What's Wrong with Students? | Hacker News Reader

What's Wrong with Students?

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100 pointsjseliger100 comments

I went to Catholic college prep high school in the 1990s. My kids, public high school (albeit: a suburban public high school) over the last 6 years. I had to write a shitload of papers. My kids have to write a shitload of papers. If anything: their education is more rigorous than was mine. If my kids get(/got) "cats" vs. "cats'" incorrect, they'll get dinged for it.

I kind of want to call bullshit on this analysis.

Just want to chime in: Likewise with my kids. They've been writing paper after paper since middle school. Both have been taught a lot about good writing and critical thought. Other subjects are similarly rigorous. My kids study more in high school than I studied in college.

With that said, there's certainly a disparity in education quality depending on where you live, and how affluent you are. In addition, for kids who attend college, there's a disparity across departments and majors based on the high school background of the students. It is possible that for whatever reason, the author of that article ended up assigned to teaching a "fluff" course at their college.

Yep. Relatively recent product of the American public high school system here [0], and soon-to-be product of the public university system. If anything I had to write many more papers in my high school classes than in my college ones. I don't know what planet these guys are living on.

> Well, the night before, I studied probably pretty close to an hour." And with that the scales fell from my eyes.

> "An hour? Do you realize that when I was in college it was common to start studying for big exams a week or more before?"

I suspect the professor has forgotten just how much college students have on their plates at any given time. An Intro to Philosophy class may not be everyone's top priority.

[0] Starting in Louisiana and finishing in California.

College students also frequently work.

Four decades ago, you really could pay for college with a minimum wage summer job. Now, it would require far more than a year's full time work.

https://newrepublic.com/article/122814/how-many-hours-would-...

agree, I didnt go to an affluent school and I had to write at least 6 major papers. the only shock i had was going from dos word perfect to ms word. the grammar check was infinitely better in the former.

I had a similar experience: I went to a very good, Catholic college prep school and I wrote a lot of papers well before setting foot in college. In some ways, it was more challenging than any subsequent education.

However, this is not the normal educational experience of many in America. Outside of private and (good) public schools, what's described here is probably the rule, not the exception.

So: I know this is true. My kids were privileged to attend one of the better large public high schools in Chicagoland, and I'm not indifferent to that situation.

But that's not really the argument this little piece is making, because it's arguing that incoming college students are underprepared by high school, and demographically, college students as a cohort tend to come from the better high schools anyways.

I think your scope of college students is too narrow. You do not have to do well in high school to get into some kind of low tier college. Low tier colleges will take anyone with a pulse who can get a loan.

Maybe. I'm interested in learning more about where Dennis Fried taught.

According to The Directory of American Philosophers, 1980 edition [0], he taught at Franklin and Marshall College at that time. Probably with a little more digging, you could come up with his academic CV. The school is a small, expensive, private liberal arts college that's (currently) well-ranked in the US News rankings[1].

[0]: https://books.google.com/books?id=5D9AAQAAIAAJ&focus=searchw...

[1]: https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/franklin-and-marshall-c...

So, what's the likelihood that the incoming freshmen at Franklin and Marshall (a) had trouble with "cats/cat's/cats'" and (b) hadn't written any papers in high school?

Catholic grade school late 80s/90s.

We wrote everything longhand. You were allowed 4 corrected errors per page; if you exceeded 4, you were required to rewrite the entire page. This sucked, but it definitely grinds grammar rules and spelling into you.

My own anecdote; 12 years of Catholic School, graduated HS in early 90s.

In my Freshman year of High School, the English teacher gave us a grammar test on the first day to see where we were. Two people passed [including me--I got one question wrong], but the bulk of the students failed.

I remember being surprised that so many of my long-time classmates could fail the test.

Consequently the teacher spent the first half of the year on grammar issues instead of other literary pursuits.

I always love reading your comments because they are so insightful thus it's very depressing to read this comment and have to accept that this is probably who you really are.

Your comment (and assumed mentality that comes with it) are what is wrong with our educational system. I went to school with people that could not add and were functionally illiterate - they graduated too so I can assure you this is not fake news.

