widely. I was not presented with the opportunity to take a foreign language until 9th grade (~14 years old), while the district I currently live in offers Spanish education to children age 7.

Edit: This is in Illinois. According to Wikipedia, we have the 7th largest Spanish speaking population in comparison with other states. In my experience, Spanish is the most widely offered secondary language, followed by French. More uncommonly taught languages include Italian and German, and rarer still are Eastern languages such as Japanese. Latin may still be offered in select places, but has been largely phased out.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_in_the_United_States#Cu...

Just adding that I also wasn't exposed to foreign languages in school until the 9th grade. This was in a private school in Chicago, Illinois.

Meant to upvote this. Started learning German in 2nd grade, but that's only because my dad was in the US Army and we were stationed in Germany at the time. Learning a language at that age (and younger) should always be an option for kids as their minds are like sponges at that point. That early exposure always kept me interested in foreign cultures and their languages, too: Japanese, French, and of course, German.

EDIT: Use of simile vs. metaphor for describing the kid brain when it comes to foreign languages. Semantics...

if your mind was literally a sponge, I think you would cease to live.

...it's a fitting metaphor. Meh.

then it's not literal.

I have an idea for a website.

literalpolice.com (I've already bought the domain name)

A community of people who care about preserving the power of the word "literally."

The site maintains a list of websites and people from the community who are assigned to them. When you are assigned to a website, your task is to have an account with as close to a variant as "LiteralPolice" as possible. You simply read the website as you normally do, and whenever someone abuses the word "literally," troll them for it.

With enough community members, we could have literal police on every website!

What do you think?

Check out the literal web log:

http://literally.barelyfitz.com/

Sadly, it seems to be dormant.

I think it's more fun to make emphatic use of "figuratively." As in, "wow, we FIGURATIVELY kicked their butts!"

@AndyKelley - literally the worst idea since bagpipes.

8th grade for me in the 80s, and it was quite possible to go through HS without a foreign language at all.

During the 70's/80's in my home state, 7th grade would be about normal to start learning a foreign language if you were seen as college bound. Otherwise, you had to wait until 9th grade. In my area of the US, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian are the predominant languages taught. The choice of languages goes strictly according to the immigration patterns.

Maybe you were in a public school. Because I was in private schools, I had French in kindergarten and first grade, and then Spanish in fourth and fifth grade. (In between, I was in public schools, you see.) After that, I took French in 7th grade, Spanish in 8th grade, Japanese and French in 9th grade, and then Latin and Classical Greek in what would have been 12th grade, except that I had dropped out in order to go to college.

This was in Texas and then in New Mexico, which has one of the two or three worst public school systems in the US.

This might sound like a "nyah nyah my family is so rich" except that in fourth and fifth grade I was living with my dad in a converted school bus parked on a friend's lawn, while he was fixing cars at the garage on the outskirts of a small town, and then later we upgraded to a trailer in a trailer park. Obviously we weren't the poorest of the poor, since we did have enough money for housing and to send me to a private school, but we were far from rich in US terms.

"Maybe you were in a public school." Through 8th grade I was. For high school I went to a private school with religious affiliations. I'd qualify the private school as antiquated at the time, so my education was better in the public system.

The private schools you attended sound above average. Friends of mine in private schools through elementary (grades K-6) took French - no other options were available.

Out of curiosity, do you still speak any of the languages?

Oops, I lost my longer answer in a power outage. The short answer is that I only speak English and Spanish fluently, and Spanish only because I've been living in Argentina since 2006. I can get by in Portuguese and French under some circumstances, and my Japanese is sufficient to make Japanese people giggle before they talk to me in English.

Far better than I. I can read French and German but my speaking French makes native speakers cringe. German is easier for me but I've lost too much vocabulary to hold a long conversation.

Tolerant native speakers make a huge difference. Backpackers and people from Couchsurfing are great for this. (Also it helps if you can tolerate people cringing when you talk, some.)

Depends on the school. One that I went to in AZ had a Spanish class in 7th grade, which many people took, whereas another on in IN did not have foreign language classes. High schools usually do.

I started to learn my second foreign language in 7th grade, I started to learn the first in 4th grade.

To this day, I cannot play a musical instrument.

I went to a public elementary school in Sacramento, CA, and in 2nd grade we began basic spanish.

And where do they learn the "why" of all this?

They don't. That's the problem with the school system. Likewise, you seem to be so focused on skills that you can't even question anymore why those skills are necessary, or even worthwhile.

Man, sophomore is a doozy. Are you sure kids can handle all that at once?

I read all the boring comments and this is the only one I liked. Learning is hard, caring about stuff that has no relevance to food or sex is hard. School is not about helping the rug rats but getting them out of the adults hair until they can kill their own horse for supper. Edumacation is about following rules. Follow pointless rules in a chain for 200 hours straight and maybe you'll discover something that actually helps the human race. Otherwise its all masturbation. If the kid is stupid, I want the kid beaten into submition. If the kid is smart, he can do the assignments trivially and get an A. I see no need to change the way babysitting kids works. Creativity is not the same as rule following skills. If she really wanted to educate herself she would have realized that she should have been skipping class, reading more sci fi and masturbating harder. She was probably just unhappy from being russian.

I disagree on the current purpose of school (which really came to be in the late 19th century). School is there to train people to 1) tolerate being bored eight hours a day and 2) do what the authority figures say.

These two items were critical for training a workforce who would sit in a factory screwing the lid onto the tube of toothpaste.

Unfortunately, today's jobs are all about creativity. Knowledge workers increase value through their creativity, which is all but stamped out of them in school.

At that time, the majority of the workforce was involved in agriculture. Toothpaste was nowhere in it...

At the time, the industrial revolution was rapidly pulling people from the agrarian life to the factory life. Factory owners knew they'd need more and more people who could sit around, day after day, expressing no individuality. Politicians recognized the economic benefits the factories were providing. Together, the current US school system was born.

Here are the real questions: Current industry leaders recognize the education system is not training knowledge workers they way it could be. Do politicians recognize the economic value of the knowledge economy and will current politicians and business leaders come together to build a new education system that meets those needs? Of course, 125 years ago, there wasn't an existing bureaucracy that needed to be torn down first...

The first country to get that right is going to thrive. A country like Costa Rica could do amazing things.

Our kid is now 2 and a half, and I'm puzzled - there is Regio Emilia, then Waldorf, Montessori - geeezus!

I'm not sure where is going to be best for him. I mean his just a small child :) - Just playing should be enough for him...

Er, if you can't read before you get to kindergarten your parents are fucking up.

Either that or they're recognizing and embracing the uniqueness of your passion to not read.

Are you talking about the kind of Kindergarten that starts at the age of 3?

(In Germany it would probably not be a good idea to teach your kids how to read before they go to enter school (at age 6 or 7). Schooling is mandatory in Germany, and elementary school is boring enough if you don't already know the stuff they are trying to teach you. If you have more choice for your kids, then reading earlier may or may not be a good idea.)

