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Comment by Loughla | Hacker News Reader

A bit of a rant here - Having worked in education both here in the States and in Korea, this makes a ton of sense.

We all lauded the accomplishments of Asian countries in measures of math, science, and English. We sought to replicate their success.

And we have started. One thing about the US student was that we used to be behind in math and science, but our creativity was our strength.

And we're educating that out of the system, in the pursuit of standardized objectives (standardized objectives that encourage the development of things like remind to constantly keep kids on track, career clusters for focus, and the pressure to decide a career in 6th, 7th, or 8th grade).

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I made a terrible mistake and I put a lot of pressure on my daughter to do well in school, do well in extracurriculars, etc.

I made the measurement the goal.

Now I'm trying to undo that damage and put it in her mind that at any point you can change direction, study, knowledge, but you need a few tools to do so: self-criticism, discipline, critical thinking. Initial progress has been good and our relationship is running quite a bit smoother, but Jesus I could have left my kid seriously messed up.

I think that a huge amount of this derives, in the US, from the continued degradation of the social safety net in this country. We have put an expensive gateway in front of success with very expensive college, and even with that there is no guarantee of a job that pays well enough for you to live comfortably. That in addition to the traditional standard of the "Atomic Family".

I have no proof of that, but it certainly seemed to have been a major factor in our house, but I have to recognize that individual human brilliance can occur at any point in life, and that the tools to act on it are more important than many of the things that she is learning at school.

continued degradation of the social safety net in this country

What degradation? Spending on the social safety net has only ever increased, not decreased.

The population has grown. Obviously spending increases. However, access to the safety net has decreased as have the net benefits. In other news water is wet.

The US population annual growth has barely broken 1% in the last 50 years. Social spending has increased at a greater rate.

I used to believe this but it turns out that net benefits (by almost any measure) have increased continually:

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-05-16/the-u-...

The fact that so many people don't "feel" more secure from these very expensive investments may point to other structural problems.

Huh.. thanks for the clarification. I should have googled first!

Or maybe the social security net was always atrocious, now it’s just a little bit less so.

(Not saying that’s necessarily the case, just that it could be)

The US has a larger social spending budget than Canada.

So if the US is “less horrendous”, then canada’s must be even worse?

This is a great point. I've taken a similar approach.

The essay about Abraham Lincoln isn't really designed to teach you about the 16th president of the US--it teaches sentence structure, argumentation, clarity, research, etc. The grades are for the school to use to prepare next year's funding package; the assignment is for you to learn skills that may help put food on your table someday.

Shifting the focus from grades to skills tends to give them a greater incentive to excel.

What led you to believe that it was a terrible mistake?

Everybody wanted our school kids to perform as well as those in Korea, but I wonder if anyone ever looked into the high rate of suicide among young Koreans?

Math and science are creative pursuits. One of my pet peeves when people think that STEM subjects are not creative fields.

I think a common problem is that often they become non-creative subjects when taught in school. Standardized tests frame them as a pursuit to find the same steps and answers as the mythical answer key, instead of a pursuit of exploring and building solutions to questions/problems.

Ironically, Asian countries tend to copy the creative Western countries with all their STEM abilities.

And it's perhaps a good thing to copy each other! Ideally we would want our kids to be both creative and knowledgeable in science, math, reading, and other skills.

Or perhaps reclaim our education standard that created STEM in the first place? The Asian method seems to be mostly good for sucking up existing content and spitting it back out, but not producing anything new.

Additionally, the "Asian method" is not actually Asian, as is the case of most practices we attribute to China. These practices (rote mass education, communism, state birth control) are all originated by Westerners, who were unable to sell their ideas to the western countries, and so went east. In other words, we outsourced all our bad ideas to perform massive social experiments with other civilizations. Pretty reprehensible, if you ask me.

Can you cite a source or describe what you mean by "our creativity"?

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