Outside of your "Catholic college prep high school" is the world that the rest of us live in and in that world this is a reality. A reality that can not be addressed because the well off people like you say: This is fake news because my kids are fine. If you have not please educate yourself on things like: White Flight and the correlation between property taxes and education. I have posted one link below but you can google to learn more.

https://www.npr.org/2016/04/18/474256366/why-americas-school...

Note: My father is a social worker who deals with these uneducated people for a living. For the first 17 years of my life I heard story after story like this, I also have spent years tutoring kids and adults in prisons and jails so I do not consider my experience to be anecdotal.

I think you missed the point of my comment, which was not about how good Catholic schools are.

I 100% totally missed that and I am very sorry. I thought your comment was simply that because your kids are doing well then all kids must be doing well.

The point isn't that they're "doing well". It's that the coursework they're assigned is rigorous. You could also have students doing poorly on such coursework, but that would also contradict the anecdata in the main article.

My kids are in public school, not Catholic school. I was comparing a system that was designed specifically to produce college students to the default for people in my area of Chicagoland, and finding that the default was if anything more rigorous than the selective private school.

You're out in Oak Park, right? That makes you folks an outlier no?

If you want to get a sense of where I live, Google for the intersection of Lake and Austin streets in Chicago.

I'm lived up in Riverdale.

I don't know if this means anything to you, but, to be honest, I somehow got the same impression from the comment in question.

Anecdotes don't prove anything other than exceptions exist. The article and all the comments are anecdotal in favor or against the analysis, but there's been no actual data presented.

There is quite a bit of data in the linked article: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/01/whats-c...

He probably taught at a much lower-status college than you went to, or your kids will go to.

At lower-status colleges, the issues he describes are very real.

When I went to college in the US in the 90s, I was a bit surprised to find fairly basic (remedial, if you want to be less generous) reading and writing courses as a hard requirement. Easy to test out of, but they were there. I just looked and they still are:

http://guide.berkeley.edu/undergraduate/colleges-schools/let...

The fact that a pretty decent school needs to provide and demand this of their incoming undergrads seems to suggest they (still) have no shortage students who come in without those skills. I don't think it warrants the kind of handwringing in the 'analysis' but it's probably not complete bullshit.

> Answers: Listened to records, watched videos, talked about movies and current events.

Amazing-- a class of (apparently) 30 students mysteriously synchronized on three answers to a wide open question. And alarm bells didn't go off in the professor's head that maybe there's some confirmation bias going on in this non-scientific survey.

Also amazing-- once the professor figured out that his students didn't have the prerequisites to understand the material, his next question was not how much debt the students had taken on in order to pay for this and presumably other classes they have no chance of understanding. This is especially irresponsible given that a) if they can't read on a third grade level it is certain they can't calculate compound interest and b) freshmen were enrolled who the professor could have at least convinced to drop out before accumulating so much debt they'd never be able to pay it back.

But instead of a courageous act of dissuading them from continuing down what is clearly the wrong patch-- an act which no doubt would have brought the dean's wrath-- he shames them for not having had a quality education-- something that is safe to belly-ache about to colleagues. And he left teaching anyway!

Question: did he give the money back to those students who had no chance of learning anything from the class he was paid to teach?

> his next question was not how much debt the students had taken on ... But instead of a courageous act of dissuading them

Can you explain how you arrived at this conclusion from the letter? The author literally transitions from "... watched videos, talked about movies and current events" to describing another event. There's nothing about what he said or did after realizing his students' academic inadequacies.

I have children in a good public school, in Australia.

It is dismaying how much time they spend watching movies.

I find the quality of the texts tends to contemporary issues and is of uneven literary quality to put it mildly. Only the advanced English classes spend time on classic texts. (apart from some Shakespeare - of whom everyone gets some exposure)

I was going to post the great Socrates quote on this topic - The children now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise.[0], but like all quotes that follow Tillett’s Law [1] Socrates didn’t say it.

0. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/01/misbehaving-childre...