I don't see why it would be a bad idea, many kids seem to fail to learn to read well if the task of teaching it is left to the school.

FWIW, I could read when I started school (at 6, in Austria [1]), as well as do simple maths; I was bored pretty much throughout my education, but at least I did well. Bored & lagging behind surely must be worse.

[1] homeschooling is permitted here but it's extremely rare as far as I know.

Yes, the best solution is getting better (un-)schooling, instead of having to work around and against the education system.

I could not read before kindergarten and, given that they later home-schooled me, I would not say my parents were "fucking up".

You need to read that post using my over-the-top ranting voice. No offence to your parents.

You might just have a mental disability of some kind, such as dyslexia, or a physical one, such as blindness. I know at least one person who I'm pretty confident would have been able to read by kindergarten (knowing his parents) but for his lack of mental capacity.

For 90% of the population I agree.

Computers are all the way up at eighth grade? Egads.

I started in 5th grade in the late 70's. We learned binary arithmetic and punched cards to program the school system's only computer. Learning computers varies in the US. As I understand it, high schools today in the US teach basic computer skills like using a word processor, spreadsheet, browser, etc. to the general populace and may have more advanced classes for people identified as having more ability.

Not everyone has the benefit of schools with computers. Getting kids in many districts to comprehend basic math or science first would be nice.

I would have loved to have the experience to not just hear her speech in person, but to see the reactions from everyone. The faces of her fellow students as well as teachers/parents.

At my highschool the valedictorian speech had to be approved by the principal in advance. I wonder if he ever would have let something like this by.

http://dailyfreeman.com/articles/2010/07/27/news/doc4c4e6e19...

Nice find! I admire that girl's courage.

Same with my school. The only way something like this could have happened is if the valedictorian writes one speech for the principal to screen but delivers a totally different speech for the actual event.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9M4tdMsg3ts

There's a lot of selection bias here - the majority (all?) of the readers of this site are far more intelligent than the majority.

So all (most? many?) of us will probably agree with her (at least as regarding our own schooling).

I know I do.

But the trouble, the reality, is that most students can't do what she suggests, using our minds for creativity, and not rote work. There really is a difference in intelligence, and the sad truth is that for most students school is exactly right.

The good news is that the really intelligent rise above it and succeed anyway. The lost ones are those that are just a bit more intelligent than the rest, but not quite enough to succeed on their own.

>But the trouble, the reality, is that most students can't do what she suggests,

How do you know? Not everyone learns the same way. Personally I find it quite arrogant to assume that you or I are just born with more potential than those who don't end up as "smart". Environment has an enormous effect on learning as does the teaching itself. Lots and lots of students don't understand calculus. But a really talented teacher can make it clear to anyone.

Look at recent events (e.g. with the US health care debate) and it's clear that if the US education system isn't addressed soon it's going to be too late. We have to take a hard look at where and why it's broken. Not assuming it's "as good or better than everyone else's" and for the love of Pete don't accept Hitleresque "we're just the chosen ones and they're not" nonsense.

I don't buy it. Yes, people learn in different ways, and one teaching method that one person gets perfectly may be entirely inadequate -- or even harmful -- to another person.

But all people are not created equal. All people do not have the same level of intelligence. All people do not have the same potential for success (however you want to define success).

It's nice in a theoretical/feel-good sense to say that everyone has a chance to be great, and all we have to do is figure out that perfect environment to place them in to help them thrive. But this is the real world. People who adapt better to their environment will do better. Doesn't that trait alone make those kinds of people "smarter?"

Now, I'm not saying the American system of schooling couldn't be better (it certainly could), but I don't think there's any one (or more) perfect system that would give everyone an equal chance of being "successful" or "smart" or whatever.

>All people do not have the same level of intelligence.

True, but I'm talking about potential for intelligence and in this I think all non-handicapped people have close to the same potential.

Of course what I have in mind isn't person A is exactly equal to person B (and "intelligence" is probably the wrong word for this), but rather if you could somehow give "points" to the persons level of effectiveness then person A's points would add up to person B's even though they took completely different routes to get there. For example, one person might be able to get insanely good at math, while another is awful at math but is an amazing artist.

I can accept that there may be overall differences in the potential levels between individuals but I don't think that difference should be anything remotely as dramatic as what we're seeing right now (especially in the US).

>But the trouble, the reality, is that most students can't do >what she suggests, using our minds for creativity, and not >rote work. There really is a difference in intelligence, and >the sad truth is that for most students school is exactly >right.

I disagree. I don't think we're that smart, and I don't (usually) think the rest of the world is that dumb. Besides, is memorizing soon-to-be-forgotten dates and listening to other students butcher Shakespeare in a uniform monotone exactly right for most students? Is doing the same math over and over again, boring those who get it and failing to bring understanding to those who don't, exactly right?

More people need to be able to find their way to meaningful work (not necessarily creative work.) I claim that the public school system hinders this process.

> The good news is that the really intelligent rise above it and succeed anyway.

Probably only if you circularly define the really intelligent as those who succeed. This definitely doesn't work if you use IQ.

And how do you measure IQ? With a test?

You can't study for an IQ test.

You probably can, at least in principle. The SAT is effectively an IQ test (it correlates as well with IQ tests as they correlate with each other) and you can definitely study for that. The difference is that there aren't Stanford-Binet prep classes (at least I don't think so.)

SAT scores and IQ may be correlated, but the fact you can study for the SAT means that it's a weak indicator of 'natural' intelligence.

My friend scored 70 points higher than me on the math section and yet he was totally lost in calculus II and eventually dropped the class (while I consistently scored the highest on tests). His strategy was to try and memorize the answers/procedures rather than understand the principles behind them (which is the name of the game in prepping for the SAT).

I do not agree with her as well. Yes there are problems with the system. Yes, we can have a more liberal flexible system. But the system is designed for everyone.

How many people in your class didn't know the capitals? How many couldn't write a formal letter? How many couldn't solve for x? I'm sure majority of HN thought this was trivial, but many others need this, and the only way they can learn it is through repetitive, boring, tedious tasks.

It would be more helpful if schooling allowed everyone to excel in whatever they wanted to, but the fact is we still need a basic understanding of everything. Yeah, it's easy to subscribe to the romantic view that doodlers will become great artists, but the fact is being a great artist and knowing differential calculus are mutually exclusive. She has a very black or white view of the educational system. She half expects this magical school system that would transform her into this creative genius if she just demands it loudly. She seems afraid of failure, she doesn't want to work hard for it.

If it weren't for these boring tedious tasks, I would've never known about the works of Shakespeare or how cells multiply and many other things I would've never considered studying for, but later found really interesting. The educational system isn't meant to be a one shop stop for your enlightening. It's meant to show you what's possible, what doors you can take. Then you can walk through any door - work on whatever excites you, whatever interests you.

