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Comment by eksemplar | Hacker News Reader

I think our educational system is flawed as well. I know a lot of talented people who would be able to do great things in science and research if there was a way for them to enter academia after they’ve become full fledged adults.

Often it’s people who matured late or spend their youths trying to figure out what they wanted, and now they can’t really enter into academia because the institutions were build to educate the same way we educate children.

I know there are masters programs, but a lot of those, and a lot of people who take the time to re-educated, are solely focused on getting more valuable for business, not for research.

It’s a shame, because I think we lose a lot of potential by almost entirely focusing our higher learning systems on young people.

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It is flawed, flawed to the point of being broken. What education should be: teaching children to become mature adults and functional members of a cooperative society, teaching coping skills for adulthood, cultivating and encouraging a sense of curiosity and interest in reading, learning, etc. What education tends to be: a brutal factory that is not unlike prison that babysits children until they are legally (but not emotionally or intellectually) adults while burning out every ounce of curiosity in science and learning in all but a precious few individuals.

There are tons of ways the system can be improved. One little thing I'll point out is that in school the expectation is perfection and deviation from "perfection" (orthodoxy, memorization, etc.) is punished. If you "fail" a midterm or a big project but end the course with a high degree of mastery of the material you are punished with a lower grade. If you excel in certain subjects but only passably good in some others then you are again punished. Which is exactly the opposite of the way real life works. If you are a superstar (perhaps literally) in even just one area (science, music, art, writing, comedy, machine tools, what-have-you) whereas in other areas you merely have a basic level of competency, well in that case you can become hugely, wildly successful. And yet the educational system would lead you to believe that you would have a dim future in that case and you should stop focusing on what you are best at and most passionate about to improve your "grades" on everything else.

>educational system [...] stop focusing on what you are best at and most passionate about to improve your "grades"

Yes. Precocious boys follow a sequence of obsessions. The way to foster achievement, then, is to find out what a child loves and help him to do more of it. Ultimately this may involve finding a master who can act as mentor. It's not going to happen in conformity factories dominated by ideologies (and often policed by bullies).

That is not true. Kids who develop abilities or inclinations at an earlier age than is usual or expected don't necessary follow obsessions. Their brains often simply develop a bit faster then brains of other kids, hence sooner abilities and inclinations.

It does not mean they will end up more skilled in adulthood nor that they are necessary obsessed types.

Conversely, obsessed personality types are not always that much better then others if their obsession is not channeled in an effective way. The obsession is not necessary combined with larger talent or effective learning methods.

Well I'm not talking about obsession in the sense of a mental disorder -- but in the sense of that one thing X that a particular person happens to be in love with at the moment (could be piano, could be tennis, could be computer programming or could be something socially disapproved of like pokemon or skateboarding or whatever). The obsession creates a depth of knowledge. Even when you try to make such people do other stuff, they'll still be daydreaming about X. So better to work with it.

Obsession creates time spent by topical activity. If does not create depth of knowledge unless channeled right. Kid won't go far in piano or tennis or math unless having good teacher no matter how obssesed. All those fields are too competitive for that.

> Even when you try to make such people do other stuff, they'll still be daydreaming about X. So better to work with it.

That is point where it is approaching mental problem. Most kids, evenovanej those with strong hobbies are fully able to learn other things too.

Also, the competition winning programmers among my peers had wide knowledge in non coding areas. Then again, our environment and camps encouraged that sort of thing.

This is my take as well. The current system is well suited for the world that is resource-constrained and more or less designed to actively weed out students from reaching mastery. In other words, it’s not necessarily designed for optimal dissemination(and creation) of knowledge.

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