1. The more famous the authority quoted the less likely it is accurate.

This attitude (let's not call it a quote) seems to often be offered up as evidence that there isn't much merit to such inter-generational kvetching. But if this attitude was contemporaneous with Socrates and Plato, then the Hellenic world was indeed in decline (Rome would conquer Greece in only a few hundred years and in Spengler's regime the whole Apollonian world had already entered its autumn period) and why should the recurrence not be because our own world has reached a homologous point in its development?

Socrates is far from being the pinnacle; the pre-Socratic philosophers are seen as having accomplished little, whereas Plato and Aristotle are immensely influential, and presumably part of the generation referred to.

The quote is made up. And the important question is why do we have the strong desire to make up quotes like this. What exactly are we trying to deny?

Did you read the link? The paragraph wasn’t made up. It is a summation of attitudes towards children at the time.

My bet would be that it was falsely wrapped up into a quote because it simplifies origin and time frame to better underline the point.

Something I don't think people here are taking into account is the bias inherent in this forum and the variance in education.

I had to write a ton of papers in high school (less in college, but that happens when you study math).

Some childhood friends of mine who went to a different school got stressed because they had to color a map (with colored pencils). The difference in rigor levels was astounding.

I wrote more in some of my high school math classes then I did in all but one of my college classes. My college English classes felt like going back to middle school.

My writing was appalling out of high school, but it is passable today. That was only achieved after writing chapter after paper after chapter in my Ph.D. work. Writing takes practice, and is hard work and time consuming.

I worked with my high school son on a report recently. His writing and organization was also appalling, yet this is a very bright kid; I've administered a number of cognitive and IQ batteries on him. Only after showing him how to arrange his arguments cohesively and logically, did he start to see the flaws in his writing. It takes practice and instruction, and I don't think that the school system makes it a priority. I could excuse my high school, coming from an impoverished district, but I see it also in the children of my son's school in an affluent school district.

It depends strongly on the school. I received almost a whole year of instruction on analyzing other people's arguments, spotting the use of logical fallacies, and constructing your own coherent arguments. We spent a lot of time reading both "news" and opinion articles from current events and analyzing how the author was trying to influence you / the quality of their arguments.

I still count it as one of the most influential classes I have ever taken, and it was 11th grade English at a public school.

I recently went back to school (a nearby state university) after a 15 year absence from academia to get another degree.

In one course, a number of my fellow students were pursing their ME. None of them were there out of a zeal for knowledge. Rather, New York State requires teachers to obtain a master's degree in teaching (or a related discipline) within five years of the completion of their initial degree. Without exception, the literacy and critical thinking skills of these students (several of which were already teachers), was absolutely atrocious. I was astounded at the total inability of these teachers (and teaching candidates) to read and write coherently. Granted, this was a state school and not a respected Ivy League university, but the lack of even basic literacy among these graduate students was shocking. Most struggled mightily to get through the class. Several dropped out to take courses with less demanding professors. To my knowledge, they all got their degrees, and are today teaching in our schools.

How can we expect our children to become literate if those who teach them are not? The most important facet of education is teaching a child how to think. It is far more important to teach a child how to absorb the thoughts of others (reading) and express their own thoughts coherently (writing) than saturate them with information that they cannot retain or process properly. We are depriving our children of the tools they need to be thoughtful, and our society is suffering as a result.

Perhaps the question should be rephrased to, "What's Wrong with [secondary school] Teachers?"

In the US, we only compensate our teachers $20-40k a year. For a skilled practitioner in a field, teaching presents an untenable opportunity cost. Most fields pay their experts at least four times the salary of teaching. Therefore the only reason for an expert to apply his skills to teaching becomes passion or a sense of duty. On the other hand, a non-expert may become a teacher because it is his only option. So we either get teachers who are both expert and passionate, or teachers who are non-expert and possibly even non-passionate.

How can we expose students to more passionate, expert teachers?

The clear solution is to reduce the opportunity cost of teaching for the expert. He should be able to engage his passion or satisfy his sense of duty without also sacrificing the benefits of a career in industry.