I feel that learning to solve for x, learning the capitals, writing a formal letter, etc. can all be handled better than "repetitive, boring, tedious tasks." Why am I solving for x? How would knowing the capital of Nebraska ever help me? When would I write a formal letter? These are questions school fails to answer and thus fails the students.

For example, teachers could give projects out that involve a closed-system and get the students to work through the problem until everyone understands. I have spent weeks being taught a single subject because the teaching pattern involved putting a math problem on the board, wiping it off, repeat until the bell rings...

Another example would be finding a business that they deal with regularly and writing a formal letter expressing their concern/surprise at the services the business provides. In school, instead, I was given the task of copying word-for-word formal letters out of a book for the purpose of replicating something identically.

The problem is that we are graded and passed based on memorization, duplication, and busywork. It's not that we accomplished anything in particular - we just learned a little stuff without much purpose (most of which will be forgotten within a year or two).

You're kidding, right? Even my small town school in India told me why I had to write letters or solve for x. We actually posted a letter to a relative and to the local council. We actually solved for x using everyday examples involving ice cream or something. I'm not saying the schools should force this learning, schools definitely should give a convincing reason why things like this are important and if I'm correct most teachers do. What I'm saying is, these things do have a reason behind why they need to be understood, and no should be exempted from learning basic sciences just because they want to be the next Leonardo or U2. Sure, go ahead, be the next big thing, but also do your Math homework, it's not going to hurt your progress.

"... but the fact is being a great artist and knowing differential calculus are mutually exclusive."

Either you missed a 'not', or you need to stop and think about the number of people you've just insulted with this statement. Math and art have been strongly intertwined for a very long time, from the Golden Ratio of the Greeks to Da Vinci to Escher (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematics_and_art). Those who are good at math are frequently good at art partly because they can understand abstractions and separate them from 'icons' of objects and ideas. I would instead state that it is the rare great artist that doesn't have the ability to quickly pick up continuous math concepts.

I missed a 'not'.

You're right about needing basic understanding of everything. However schooling goes much further beyond that. You can take college level courses in high school. A college level education is supposed to summarize your professional capabilities. As you can see, the problem is that youth is swallowed up by an educational itinerary that leaves very little time for you to do what you want at a time you can make the most out of it.

It's almost like one-size-fits-all is a bad idea.

On that thought, I wonder why we get so much choice in so many services that we buy but so little in something that matters as much as education?

There's an active "school choice" movement, and they're working for policies which enable choice: e.g. charter schools, voucher programs, and choice open enrollment for public schools, as they do in Seattle.

Cynically, the reason choice is restricted is it's easier to do a bad job and get away with it when you have no competitors to be compared against. Because the public schools get substantial funding from the government, an entrepreneur generally can't compete on equal footing unless they have similar funding of some sort as well. Hence vouchers & charter schools as a mechanism for choice.

But where I have seen pro-choice policies implemented here in the UK, the choices have amounted to between "bad" and "good". And some parents are pushier, and richer, and can afford to live in the right catchment areas. And thus choice mainly seems to promote rich parents having well educated kids.

Personally, I don't want a choice, and I want what I receive to be high quality and accommodating of a wide range of kids.

If you are interested in a contrary viewpoint I suggest reading some of E.D. Hirsch's work.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._D._Hirsch,_Jr.#Concern_for_c...

Because schools are cheap. And I'm not talking inexpensive.

Why do you equate intelligence and creativity?

I am not the brightest person on the block, but I probably know more than most people on something.

If you have curiosity, you will discover something.

I don't agree with her, well, sure a little. The fact is, like capitalism, the schooling system is the worst system, except for all the others.

And for the majority, it is great for them.

I think this is one of the areas where it is so easy to criticize, because of course there are problems, unless someone actually recommends a good alternative system, I just ignore them.

Total nonsense. Lots of other countries have vastly better grade schools (pg mentions this in one of his essays). Do you think all the people in those countries just have a lot more potential than most Americans?

The worst thing about this ridiculous "America is the best!" attitude is that you can't fix anything if you think you've already got the best that can be done.

I am not actually American, I am from Australia, which supposedly has a comparatively good schooling system.

We have the same complaints here.

"Do you think all the people in those countries just have a lot more potential than most Americans?"

Yes, for the above reasons you mentioned.

I meant potential as in "do you think no manner of teaching could ever make them more intelligent".

You're misquoting Churchill and objectively inaccurate. The USA version's of capitalism and schooling are not ideal for our culture or the world as a whole.

There are plenty of alternatives.

...go on

I agree, she didn't offer any alternatives.

There are some very basic concepts that regular schools completely skip that would make all the difference. In my opinion we need classes (for example):

- dedicated to learning how one specifically learns,

- dealing with relating to people/relationships (it's really the main thing a lot of young people think/worry about),

- helping people find passions/things they care about,

- giving people choices and learning through real-world scenarios.

We all agree that a majority of schooling is focused on memorizing random stuff. It's a fact that people learn more effectively by doing, not sitting in a classroom memorizing and theorizing. It only makes sense that most information needs to be placed into contexts for it to be any useful whatsoever (or stick in the first place), and school eliminates any context in most cases. Math is the perfect example of this.

Other than for the reason that you may appear ignorant in random social settings with mindless/pointless conversation, why do we have to learn all the math that we do, history, literature, chemistry, biology, etc.?

This speech shook me rudely awake , reminded me of my post-college long-term life goal(one that makes a contribution to human wealth). My goal is to build a excellent institution of learning, to train the dreamers and doers of tomorrow(not mutually exclusive). This place would rival the IITs in depth of knowledge imparted but would strive to create more well-rounded individuals who would be masters of their own destiny. I feel sad when the cream of India's IITs today prefer to chase that money-minting Investment Banking career or accumulate advanced degrees state-side for a career in academia. I'm not sure if this indicates a problem with their admissions filter. (IIT = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Institutes_of_Technology)

In India, Education is a capital-intensive , profit-maximizing beast of an industry. The admissions racket is huge. Parents often have to 'donate' (fork out) insane amounts of cash (by Indian income standards) to 'reserve' a seat in an Engineering/medical school. (except the IITs and govt-colleges, BTW)

Breaking into the market requires a large windfall and the ability to invest it wisely in order to build the foundation of such an institution. I'm thinking tech startup route naturally, since that is the only thing that comes to mind w.r.t immediate skill scope.

I suffered no end of anguish when trapped in the rote-learning institutions i'd been shuffled through. At the very least, I dream of hacking it slightly for the better, for my unborn children's generation's sake.

Does anyone in America have the same thought, or are your institutions of higher-learning pretty much satisfactory? This article refers to High-school and onwards, while my focus is slightly narrower : the undergraduate 'professional' education in developing countries; It changes whole families' economic statuses due to the current nature of the global market. We need more startups in India just like the US does.

