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Comment by greenlblue | Hacker News Reader

I've been educated in two different countries and the obsession that the US schools have at every level with segregating and separating students never ceases to surprise me. Administrators are so obsessed with the metrics used to perform this separation that they are no longer doing any real educating and are instead developing more and more arbitrary rules for separating students. If you don't believe me then I point you to the profits being made in making standardized tests. The solution is simple but it leaves a lot of educational pundits and standardized test makers out in the cold. Everyone is held to the same standards gifted or not with the caveat that special education still chugs along as it does today.

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What of the students who can pass the 12th grade standards in 7th grade? Do they take the next 5 years off?

I didn't say anything about penalizing people. If you are so gifted that you can take college courses in 7th grade then be my guest but you'd be surprised to know that in most other nations what people learn in 6th and 7th grades is what the US students learn in 11th and 12th grades. The point is that educators should be focused on educating instead of providing a custom tailored product to suit the prevailing political climate in order to funnel more dollars to their school's districts. Removing all the testing and separation and holding everyone to the same standards makes it much easier to apportion tax dollars in a fair way. Currently there are so many bureaucratic layers and so many constantly changing rules that by the time textbooks are published they are already out of date and new ones have to be ordered for the next school year. Obviously this only benefits the book publishers who are more than happy to reprint materials sometimes even different materials for adjoining states and get paid for it.

It's not enough to just let students take the classes at their level; you also have to offer them classes at their pace. The 5th grader who's ready for algebra is probably capable of finishing the course in a third of the time that it would take a 9th grader who is taking algebra at the usual age for US students (at least, that was the case for me and the cohort of segregated gifted students I was in).

Offering special classes for gifted students can also help solve a lot of problems stemming from disparities in emotional and academic maturity, or offer instructors the chance to provide greater depth or branch out beyond the standard curriculum.

How far are you going to atomize the students? Grade level, proper pacing, emotional development, what else? The logistics of what you are suggesting is simply impossible. I have been involved in the education space and I know people that are still in it. If we had more resources and a lot more teachers then providing a customized education experience for students would be possible but the system is simply not there and won't be there for a very long time because everyone is focused on making the system more and more convoluted. There is no push to simplify and streamline standards and processes because there is more money to be gained from making things convoluted. The problem is that politicians treat it as a business and consider tax dollars spent on it as an investment and naturally they want to see a return on this investment so they start to measure things which almost always ends up being the wrong way to approach the problem because an education is a holistic process and treating it in six month chunks makes no sense whatsoever.

Well, it's going to have to be something other than "Keep doing the same thing but throw more money at it."

What about scrapping about 80% of the curriculum and returning to an apprentice system as a serious career path? Does teaching "item A" in the curriculum really matter if the resulting system still churns out 90% of its graduates who don't know or can't do A? What about really deeply integrating computers, in a way that isn't just "Keep doing what we're doing, but throw more computers at it?" What about any of these things but different for different children?

I don't really know what the answer is, but I observe that it simply can't be "keep doing what we're doing". The entire world has changed a lot in the past few decades and schools are starting to look distinctly 19th century. Not a typo. And I don't mean that the answer is "add lots of shiny technology" necessarily, but this factory mentality has got to go and I don't know that we can get there by incremental change.

"How far am I going to atomize the students?" Why, until they are what they actually are again: Individuals.

I agree - universities often (depending on your degree) allow you the freedom to choose courses of various difficulty across various faculties to suit your interests and skills. This doesn't seem like a massive extension of that.

How are you comparing public schools to universities? First of all each state has maybe a dozen universities but it has a hundred or more school districts, in some larger states, each with at least a dozen schools. The complexity of managing public schools is on a completely different level and saying universities do it so why can't public schools is way too simplistic.

A school has an entire staff of administrators and teachers, and they can't manage to allow students to choose their own courses rather than pre-allocating them?

Who are you quoting? Is it me? If it is how did you infer I propose doing the same thing but with more money? In fact I'm advocating the opposite. Currently the move is towards more and more customized education and it's not working out well at all. The whole thing is so convoluted that whenever a student ends up learning something people have no idea if it was because of their efforts or some other factor so moving towards even more customized education is going to make things worse not better. Also, in the future please refrain from putting words in my mouth if you were indeed quoting me.

Obviously I wasn't quoting you. Your text was right there and clearly did not include those phrases. Quotes can also be used grammatically to turn a phrase into something that can then be commented on as a phrase, rather than as direct speech of the speaker. This is why the Lisp quote operator is called what it is, for instance, it is doing the same thing.

I may overuse it, but, well, I'm just very comfortable with that usage. Sometimes it's just what is called for.

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