The obvious way to reduce this opportunity cost is to pay teachers more. However, blindly raising salaries is an expensive and lazy solution. It risks attracting the group of passionless semi-experts who can barely get a job in industry.

A more targeted approach would be to make it easier for experts to engage their passion, or satisfy their sense of duty, by participating in short-term, low-commitment teaching. Why should working and teaching be mutually exclusive?

I propose that schools allocate a small budget for a new class of "temporary teachers," who keep full-time jobs in industry, but also attend class on a weekly basis to augment the permanent teacher.

For example, a programmer could come to class once a week to teach or interact with the students. This would benefit the students by exposing them to a skilled practitioner in the field, help the practitioner by satisfying his passions or sense of duty, and utilize the permanent teacher for his specialty. It seems like an effective and cheap solution.

schools allocate a small budget for a new class of "temporary teachers," who keep full-time jobs in industry, but also attend class on a weekly basis to augment the permanent teacher

Adjuncts, in other words.

Your salary range estimates for teachers are low.

Average starting salary is $36k with population average of $56k.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/articles.niche.com/teacher-sala...

Make sure you read Bryan Caplan's article in The Atlantic too [0].

[0]: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/01/whats-c...

A TL;DR for the apparently irony impaired: The letter writer is a self-described humorist and appears to be doing an elaborate “kids these days” joke. Giveaways ate things like the 10-second pause for “cats, cat’s...” and the lovely ‘“What did you do in English class?" I asked. Answers: Listened to records, watched videos, talked about movies and current events.’

I think the most likely explanation for this story is that the students thought the professor was asking a trick question, so no one wanted to raise their hand.

I went to high school and university in Georgia (our high school graduation rate and quality scores consistently rank in the bottom half of states). I have never heard of an English class where the students "Listened to records, watched videos, talked about movies and current events" and never had to write an essay.

Or nobody wanted to respond to the professor contemptuously ridiculing their grammar skills. Students can smell it on you.

In my experience, "English" classes is a broad catagory that refers more to literature (broadly defined) then the language.

Granted, in my highschool practically every class involved essays, but my movies "English" class didn't involve any more than my math classes did. (Admittedly, I do not know how to compare the length of a math paper with the length of an English paper).

>I think the most likely explanation for this story is that the students thought the professor was asking a trick question, so no one wanted to raise their hand.

This example reminds me of my syntax (linguistics) proffesor, who would frequently ask "are people not answering because they don't know, or because it is obvious". It also froze me for several minutes as I tried to figure out what is going on with cats/cat's/cats'. (I gave up because I cannot figure out how I pronounce cats'. There is either nothing weird going on, or some weird morphology).

It's ironic that the author misuses the word 'comprises' in his rant about the quality of English education. Things never comprise of - a group comprises the parts, or it is composed of the parts. The parts compose the whole.

That ship sailed so long ago, fussing over it seems like futile pedantry. Webster seems to have the right idea calling it an idiom.

Take a look these - there's 'comprised of' in the New York Times in the 1860s:

https://query.nytimes.com/search/sitesearch/?action=click&co...

Edit: Something a bit more recent - a 4600 word profile of Charlie Brooker in the New Yorker in which a sentence begins with 'Comprised of':

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/11/28/the-speculativ...

The things people get pedantic about are never the things which are the actual rules of English. In simple terms, if something were an actual rule, nobody would need to be pedantic about it, because everyone would follow it unconsciously, like they follow the rule that adjectives precede nouns in the simplest possible case, not the opposite, or in any other order: "The big red ball", not "The ball red, big", or "The red ball big".

The things which pedants go on about are best seen as a failed attempt to "improve" the language, an exercise in conlang construction using an extant language as the base. This is how it was with the prohibition on splitting infinitives: A split infinitive is perfectly good English, but it is impossible in Latin, where the infinitive form is one word. So, operating on the dogma that Latin was more fashionable... more correct than English, the pedants attempted to modify English to be more Latinate by insisting that splitting infinitives was ungrammatical in English. It was only ungrammatical in their little conlang, which never quite caught on.

