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Comment by daxfohl | Hacker News Reader

I don't know, I'm in a very international neighborhood and kids of immigrants are all spending extra time doing extra homework, and they have a near monopoly on the top scorers. So it obviously pays off. I don't know whether the argument against homework then is that it doesn't pay off in the long run (losing interest -- which my workplace is also very international and I see no indication of lost interest in learning), or that assigned homework doesn't help but maybe private after-school classes do, or what, but I don't see any way you can make an argument that "just school" is enough if you want your kids to keep up.

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Part of my job is hiring out for high performing teams. What I've noticed from 100s of candidates is that the high achieving kids of immigrants do well in university as well as school. However when faced with real world challenges, the more well rounded candidates (of which a large portion are the immigrants kids for sure) definitely produce the highest value in their work (orthogonal problem solving and communication). Hard to be well rounded when you're just doing a narrow set of training exercises after school. After school is for life

One problem with that is a well rounded candidates who dont get the best scores wont get entry into the best universities so will always be disadvantaged.

There are hundreds if not thousands of schools where a well rounded student can get a great education. Some parents and high schoolers fret about attending the top ten or so name brand universities far in excess of any plausible difference in educational or life outcomes.

Yeah, I was about to say that too. I went to a no-name state school in the south. Now the young guys from cmu and other top schools work for me, I'm an engineering director. Certainly cmu is training top grads, but ... so are most state schools too. Certainly I was lucky and worked hard, but other than a star by your name if you went to a posh school, once you have a few years of experience it's not that valuable to be from cmu. What you do with yourself is far more important.

Maybe that works in Software Engineering because of the current boom there is a huge shortage. Law, Finance, Medicine is not like this. Nor will SREs in the next downturn.

This is just mistaking correlation for causation, as if you had seen Romans conquering the Mediterranean world while making heavy use of augury by reading entrails and decided that the way to emulate them was to read entrails, not to have the best infantry, and the most infantry.

> top scorers...it pays off.

As the article says the debate is about 'what childhood is for'. Some would say it's not for getting high scores.

My neighborhood is in the backyard of a major public university, so I'm acquainted with the same cohort of kids, along with their parents. The parents tend to be highly competitive, focused, and organized, and come from professions -- doctors and professors -- that select for those traits.

I also know a kid who does practically no homework, but is still in that top-scoring cohort. His dad was the same way. ;-)

Just school is not enough. You also need great parents.

I've noticed that in at least one subject -- math -- very few students from any background retain an interest as adults. There has to be a transition from a subject being presented as a series of hoops to jump through, to it becoming an actual passion. Whether that transition occurs is a coin toss. It's easy for people to get busy enough at something productive that doesn't involve math, and so they don't miss it. At my workplace, the small handful of people who are considered to be "math people" come from an apparently random assortment of backgrounds.

"You also need great parents."

Indeed. I think the hierarchy of what factors make the biggest difference goes like this:

1. the kid

2. the parents

3. the teachers

4. the school

The kid has to have at least the basic physical and mental faculties or they are seriously impacted no matter how good the rest of the things are.

Then the parents make the next biggest difference. Even if the teachers and school aren't very good the parents can make up for it and can even excel.

It can be a close call between teachers and parents, because if the parents are doing just the minimum a great teacher can still make a big difference.

Last but still important is the school, meaning the facilities and educational systems in use, separate from the teachers who teach there.

Where I live I see most parents focus on two things: extra tutoring, and schools with fancy facilities. Most don't think they should do anything themselves, that they already paid the school/tutor to teach. An example is that despite the teachers constantly encouraging kids to read with their parents every night, it seems like most kids do their nightly reading on their own if at all.

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