>Does anyone in America have the same thought, or are your institutions of higher-learning pretty much satisfactory?

Frankly, I think our colleges are pretty much great. We have enough supply that pretty much everyone can go, and the public universities are cheap enough that most can afford it with financial aid and a night job if necessary.

The education varies, but you don't often hear people say when they leave college that they were prevented from learning. Even mediocre schools often have an honors program that gets much better results.

The fact that a majority of students enter college having absolutely no idea why they are there beyond the fact that that's what they're supposed to do, is a fairly clear sign that things are very broken. The other day a father got tears in his eyes when I asked him about his daughter who just went off to college. She was clueless. Unrelated to his tears, he was spending 40k/year on her mindlessly and passively attending random classes. How insane is that? I don't care if you can get financial aid, I don't understand how one could claim that's a good investment.

I was in the group feeling 'dumber' (in a way) after college. I wouldn't say I was prevented from learning [random stuff], but I definitely wouldn't attribute my schooling for assisting me in becoming a better and more capable person.

>She was clueless. Unrelated to his tears, he was spending 40k/year on her mindlessly and passively attending random classes. How insane is that?

Very insane and totally unnecessary. She could have gone to her state university for 8-9k if she wasn't confident what she was going to get out of it.

Exactly. And why stop at 8-9k at a state university? She would be equally clueless and most likely surrounded by even greater confusion.

This is the state of most people entering college in the United States. A person should not consider college unless they have some focus or understanding of why they are there. With focus, so much more will be achieved with what's given to them.

How do you gain focus? First and foremost life experience. Secondly, applied knowledge in areas that interests you or attracts your attention. This knowledge can be learned at school, though it's a terribly ineffective way of doing so.

In theory I agree with you, but in practice I don't.

For most of the people I've seen delay college, they only life experience they gain in the meantime is in waiting tables. (Which they usually already had from jobs in highschool anyways.) The only positive effect I've seen is that people realize they don't want to work a shit job for the rest of their lives, and get some motivation for education. On the margin this is definitely a win when it happens, but I've never seen the sort of identity discovery you're describing actually occur.

I completely agree. This is exactly the area I'm interested in.

There needs to exist something in between high school and college. In other countries especially, a lot of people take a "gap-year" and travel and work elsewhere in the world. That's one option.

Some other possibilities are (I'm curious to hear what others think of these):

- Find a business/company that would hire you as an intern. Low pay is OK - the experience is what counts. It's OK if you don't know what industry to start in, doing any decently attractive job to you brings you one step closer to figuring it out. (We need to encourage adults/businesses to take in young adults and provide them with experience in different areas, basic mentoring and training).

- Attend some sort of career/passion finding school where the entire focus is on you and your development into a thinking being (this wouldn't be needed if public schools did a better job). I'm curious if places like this exist and how effective they are.

- Take a gap year or two and travel and work remotely in various places. Learn about the world and what exists in it. This will almost surely develop character faster than waiting tables in your hometown.

- Go to a community college or take random classes at any university that interest you until you develop some interest somewhere.

As you pointed out, a key factor in motivating someone to follow any logical path is for a person to understand that the paths exist and are as possible as any other, and perhaps even more lucrative. It should all be part of the initial education.

Unrelated to your suggestions, Quebec has a school (CEGEP) between high school and university. I think it's a good idea to give kids some time to think about their choice, and since they have to choose their general orientation (science, etc.) it's a good test of their choice. Many people change program at this point.

Delaying college by going into the military for 2-4 years seems to work out pretty well. Some of the best students I've met have been on the GI Bill.

An approximation for non-military-inclined people would be spend a year or so traveling, and then learn some relatively straightforward but non-trivial skill (say, photography, or field service engineering for a certain kind of hardware), and then traveling around to do that job (even if you end up net losing money). It's cheaper than college, and generally better preparation for life. It then makes college itself much more valuable.

Yeah military is definitely an option as well. Easily the most motivated and focused person I met in college was a Navy veteran who had recently gotten back from Iraq.

Can you please elaborate why you want to focus on the professional under-graduate courses? I share the same anguish and thinking on it led me to believe that the process should start much early (High School and Higher-Secondary). This provides an opportunity to help the kids to work their ways independently (against the social pressure) and figure out what they want to do when it comes to picking an under-graduate course. Given that the current generation has seen much more financial independence than the previous ones (and possibly sharing the same anguish), I think this is the right time to drive the schooling system in the right direction.

Interesting. We share a passion. I exited a university with a computer science degree and finally then realized how many years I had wasted. In that moment I began to understand the many ways my mind had been brainwashed and muted. Public schools in the United States are in a sad place.

Luckily there are a lot of angry people and hence a lot of movements with good intents. Good luck to them all.

My primary passion is to improve all this as well.

I am sincerely sorry to say that she ain't seen nothing yet.

Take a look at countries like India or China where the test is a way of life. Not only do all educational institutions - schools, universities or otherwise - produce robots off an assembly line, such robotic behavior is praised and rewarded by the society.

I once gave a seminar at a Chinese university and these guys scared the creep out of me. They focussed me for hours without ever moving a limb.

Anyway, we should not blame the original valedictorian for her limited views. Experience comes with time and still she's right about the things she says.

Her views aren't limited, per se. She's realized there's a problem. That's good. It's just that the situation is probably much worse than she can imagine.

Someone mentioned Montessori schools, which seem to do pretty well. Another along similar lines, but more extreme, is Sudbury Valley schools: http://www.sudval.org/

Kids are taught whatever they ask to be taught. They aren't divided into classes, they can just wander around the campus asking for help from any teacher they like. If you start kids young in this environment it works really well; kids are hard-wired to learn as much as possible if you don't make it a miserable experience.

Something else they do: every kid gets a vote in school decisions. A kid's vote counts as much as a teacher's. It's like they're teaching kids to be citizens in a democracy, instead of subjects in a dictatorship.

I once read that (iirc) New Zealand used to have horrible public schools, and fixed it with this system:

- Every parent can send their kids to whatever school they wish.

- Each school is directed entirely by the parents, with no interference from government bureaucracy.

- Each school gets $X per enrolled student.

It took about ten years to shake out, then they had great schools.

The Sudbury Valley model is definitely an extreme as far as the freedom & responsibility it invests in its students -- the school decisions you mention include expelling students, whether to rehire each teacher every year, etc.

>- Every parent can send their kids to whatever school they wish.

This is an impossible system to work if you don't have unlimited funds for education. Parents want to send their kids to "the good school" getting the better grades, with better facilities or whatever. Not all parents in an area can do this, there isn't enough room. As the good school gets fuller, it takes more of the cream and the other schools suffer. But this school is leaching the money away from other schools too as the richer parents that help to contribute time and resources and money move to the "good school". Ultimately the other schools aren't getting the pupils they need to run properly and suffer incredibly. The one school gets better the others worse.