The pedants did have one victory: The Latin word for "debt" is spelled with a 'b', "debitum", whereas the former English spelling was fairly phonetic: "dette", or similar, with no 'b'. The pedants got most English speakers to accept the conlang spelling, "debt", as "more correct", as part of their larger, largely unsuccessful, program to Latin-ify English.

My son is graduating this year from the #5 ranked public High School in a top 10 population sized city in the US. In his four years he has never had to write a research paper or read a class assigned book. When he fails a test he is allowed to correct the errors and receive a 70% for the final test grade. His AP Computer Science class was mostly playing games and learning to create websites in HTML.

I went through the same school district in the early 1990s and had a vastly different experience and did well in college. He is absolutely not prepared for college but the kid is a master at taking state standardized tests.

I wish I had taken a more active role with his education instead of just assuming his school was getting him ready. My advice to moms and dads who have kids getting ready for High School is to participate and monitor what they are learning and find a way to fill in any gaps.

Don't assume it gets better in college. It's very possible for a smart kid to go to a good school and not get a good education. If your son does in fact plan on attending college, make sure he has an advisor who is willing and able to take an active role in his education. Not every kid knows what they want, and not every kid figures it out on their own. Source: I was that kid.

Amusingly I had a similar experience while holding a tutorial for math 2 at my university. After an hour a student asked me what the integral symbol is, as if she has never seen it before. Now I do not find this very tragic as I would gladly recap anything and working throughout my studies I know one might not be able to get through all of the content, but good luck studying when you are missing the basics to even understand the problem at hand.

In freshman physics at Caltech I cancelled out the d's in dx/dt. But I knew something was terribly wrong, and I sought out the professor after lecture. He asked me if I knew what a derivative was, and I said no. He suggested I come to his office later.

He gave me a half hour lecture illustrating the basics of integration and differentiation. It was the most useful half hour of my life, and it got me through the semester. Prof. Gomez pretty much saved my @ss.

No, my public high school had not offered calculus in any way, shape or form. My fellow freshmen couldn't believe I had come to Caltech utterly ignorant of calculus.

I had other problems too - did not know how to study, did not know how to take notes, did not know how to organize my time, I'd never had to work at school before, thought I could skip lecture and wing the exams, etc.

It took until my sophomore year to get my act together. Fortunately, freshman year at Caltech was pass/fail, and I barely scraped by that year.

What were some of the methods you developed and used?

It was straightforward:

1. attend all lectures

2. do all of the homework on time

3. make sure I understood how to do 100% of the homework problems

4. get help with anything I didn't understand

5. write down everything that the prof wrote on the blackboard

6. clean up my handwriting so it was legible

7. lectures/homework/studying always came first

Exactly what worked for me back then, except in Chemistry in addition to copying from the board I also wrote down everything the professor said along with what I thought about what was presented and was writing so fast it made No.6 completely impossible.

Ever since, when working with someone who has difficult-to-decipher handwriting I advise them that their handwriting is just fine for themselves, so when you need others to read it correctly, in those situations approach it like calligraphy instead.

Naturally I typed my homework and did "calligraphy" on exams.

Also the homework contributed so little credit toward your final grade that a single wrong answer on a midterm or final counted against you mathematically more so than turning in no homework at all, so some good students treated it like they could make up for many hours shortage on homework in just five minutes of the time spent acing the exams. But it turned out to be impossible to get an A for the course if all of the homework was not completed and all correct as well. This was by design and for students to figure out for themselves. They didn't give very many A's in Chemistry.

At Caltech, the grade was totally based on the midterm and final exams. The homework only counted if you were on the boundary between one grade and another. In fact, the homework often wasn't even graded, you'd do the homework and then attend a "recitation" session where a grad student would go over it with the students.

The point of the homework was to teach you the material. Skip it at your peril. Mastering it meant you were reasonably prepared for the exams.

