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Comment by ismail | Hacker News Reader

The biggest take away for me personally is:

We all have an inherent drive/desire to learn. It is why most of us learn to talk, walk, run with out any direct instruction. Yet school is based on a massive assumption which I had never questioned. The assumption that it has to be forced on you. Education that your are not interested in has to be forced. True Learning, which differs from education, is self directed. It happens because you are interested and curious.

Personal anecdata I thought myself coding in high school because I enjoyed it. No one told me to go out and teach myself this. I found myself coding and hacking instead of learning useless facts.

Edit:

Regarding the “schooling the world” documentary I have added two links. YouTube and the documentary website where you can rent it. I chose to rent the documentary to support the filmmakers.

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> The assumption that it has to be forced on you. Education that your are not interested in has to be forced. True Learning, which differs from education, is self directed. It happens because you are interested and curious.

That's a false dichotomy. Sometimes you need the "forced learning" to get to the "self directed education."

> Personal anecdata I thought myself coding in high school because I enjoyed it. No one told me to go out and teach myself this. I found myself coding and hacking instead of learning useless facts.

To a small enough child, reading is a "useless fact." After all, an illiterate child has gone his whole life without needing to know how to read. Why waste time learning letters when you could look at animals and plants outside? None of the facts they teach in school are truly useless, but rather the person who judges them useless is just too ignorant to know their value.

Great points;

“To a small enough child, reading is a "useless fact." After all, an illiterate child has gone his whole life without needing to know how to read”

“Why waste time learning letters...”

This is the point/philosophy of it. The child will choose to learn when they need and want to. Having spoken to some of these children I found most taught themselves to read without formal instruction.

“None of the facts they teach in school are truly useless, but rather the person who judges them useless is just too ignorant to know their value.”

Exactly. So if they are useless to the person it means an EXTERNAL party has made a judgement call on what knowledge is useful. It comes down to who decides what Is useful knowledge and what is not. Who should make threat decision?

> This is the point/philosophy of it. The child will choose to learn when they need and want to.

You're missing the point. A child is ignorant of a great many things and not competent to make many of those kinds of choices. That's not to say they can't have some input, but it's an abdication of your responsibility as a parent to let them make all their educational choices based on "when they need and want to," unless those choices are so highly stage managed that they're not really choices at all.

> So if they are useless to the person it means an EXTERNAL party has made a judgement call on what knowledge is useful.

What's so bad about that? The whole point of schooling is to benefit from the knowledge and maturity of that "EXTERNAL" party, which allows them to make better educational choices about a great many things.

I think educational standards are saying this: To be a functional member of our society, you need to be well grounded in certain subjects. Reading, arithmetic, basic chemistry, basic physics, basic biology, history (local, your country, and global), economics (personal and global), classic and world literature, and so on. Many subjects you may not find on your own. An elementary education seeks to expose you to an overview of human knowledge so you can, if you choose, pursue the bits that interest you further. It also seeks to give you the foundational skills to operate in the society we've created.

I mostly object to homeschooling, charter schooling, unlearning and anything else that takes children out of their community and away from community standards of education. I understand some people object to their local school systems; I think it would be more beneficial for everyone if they put their work into improving them instead of opting out of them.

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