>- Each school is directed entirely by the parents, with no interference from government bureaucracy.

There are many areas of running a school that can be made more efficient by using local government departments. Paying employees, insurance, grounds-keeping, building maintenance, healthcare provisions, utility purchasing, school meal provision, etc., can all be run more efficiently with a local grouping of schools rather than individual schools fighting it out for themselves. Do you know who is good at administrating such groups? Local government.

Indeed things like creating syllabuses and setting exams can too be streamlined by cooperation across schools.

>- Each school gets $X per enrolled student.

I'm assuming here that you're not allowing x to vary from school to school. What about areas with high levels of non-native language speakers that need translators and extra helpers. Or that by some quirk have large numbers of disabled students that require special care and equipment. Or those in rural areas that pay a lot more for bus travel than inner-city schools. Do these schools have to restrict the care and opportunity they give to pupils because of costs that are out of their control?

Except, apparently, it did work. (I wish I still had a citation.) Yes, I expect bad schools suffered. In fact, I expect the bad schools went out of business entirely as people abandoned them in droves. This leaves a market opportunity for private schools to spring up and get that tuition money.

I wasn't really referring to things like building maintenance, just instruction methods, curricula, stuff like that. Those are the things that I think should not be streamlined and standardized, for the very reasons described by our distinguished valedictorian.

You raise good points about varying $X but I would keep it constant anyway, because although in an ideal world we should vary $X according to the factors you mention, in the real world it would vary according to the political pull of the people living in different areas.

I think this is something many high school seniors realize at some point or another: had we known how easy it really was to game the system, we might have started playing the game earlier and earned more points. We aren't rewarded for interests, or how we approach things, or even for helping our fellow students; we're rewarded for scoring as many points as we can to the detriment of all other things.

Or you recognize that the game is contrary to your learning-related goals, figure out how many points you need to get what you're after, and then return your focus to learning. What would I have gained with another half point on my GPA or by moving my class rank into the top tenth? Probably not much, but it would have meant a lot more time and attention spent on work I didn't find interesting.

Also, for some strange reason, work you do that is interesting prepares you a hell of a lot more for your intended major in college.

I don't think the difficult thing is figuring out that it's an easy game, but rather figuring out that it's a game at all.

The system looks like reality when it's all you know. Setting your own goals is a hard concept.

had we known how easy it really was to game the system, we might have started playing the game earlier and earned more points.

I think you completely missed the point the girl was trying to make.

Not really, he means the current system is how it is and if you want to there is a way to game it. I know people who took subjects based on their interests, the way it should work, in high school and ended up getting a much lower score than those of similar ability who sort to pick subjects to best maximise their score.

Sure the people picking the interest based subjects may have learned more and got more out of the experience but they failed to get a direct path into something they wanted to do in higher education.

As much as the tide is changing there are still plenty of occupations in which your not going to get anywhere without the relevant degree.

But yes this is a tangent from the point being made, which is a good one.

That was indeed the point. I took the "learn what you like" route and was not rewarded for that as much as I could have been rewarded for gaming the system.

It is extremely validating to hear this coming from the lips of a valedictorian. I've always defended my disinterest in school by asserting that I'm way too smart for school. I struggled for my entire academic career because I naively believed that the point of school was to learn, when really, the point of school is to follow directions.

Now, when I tell people that I have no interest in college, they could dismiss my disinterest as a defense mechanism. I know that most people will never understand what I'm talking about when I claim that mass education is a tool for creating workers, but at least some intelligent people will read this brilliant speech and know what I am talking about.

I don't care anymore about arguing with the world, I just want to care for myself and my family, but I am glad this woman got a chance expose some truth to her class. I feel for her confusion and fear about missing out on self-discovery for many years of her life, but it is pretty clear that she is on the right path now and I can't wait to see what she goes on to accomplish in the future.

To illustrate this idea, doesn't it perturb you to learn about the idea of "critical thinking." Is there really such a thing as "uncritically thinking?"

Reading Edward de Bono has got me convinced that there are several modes of thinking and critical thinking is just one of them. Critical thinking as I understand it means looking for flaws, downsides, logic errors in ideas. It is necessary but it cannot be the only thing that you do - you need to come up with the ideas first.

Erica,

I want to thank you for your beautiful articulation of the sad truth that makes mass education painful for so many people.

Unfortunately, school very effectively destroys people's ability to act on the reality you tried show to your classmates and community, but I am appreciative nonetheless because it is better to give the truth a voice, even if it falls on deaf ears. You exposed yourself and embraced vulnerability, and that is the most powerful thing a human being can do.

If you have any pedagogical theories, please share them with the world. I am all ears.

Thank you.

I have no interests because I saw every subject of study as work, and I excelled at every subject just for the purpose of excelling, not learning. And quite frankly, now I'm scared.

A mind that thinks this has nothing to fear.

Explain? She learned how to work the system, not follow any passion of hers. Sure that's definitely a skill and a valuable one, though how much better would it be if it was better focused at something worth something a bit more?

It shows a level of meta-cognition not normally found in the "valedictorian" types. The fact that she recognized what had happened and that she should be afraid is the reason she should not be.

She's realized that there's more. The battle is nearly won with that. Just realizing that "the matrix has you" is the most important step.

Definitely. Good point. I agree, the fact that she says she's scared (and if she means it) is proof that she will "cure" herself someday. Good luck to her.

I believe that the speech as a whole is a great demonstration of skill that goes beyond working the system. So far beyond that it even makes the speech look a little self-contradictory.

Ah yes, I find myself wondering: how to explain to younglings that even more important than the realization that one needn't conform to the status quo (and indeed one might reject one's entire frame of reference) is that the truth -- rejecting only those things you can honestly, authoritatively reject -- is a much more sustainable approach, even though it takes longer and appears harder. But, within one's expanding limits, hard things are efficient. They're dense. You solve hard things, and then you can easily solve easy things.

If the idea is to maximize innovation and happiness in the world -- it's a little bit trickier than everyone should start rejecting things too cavalierly and promoting their own innovative ability to quote H.L. Mencken.

But that's not to knock the speech at all. I think it's a great part of the conversation about what really is the best way to prepare high school students? And how do we get there? Identification of a large problem is key. A key prick of conscience at the beginning of many large solution spaces.

But if I were to say one thing it would be:

  Be as truthful as you can.

ETA. I really shouldn't joke about 'younglings'. Although there is an argument to be made about appreciating the benefits of any situation (even misguided high schools have enviable qualities and resources, in a certain light). But it's really bad these days. Getting into college is 2-3x as hard as it was a decade ago, just on admissions rates (let alone how that factors into other qualities and explodes exponentially into other headaches). And economic hard times exacerbate things dramatically. In that sense, this speech is increasingly pertinent. It's important to jolt people into a much more focused approach to high school education. But also, in a certain light, I guess what I'm saying is that challenges are what you make of them. It's easy to make speeches as you're leaving. Even if the speeches end on the idea of coming back some day.