If you were allowed in a calculus based physics course (some schools offer non-calc versions for non-science/engineering students) without ever being asked if you had taken calculus, there was an issue here other then you not having taken calculus. Calculus is not part of the standard curriculum at many US high schools. I attended one of the top 10 engineering schools in the US, and it was not that unusual for students to need to take calc before taking their first physics course. This kind of basic prerequisite verification is something any major university should be doing.

Calculus was required in pretty much all of the freshmen classes. There was no possibility of deferring that in order to learn calculus - it should have been done before the fall. Remedial classes were not offered.

As far as I recall, I was the only freshman who did not know calculus. I can only infer from that that I did not get the message, or ignored it. I certainly received no useful guidance from high school.

Thank you for the reply but sadly there is another issue.

Similarly to you, I was educated in North America where ironically integrals were not part of the curriculum, but when I arrived in Europe I had to take 3 entrance exams: English (the exam is very awkward for the native speakers, you get 2 questions: what is your name and why are you hear after they notice that you do not have an accent), math (their curriculum with the missing content I did not have) and German.

As I understand, if a local does not have a matura in the required fields, they have to take similar examinations which should prepare them.

I think you had a very nice professor though.

> I often said that, in my experience, out of a class of thirty students only about five would normally possess the minimum requirements for a college student

The question is what to do with these students... What should a teacher do when half of his students don't have the prerequisites to follow his class?

When I as an academic I used to run extra classes at lunch time for the keen students covering topics that I thought the students needed to learn about, but for which we didn't have time in class. Theses topics were not covered in the exam so only those students interested in learning came.

As for those students that don't have the prerequistes or the motivation to do the work to catch up, you fail as many as the university will allow and then scale up the class mark so the rest pass. At my university I couldn't fail more than 3% or 4%, but in some classes more than half really failed.

The professor should write a meaningful intro text book and deliver it as a pdf, rather than use some $400 Wiley textbook they get a kickback from and the chapter and questions get resorted each year so that used books are useless. This is all a racket. Does anyone think that the 25/30 remedial students are going to pay for a $400 or more textbook when they've got more immediate needs (shelter, food, clothing) to pay for?

I suppose I've got just a normal third world education, but even with my poor background I considered the cats example somewhat extreme. Is this kind of thing really common?

I guess there is quite a paradox, that non-native English speakers know some grammar concepts better than the native ones. I also think that it's an extreme example and somewhat I refuse to believe that college students do not know the difference.

I also was told that non-native speakers can better distinguish between 'well' and 'good', and the usual suspects 'you', 'your', 'you're'. The latter is so basic that I am bewildered when native speakers cannot understand the difference.

I did not know this, quite interesting. I will try to find an explanation of the phenomena

English is my second language. I'd say it's due to the fact that when you learn a language in school, by listening AND writing, it'll stick in your head visually. I never mistake its/it's, they're/their etc., something I can frequently see native speakers do on the Web in their comments.

Having done 2nd grade in the Philippines and the rest of my education in the USA, I would say that their schooling is much more difficult and they are pushed harder. In addition the school days were longer and the culture there really promoted the importance of academic success. Here in the USA it's almost frowned upon to some degree-- if you're smart, you're a nerd.

And yes, at least in my area (Southeast USA) people do not know punctuation rules. Most of them write okay, but comma splices, apostrophes, semicolons, etc. would trip them up.

I am brazilian and our education system is notoriously bad, any international ranking can attest it. I've seen many brutal errors made by university students, but this particular example striked me as almost unbelievable. Thanks for the answer

>but this particular example striked me as almost unbelievable

That's because it is unbelievable. In high school in the US, I had to write an essay per week in my history classes and a paper per book in my literature classes.

I went middle ranked suburban high school (and a large public university). Based on my experience, this story didn't happen the way it's being told.

I think it's more likely that no one wanted to raise their hand because they thought it was a trick question.

I'm sure it depends on where you live. I've moved around a lot. In the well funded city schools we got a pretty decent education. When I moved out to the country it went downhill a lot. I tried going to the middle of nowhere community college to save money and the first year was basically middle school level English and Math. People were struggling. There was a lot of "this stuff will never affect me, I'm just going to work on a farm or factory so who cares" type of attitude.