But the key thing is to solve actual problems.

One thing I'm always struck by whenever this comes up is how much people underestimate our collective capacity for indolence. As much as I hated uninspired busywork in highschool, and did as little of it as possible, what did I do with the rest of my time? I sunk 70 hours into Final Fantasy VII.

Sure, maybe I would have been more productive if I hadn't spent 6 hours every day waiting my way through the day, but I don't really think so.

Most people do have an equilibrium level joy of learning that they discover when left to their own devices, but I don't think most schools stifle this. On the contrary, school just forces you to do more learning than most people naturally would, and feels like an imposition as a result.

I'd certainly have enjoyed being left to explore at my own pace, but frankly, I wouldn't know nearly as much.

I had exactly the opposite experience. Graduated from Mathematics/Informatics specialized High School, second worst in class - way off below the average grade. Yet I got for free in the University, because was 9th at the national computer science (informatics) olympiad, and this gave me an automatic "A" (still the high-school diploma was taken, so it was a bit of a risk).

Anyhow - I hated school :) and too bad never finished university (too much parties).

New York city?

I'm guessing not even the US.

You don't go to a specialized HS (Hunter, Stuy, Bronx Sci) in NYC and graduate low in your class and get a scholarship.

You're lucky to get into a school. MIT isn't looking for 12 people from the same HS, even if they're all geniuses...they want diversity.

The score system is different in Bulgaria. There was nothing like N% of the students get A. In fact - the class I've been in, graduated with 5.50 (6 is the max in Bulgaria), the other class graduated (averaged) with something like 5.75. I graduated with something like 4.40, and the other guy was 4.20, the next worst after me was 5.20 I think. About 30 people in the class.

I basically skipped a lot from the school, but because I was in the computer science (informatics) team, I've got A's (6) on certain subjects, because the teachers decided not to care. Other decided that I should be present more and I've got 3 or 4 - like C or D here in US.

"Informatics" implies central or eastern europe

Yes, I'm from Bulgaria

It's hard to speak to another's educational experience (I know I've been really fortunate) but is it really as apocalyptic as some of those paragraphs suggest?

"Conditioned to blurt out facts" -- "this period of indoctrination" -- "an educational system that clandestinely sets us up for jobs that could be automated, for work that need not be done, for enslavement without fervency for meaningful achievement"

Nuance is important in arguments and creating pathways for dialog even moreso. But maybe that's not the goal of an 'inspirational' graduation speech.. Despite the last paragraph.

Surely you, too, were once in high school--are not all of those phrases you quoted the exact sort of thing you would have said at that point? I was like that too, occasionally, and oooh did I feel like a clever fellow for thinking such radical thoughts.

policy makers often look at side effects of success and, not understanding how success is achieved, seek to make the side effects more likely.

They see successful economies spend lavish sums on housing, so to have a successful economy, subsidize housing.

Intelligent people do well on tests, so raising test scores will produce intelligent people. Never mind that the obsession with test taking make it even a more mind numbing experience.

Are people truly better innovators after going through such a process? We need to study exactly this question. Actually, I would not be surprised if alternatives like the Montessori method have already been proven superior.

It seems like we might be heading into an era where questioning the methods of traditional Western education will become commonplace. This is exciting, as it cracks open the paradigm for smart people to analyze and modify. If we let some of the top creative, scientific minds spill their guts about schooling in a public forum, who knows what could happen?

What I worry about, however, are the fools who will use specific criticism of our implementation of education to fight education in the general sense. Every time I read one of these articles, there are inevitably dozens of comments by idiots who don't have any specific criticism of the system at hand, but would rather rail against the idea that learning is important. In fact, conflating the "Platonic ideal" of education with the American school system is exactly the kind of confusion that prevents anyone from making any progress in the first place.

This reminds me of The Onion's "High-School Senior Marvels At What A Long, Strange Trip It's Been" http://www.theonion.com/articles/highschool-senior-marvels-a...

Which, in turn, reminds me of "6-Year-Old Stares Down Bottomless Abyss Of Formal Schooling" http://www.theonion.com/articles/6yearold-stares-down-bottom...

The truly mind expanding experiences I've had in my life have come from meeting new people, engaging them in conversation, and trying to learn how to get along. Meeting people who were interesting before they ever went to college, or were interesting despite never having gone.

"Well, you meet people in college!" You'd get a better experience starting a rock band, joining a community service group (or hell, joining the military, it's a similar time commitment and they pay you), all activities essentially free compared to college. If anything, the system of accreditation, the politics of the teacher-student relationship, and the financial concerns of meeting even the most modest tuition rates are nothing but impediments to "expanding ones mind".

But without continuously increasing GDP we will have deflation and will not meet our national goal of... hey wait a minute... don't our national goals look a lot like standardized tests?

Maybe we were invaded by aliens a long time ago, and this is our prison.

I think she has come to the same conclusions many teenagers have come to before her. Although perhaps she frames them a little more elegantly. Most teenagers just have the instinctive realization that, "school sucks."

Grading is a system that can be gamed. However, it's not a system that doesn't encourage you to learn anything. I'd say you are rather clever if you can get good grades but not very smart if you didn't learn anything along the way. In one of her criticism she claims "I excelled at every subject just for the purpose of excelling, not learning. And quite frankly, now I'm scared." She should be scared. Scared that she made a mistake to not learn anything.

But of course I don't believe that to be true. She did learn something even if she is spiteful of the methods by which she came across the knowledge. I also do not believe that the system is perfect either and it is good that she recognizes this. However I think she, like the vast majority of people charged with writing a speech for an audience, got hold of a single idea and stretched it beyond its logical limits.

Is the system perfect? No. By any rote definition of perfection any system wrought of the mind of a human cannot be perfect. Could it be better? Certainly. Though I think you will have a tough time educating people by removing the goal of excellence.

People might be interested in Chomsky's overview of the educational system, as one where even stupidity has a role -- if there's a lot of stupidity in the system, then the people who'll succeed are obedient people (including him) willing to follow the orders of someone who "couldn't think his way out of a paper bag", to get to the next rung. The rest are filtered out.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xq6lFOhLJ0c

The problem I have with her speech is that it is speaking in wishful grand platitudes, as most V/S-torian speeches do. I know several public school teachers and most have as their primary goal teaching students how to learn and to love learning. It's not like they want to create drones.

But here is where the problems begin. How do you teach a 9th grader how to learn to think about math problems? When I first saw my first geometric proof I thought, "Big deal. Why do I need to learn the proof to something everyone knows is true?" It seemed pedantic to me. But it probably deal a great deal for teaching me how to think analytically. But as a 13 year old, given the choice, I think I'd argue that studying NWA lyrics are far more useful and enlightening.

Again, 9th grade is when a lot of my friends dropped out. Not so they could go grap a copy of Apostle, because the current math curriculum wasn't challenging enough. But because sex, Nintendo, beer, and drugs are a lot more fun than just about anything you can teach in class.

And here's the other problem I have with her speech. No one has been able to construct such an environment, even on the smallest of scales. No charter school, no private school, no home school that I've ever seen.

I think her speech is more wishful thinking than anything else. As a child I used to wish that medical science was wrong. Eating chocolate, pizza, soda, and ice cream were actually really good for you. I theorized that they had overlooked some key facts in body chemistry. But my wishful thinking didn't change the fact that some things are the way they are... and maybe even for good reason.

I never let schooling get in the way of my education, but I'm pretty sure that's at least partially responsible for me getting rejected from all the colleges I even remotely wanted to attend. So I can't say the system is really in place to support people who do their own thing. It's not a realistic option for most people to start deviating from schooling. I mean you've got to be really above average to be able to quit or marginalize school and still succeed in our institutionalized world. You'd basically have to start from scratch (or at least start much lower than if you subjected yourself to the education system).

The dilemma here is that some students when left alone can thrive without having a safety net education regiment, while some may just play games all day and waste away. And perhaps some may get too specialized and lack other basic skills a standardized education would guarantee. I think if there is going to be change, we have to start looking into whether or not those things are true. Lots of kids are home schooled right? The data should be there.

If kids have to learn how to drive then they should do the driving, and school should just provide the vehicle. Can't learn to drive while sitting in a bus (but it's more economical).

I went to a very competitive public school. They looked at more than just my grades. I'm sorry that you got rejected, but quite frankly, if you didn't get good grades, it's hard for a school to vouch for you mastering basic skills you'll need at the next level. If however, those grades are a reflection of one of many problems of obstacles you may have faced, then that's where your personal statement comes in. If you decided to do your own thing, then as someone reading applications, I'd rather give your spot to someone else and wish you well in that sense.

Whether you decide to go to college or drop out is a decision I hope everyone can live with either way. At the end of the day, yes, find what you love and do what you love. Schooling is a great, great way to learn how to do many things, meet many great people, etc. It's not the only path, but it's an easier path for most people because you have the threads of people who came before you and would know how to guide you--assuming you're on the lookout.

I remember Paul Graham writing sth. similar in one of his essays on education -- that school is basically only for adults to conduct their daily work while the kids are being watched and that it teaches you values you won't need in later life.

Furthermore, coming from a German schooling background, I think it's much the same over here.

Testing, ranking and inspecting have become all too pervasive?

In Finland national testing, school ranking lists and inspection systems do not exist. Unfortunately behind this facade it still manages to focus quite heavily on rote memorization.

http://www.oph.fi/english/education

In other words, the system is tailored for good 'students', not great learners.

Autodidacts are viewed as social misfits who do not like working with others. I can attest that this generalization is not true as far as I am concerned.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autodidact

original link: http://www.sott.net/articles/show/212383-V...aduation-Speech

Am I the only one detecting a "frowning on education" theme on hacker news lately?

I don't necessarily disagree, but it seems like there has been an article a day about "should i go to college", "the diminishing value of a degree", etc.

Is something that the country is focusing on right now or is it hacker news specific?

As Sir Ken says, education is one of the most personal experiences people have. If you ask someone about their education you suddenly get their full attention as they travel back in time to recount the good old days.

The anti-education slant largely comes about from people trying to prove themselves or justify their personal circumstances. Their words: "Well, I didn't go to college and I'm doing fine." Their meaning: "You must be not as good as me if you didn't do what I did." Their feelings: "All these other people had opportunities, support, and they just went along with it. Their lives were handed to them. I know I'm better, or at least just as good, as them even though I didn't go to a fancy school. I'm going to prove it by telling everybody how school is worthless."

In short, you are what you did. The anti-schoolers forget school also includes social grooming, transition periods, and growing up. The schoolers forget not going to school has different ways of social grooming, helping with transitions, and growing up.

I think some of you might enjoy the "School Sucks Podcast" about compulsory schooling and its effects. http://schoolsucks.podomatic.com/

Did she really end a high school speech with the term "pedagogic movement"? Sounds like a "Curse of Knowledge" overdose to me.

http://37signals.com/svn/posts/213-the-curse-of-knowledge

One common remark on HN seems to be that high school is not challenging/interesting. One way to fix that would be to put pupils into different schools according to their ability. Several European countries do it that way, usually around age 12.

I have a huge problem with that. It sickens me to think of categorising children/pupils (and even human beings for that matter) on any basis. There are many objections that I have against it, but the most pressing is "This will lead to no interdisciplinary or inter-school-of-thought discussions."

We need to understand how we categorize students. The fist thing that comes in anybodies mind is ability. But how do you measure ability? Everyone has a particular area of work she/he is good at. Then how will you measure their ability. I may am not be good with spellings, but may be I can write better prose. He may not be able to master the subjects of Mechanical Engineering but my god can he modify a car.

If you put children in different schools based on there ability in different fields, then that would need to field stagnations. Sometimes a short story would inspire a few innovations in neuroscience. We need to have discussions between people from different fields.

Also if you make another standardized test to test pupils abilities would that not have the same result. They would be just as bored, but with better people around them. Who is to ensure that they would not be bored by what they are taught.

Also such a process would lead to elitism, similar to what we have in the current academia. If you are not from your countries best college, then you would have a bloody hard time to get research grants and such.

That's a pretty enlightened speech for a high school grad, awesome!

Take home lesson: "What gets measured gets managed - even when it's pointless to measure and manage it, and even if it harms the purpose of the organisation to do so."

If I was head of the Coxsackie-Athens High School, I'd be damn proud. You've taught your students well if they end up concluding you've been doing it wrong all the time.

To write such an eloquent and thought provoking piece as this, her education must have taught her something more than just memorisation and facts.

As her brain does not cease to function when she leaves school grounds, there is no reason to believe she did not gain her perspicacity elsewhere.

Here it is on video! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9M4tdMsg3ts

As Mark Twain said: "Education is the path from cocky ignorance to miserable uncertainty."

Parts of this speech imply the valedictorian was somehow misled into working hard and graduating at the top.

Well, I don't like speeches about the evils of money given by rich people, nor do I like speeches about the broken education system given by valedictorians.

I got goose bumps!

Wonderful speech, but a bit of a misleading title on the article as she's not speaking out against schooling, but against a specific kind of schooling that's common throughout the United States (and elsewhere):

H. L. Mencken wrote in The American Mercury for April 1924 that the aim of public education is not "to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence. ... Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim ... is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States."

[.. snip ..]

For those of you that work within the system that I am condemning, I do not mean to insult; I intend to motivate. You have the power to change the incompetencies of this system. I know that you did not become a teacher or administrator to see your students bored. You cannot accept the authority of the governing bodies that tell you what to teach, how to teach it, and that you will be punished if you do not comply. Our potential is at stake.