I've always enjoyed learning and I think anyone who does can succeed in any environment. There were certainly other kids who strived for more even in the country and did okay too. But having moved a lot I could tell the difference.

[re-parenting comment]

Not surprising, even looking at some of the appalling written English posted here on HN (a community which, you would think, is educated to an above-average level). Nobody cares. Plus, if you actually point out incorrect spelling, grammar, or usage here, you’re instantly shouted down with cries of “language evolves!”

[Edit: Looks like the “Language Evolves” crowd is already here!]

On the Internet no one cares about punctuation or grammar.

Maybe you're overthinking it. People just don't like to hear about something that's completely irrelevant to the conversation.

If you really care about improving some one grammar, send a private message. It can be very useful for a non-native speaker, especially if it's not a total stranger to you. Saying out loud "fix your grammar" doesn't make you a hero on a white house.

'Is this kind of thing really common?'

In the UK it is, the cats example would stump a lot of people.

A classic here is 'its' and 'it's'.

Wouldn't you get points deducted from various classes starting even in elementary school?

Why would deduction of points lead to understanding?

Wouldn't one ask why points were deducted?

Only if that one is interested is his/her success and doesn't hate the subject. Plus, a child can be too shy to ask for an explanation.

You think someone could possibly keep this up for 10+ years?

It used to be the case but the trend, anecdotally, is towards a more-rounded learning experience where grammar and punctuation are considered less important.

The article has some grains of truth but seems to overlook many areas, but the three I'd highlight are that numbers have dramatically increased, facilities / organisation is much improved and students for the large part work very hard now (in higher tier institutions at least). It's such a diverse field I'm sure people could debate over examples for ages but it probably does benefit to try to simplify it this way. Where I'd suggest society might want to look is how we ensure that the overall higher education offering can be optimised to obtain the best outcome for the greatest number of people. Clearly it isn't for all and not treating alternatives (eg apprenticeships and other channels) as interior is a start. Something also needs to be done about the spiralling costs from the arms race between institutions and the increasing portion taken by senior staff at the expense of average staff.

I'd add that both teaching well and learning well are difficult skills: https://jakeseliger.com/2011/01/24/why-dont-students-like-sc...

Many teachers and professor also develop unfortunate carapaces; if a student wants real coaching and mentoring, it helps to think about those carapaces: https://jakeseliger.com/2010/10/02/how-to-get-your-professor...

One of my coworkers who is in his early/mid 20s didn't know what Leap Year was until his Junior year. He went to elite private schools in the Bay Area, probably among the most elite, and then went to a very good college. The idea that he could escape knowing what Leap Year was made me question whether I should home school my children.

Parents (i.e. the customers) have influence, the product that they are buying isn't necessarily an academic education for their children.

Yes, I agree. The real cause of this issue.

I don't think it's necessarily a huge failing to not know about this/not teach your kid about it. Different kids have different curiosities, and as long as he is intellectually curious, and just didn't happen upon that particular calendrical oddity, then no biggie.

However, I've seen some evidence that it is possible to do well at elite bay area schools without having much intellectual curiosity, and most teachers will give you high marks just for hard work and obedience.

I'd say you are likely to come out ahead if you ignore elite status, and instead focus on whether teachers at your kids' schools nourish their intellectual curiosity.

Everyone has weird gaps in their knowledge. Especially things that are common knowledge.

I wouldn’t want a school covering leap year.

I agree with the "weird gaps in knowledge" part, but I would want a school covering leap years. Leap years are an excellent introduction to astronomy and our solar system.

Once we teach kids how to do their taxes and vote we can move on the hard stuff like Leap Years.

You could also send your kids to public school and then supplement their education on your own, a tactic sometimes referred to as "parenting".

You obviously don't have kids going to a public school in the Bay Area. The local school superintendent literally begged for money from the parents because they didn't have enough money. Class sizes are huge, and they only care about standardized tests because that's how teachers and schools are evaluated. It is not the same public school system that I grew up on, that's for sure.