For those of you that are now leaving this establishment, I say, do not forget what went on in these classrooms. Do not abandon those that come after you. We are the new future and we are not going to let tradition stand. We will break down the walls of corruption to let a garden of knowledge grow throughout America. Once educated properly, we will have the power to do anything, and best of all, we will only use that power for good, for we will be cultivated and wise. We will not accept anything at face value. We will ask questions, and we will demand truth.

While intriguing to think about, this teleological viewpoint which she repeats a few times is a little silly. There isn't really a shadowy cabal of plutocrats secreted away in a subterranean headquarters inside of a volcano, planning all of this.

It's likely instead a series of unplanned, undirected side-effects from other things. Standardization could side-effect of trying to mass-produce education, which is a side effect of the increasing size and complexity of society. Educational institutions last for generations and stick to what they know because they don't know what else to do. It's very difficult to get feedback or to infer causal relationships or have anything resembling an experimental control over a 20 year education process and literally a lifetime. No one is directing all of this from a secret mountain lair while cackling malevolently and stroking a trained leopard.

If there's anything that's clear, it's that no one is masterminding the design of the US Education system.

It must have been very painful for her to continue on her path to being valedictorian after she came to this conclusion.

It is ironic that she is condemning an institution which made it possible for her to write so well and be able to think so originally and creatively.

Perhaps she has forgotten, or is unaware, that without the schooling she received, without the need to complete those assignments, or prepare for those tests, she would hardly have been so motivated for the future and full of passion because whatever she might say, she knows very well that the education she has received has given her so much and will allow her so many more opportunities.

She does however forget to mention how her visionary education could be? What do we do, not teach kids maths? not teach them the thermodynamic laws which personally I have forgotten but have a vague recollection of them, not teach students of biology, history, geography? Does she suppose that a seven year old, ten, 12, 14, 16, year old can so freely be creative without knowing anything whatever of the facts. Should such student be allowed to imagine what our history was, or how our biology works so that he can be "creative". Does she actually know what to be creative is?

Whatever might be wrong with out educational system, unfortunately some things are basic and simply must be learned. We simply need to teach our kids to read, to do maths, physics, biology, history, art, music, sport, literature. Not simply let them imagine how it could be but yes make them memorise the facts, make them learn the fact. You might forget them the next month, but in the long run you learn the basics of each of these fields. You learn you have a heart and other organs and an immune system and the basic of history, lit, etc.

It is fine to simply shout foul, and for the top in the class that is their past hobby, impatient with themselves, believing themselves to be leaders when they so immature still, but we have been teaching for more than two millennia. You can not simply discredit all this experience with some rhetoric.

As for the creative part, that happens in university. If you did not learn the basics that are taught in primary school, and then on advance, you hardly would be able to independently arrive at this stage of creativity in a meaningful way, that is to gather the facts, learn them, understand them, understand how they relate, synthesise them together, and come up with suggestions as to how things can be improved.

But by all means throw stones as long as your house is not made of glass.

"We have been teaching for two millenia" is no way to defend an educational system that developed during the industrial age. The Montessori method was published in 1912, and experience has shown its effectiveness. It is our current public education system, not its critics, that ignores experience.

The nearest public Montessori school to me has a waiting list larger than its student body. As a result, I'm sending my kids to private school and making lots of sacrifices to do it.

I don't want to say about my kids, "As for the creative part, that happens in university."

It wasn't the Montessori system that put men on the moon. I'm pretty sure it was bright young men sitting in high school math classes, learning to use their slide rules and practicing integration until they got it perfect, then going on to engineering school where they learned even more complex mathematics and physics. Have you ever looked at a math or physics book from the 50s? They lack the full-color illustrations, story problems, and "extra activities" of a modern high school text, yet somehow generations of mathematicians, physicists, and engineers mastered the techniques.

Speculate about the moon landing all you want, but a lot of successful people, Google founders included, credit Montessori education as helpful to their success.

The institution she is condemning is not necessarily responsible for her talent in writing. It is entirely possible to learn facts outside of the modern school system, and many students learn outside of the classroom by pursuing their own interests.

The real issue here is that the modern American school system is not designed to facilitate learning and growth, but rather it is designed to act as a daycare that produces consumer-workers.

By her own admission, she had no time to do anything else but study.

Yes, we need to teach children to recall certain facts and apply various algorithms. The great thing about imagination, though, is that we can dream of a world where we are taught these things without being trained to submit to authority or be swallowed up by an organization.

I think her point is that learning the basics that are taught in primary school hardly necessitates being molded to fit within an industrial-age corporation

How can you control a class of twenty students without some sort of authority and without requiring some sort of submission?

I realised what she said perhaps at a younger time than her age, maybe when I was 14, but as I have grown I have come to realise that I do owe much to that very system towards which I shared her feelings. Indeed perhaps it was because of that institution that I was able to even think such thoughts, and have such realisation and gain such understanding about such a great picture as an entire institution.

We should indeed find ways to improve our schools and perhaps even find such ways in this big picture scale. But you can not simply condemn this institution through some rhetoric. She says nothing specific and hardly offers any suggestions seeing as she is fresh from this institution and would perhaps know better than more how things can be improved.

And I submit, that she is unaware that she owes so much to that institution and that institution has offer her so much. She might not like it, but I doubt she could suggest that she is not the better for it.

Also, I do not think students are robots. They have plenty of freedom. Two weeks holidays every six weeks of teaching, six weeks summer holidays, then they have literature where they can be as creative as they like, and arts, and music, and sport, and plenty of afternoon free time. They hardly can be uncritical, but they do as they must learn that criticism, however truthful, has a price, especially if aimed at the powerful, i.e, teachers.

Unfortunately, there is no other way but to teach kids maths, how to read, biology, history, the facts and make them memorise them. If they don't remember the specifics, then their memory would improve, which I think correlates highly with intelligence, especially working memory, and they will learn plenty of other things, such as to see the bigger picture as she has. I doubt that without those literature classes she would have been able to, or without those history classes, or...

She writes well because of her DNA. Both directly (because of her brain itself) and indirectly (because she's innately curious and was hence driven to seek intellectual stimulation just as a beaver builds a dam).

That's a strong claim, and I'm not aware of any support for it aside from anecdotes.

In other news, the sky is blue.

Srsly... Valedictory speeches are suddenly no longer about embracing our individualistic spirit anymore? Thank you for the link bait.

I really hate downvoting, but if you consider this link bait I do not know what you consider good content. The author/graduate is very articulate about not supporting the current systems set in place for schools. I wholeheartedly agree with most of the speech and I think it is something that more students across the US should hear in some form. We are led to believe school is the chosen path to achieving everything in life when 90% of what school represents is memorization and homework.

Did you read the article? The headline is a bit misleading, but the speech is very well-written and its points valid.

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