Now good luck with students who were homeschooled, that's yet another huge can of worms waiting to explode (and it's bigger than "just" not being able to spell correctly). Next to no quality control, plus parents are free to "teach" their kids by religious rules.

Poor kids.

This has been going on for quite some time now, maybe a couple of decades.

Homeschool kids have diverged into at least a couple of camps. I live in a relatively affluent, liberal town, that hosts a major public university. My kids are in an activity that's also quite popular among homeschool families, so I've met a few of those kids. They're great kids, and tend to be ahead of their public school peers academically, while being on a par socially.

Then I was just talking to a relative who lives in another state, and his observation was quite different: The homeschool kids in his locale are practically uncivilized.

Homeschooled kids as a cohort do very well compared to kids in the public system.

And what do you mean teach by religious rules?

While it does depend on your state most states have a set curriculum for homeschooled kids.

> Homeschooled kids as a cohort do very well compared to kids in the public system.

The problem are those that fail miserably because their parents are rednecks with a deep trust towards the state combined with a fanaticism towards the Bible. They get overlooked when one only looks at the cohort/average.

> And what do you mean teach by religious rules?

Kids homeschooled (or, even worse, religiously schooled) by religious sects of any color: Jehovahs Witnesses, Twelve Tribes (these caused a major child abuse scandal in Germany a couple years ago), Amish, ultraorthodox Jews, salafist Muslims, Scientology or whatever. Basically, anything ranging from "you must not see kids of other faiths/gender", "you must not interact with kids being homosexual/non-cisheterosexual" to "you decide to leave our sect, you're dead to your family".

Or, in Amish (or similar) communities: the kids actually never interact with normal kids and experience freedom. With state mandated schools, the parents cannot withhold that experience from the kids.

> They get overlooked when one only looks at the cohort/average.

Ok, so can we compare the bottom 25th percentiles?

A few of my family members went to public school and are functionally illiterate.

Are these homeschooled kids worse off than that?

> Kids homeschooled (or, even worse, religiously schooled) by religious sects of any color

Oh so you weren't talking about education at all then.

You were talking about the benefits of the state pushing its moral values onto kids.

I'd rather err on the side of the parents than on the side of the state.

I went to public school and was violently assaulted at school at least a half a dozen times and verbally harassed dozens more.

I wouldn't give the state any moral authority.

> Are these homeschooled kids worse off than that?

They were both f..d up by the system and I'm sorry to hear that. No kid deserves having his life destroyed by a screwed up education.

> Oh so you weren't talking about education at all then.

Creationism, for example, is not education (and yes, I know, some public schools have been forced to teach that crap too, but that's actually the perfect example why religion should not touch education in ANY way).

> I went to public school and was violently assaulted at school at least a half a dozen times and verbally harassed dozens more.

Violent assaults are nothing exclusive to public schools, they happen at private schools too. And when I look at scandals of sexual abuse and violence (from teachers!) here in Germany, most of these have happened in private schools.

> I wouldn't give the state any moral authority.

At least I would give the state more authority than the churches or religious nutjobs.

> No kid deserves having his life destroyed by a screwed up education.

And yet it is not uncommon.

Where I live if you look at overall education homeschooling provides the best results, followed by private schools, and then public schools bring up the rear.

> Creationism, for example, is not education

That's neither here nor there. Millions of people who went through the public system here believe in creationism and it certainly wasn't taught in schools.

Like I said in my original post the curriculum is still determined by the state for homeschool and private schools.

> Violent assaults are nothing exclusive to public schools, they happen at private schools too.

Of course they do.

I guess my point is the media will focus on teacher related scandals etc.

However, the overwhelming majority of physical and sexual abuse is student on student.

As such the likelihood of physical or sexual abuse while homeschooled is likely an order of magnitude lower than at public school.

> At least I would give the state more authority than the churches or religious nutjobs.

The authority belongs with the parents.

If your parents are horrible and abusive then you are in for a rough life.

It is horrible and true regardless of whether you go to public school or not.

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