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Comment by ksdale | Hacker News Reader

My wife and I are in the early stages of homeschooling our kids and one thing I've noticed in all my reading about education is that there seems to be one side that argues for more job training in school, and there's another side that argues that a well-rounded life includes much more than just job skills, and then there are articles like these, that seem to indicate that a ton of people are making it through the education system without learning anything at all. That seems like a much bigger problem than what should be on the curriculum, but it doesn't seem to be much talked about.

On the professional side of things, I've come to expect that most 18 year olds won't know anything about anything, which is fine, 18 is quite young, after all, but it seems at odds with the tremendous amount of time and money that's been spent on the average 18 year old's education.

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Most people spend their whole time in school learning things that they will never, ever use. Pardon my linking to twitter, but this thread really sums it up:

https://twitter.com/3liza/status/1190843201315147776

It's been my experience as well. I used to read pop-sci books voraciously from ~1st grade onward, and as a result everything in science classes from middle school until the middle of college were basically review for me. (As a result, I was bored and did poorly in most science/math type courses)

Another example is a kid in my high school who was running a reptile business during his sophomore year. They had him doing algebra and writing papers about US history. Why? The kid already knew more than the biology teacher about reptiles. And he made more money than any of us did at 16. Why is he spending 8 hours a day training to take the SAT?

18 year olds can know quite a lot, they're just not allowed to spend time learning things. Instead they have to learn a bunch of useless crap in school, from elementary school onward. All the way up to upper div in college. This is only getting worse, since school (especially "college prep") is sucking all free time out of the lives of children.

This is largely my position as well. I think kids are capable of drastically more than we expect from them, especially when they are motivated, and there's no reason that 18 year olds shouldn't be perfectly capable of making an impact right at the beginning of adulthood.

Here be dragons. An ignorant electorate will devolve into a society run by subjective mob rule. All those "useless" skills developed in school actually have indirect benefit to society.

Why are you assuming ignorance? In the parent's examples, the kids knew lots of things. Additionally, it is our current state of education that's led to such a large portion of the population being unable to do basic math and the like, which is the definition of ignorance. No one is suggesting less education, just different education.

Did those kids actually know a lot of things, or did they just think they knew a lot of things? My daughter has reached the developmental stage where she's an expert on everything, and on the surface she knows a lot of facts, but her understanding is rather shallow. It takes some age, experience, and (usually) rigorous education to go beyond that stage.

Because there's more to participating in society than hyper-specialization. You may be the world's greatest herpetologists, but you still need to maintain your finances, do your taxes, and vote in a way that requires historical and contextual knowledge.

Are kids learning enough to maintain their finances, do their taxes, and vote in a way that integrates historical knowledge?

It's not my experience that the average 18 year old knows any of those things, and the article suggests that many people aren't coming away from school with basic literacy or numeracy.

This all goes back to a point I alluded to in my first post. When someone suggests that public education is badly broken and perhaps could use an overhaul, they are bombarded with arguments about the importance of education that seem to ignore the fact that a very disappointingly large number of people are not, in fact, receiving anywhere near that level of education.

Ignorance is a given. The kids knew lots of specialized things, not a well-rounded education. History is important to not repeat the mistakes of the past. Math is important to develop critical thinking skills and a disciplined use of logic. Being educated in these areas offer an "indirect benefit to society", as kevin_thibedeau mentioned.

People, though they may be individually smart/educated in their own areas, are dumb in aggregate and in general. It's only by all sharing a holistic education that we can have an educated electorate. After all, in any given area of study, a group of people making decisions by vote is only as smart/educated as the average individual.

This is exactly what I was alluding to in my first comment though. Of course a well rounded education is important, but we’re failing to deliver basically any kind of education to a very large number of people. I think it’s not inappropriate to consider drastic changes, but when drastic changes are suggested, the counter is something like saying that a well-rounded education is important, as if that’s what we’re currently achieving and we’d be forsaking that.

The 16 your old in your example could have dropped out if he wanted to. Why didn't he?

Because dropping out of primary education is HEAVILY penalized in our society in multiple facets, sometimes in non-obvious ways. Dropping out of college does not create a major barrier to success for motivated people, dropping out of high school statistically nearly guarantees a bad life outcome. Even people who drop out and then attain a GED (arguably harder than just graduating) have lower statistical success indicators.

As a simple anecdotal example, I have an acquaintance who dropped out of high school because he was bored. He's actually quite above average in intelligence and educated despite not being formally educated. Nonetheless, he had a minor run-in with the law (bar fight, he didn't start it), and due to having his official record with the state showing he was a drop-out he was treated more harshly by the justice system, including having a higher bail set and receiving harsher sentencing. Our society basically just operates under the assumption that if you drop out of high school you are complete fuck-up, so that's the context of how you're judged.

He did, if I remember right, but it was a mighty struggle. The school fought it at every turn, because it was bad for their metrics.

One thing that I've noticed in California is that the system is totally disinterested in results from the student, and I have no clue how to fix it because, as far as I can tell, the teachers feel like they are not allowed to incentivize performance.

My oldest daughter discovered that if she turns in an assignment with something vaguely related to the questions written on it, she is pretty much guaranteed a B, and will often get an A. The only thing she has learned from school is that nobody cares about the quality of her work. She did manage to get a C for one term in one class in middle school by not turning in a single assignment. When we met with the teacher after that, we surprised her by asking how she could justify giving our daughter such a high grade (she was expecting us to complain about how low it was).

My second oldest has been consistently a year behind since 1st grade, and now that she is in 6th grade, things are starting to fall apart (so much of what you learn is cumulative by this point). We've been asking for her to be retained since 3rd grade and been denied 3 times in a row. Everyone is worried about her "self esteem" but it's not like she doesn't know that she's at the bottom of her class, and that's not doing any wonders for her self esteem either.

Our youngest two haven't been fucked up by the system yet, but I feel at this point like it's more of a "when" rather than an "if" question.

You might argue that kids not knowing anything when they graduate is a symptom of the focus on professional skills. I found that the more people tried to teach me what they thought I "needed" to know rather than the things I was interested in, the less I learned and the less useful the stuff I learned was.

Yeah, I think you're spot on about a lot of kids not being interested in the subjects that are taught and I agree that it has a big impact on total learning.

On the other hand, I don't really remember being taught many professional skills in school, and in any case, it's still practically unfathomable to me that kids could make it through 13 years of any kind of education at all and not end up literate and numerate.

More of the funding needs to go towards teacher salaries, in the first place. They start on $18 an hour here, you can make more in a call center with no responsibilities.

Also, we spend a lot, however it's extremely unevenly distributed making it much more likely the scenario we're discussing comes about (someone making it through school without a useful education).

If we allowed kids to choose what they wanted to learn, they would all be playing video games all day.

We really shouldn't care about what a 13 year old thinks they should be learning.

You can learn many of the most important sorts of things that a 13 year old would want to learn by being into video games. Computers, math, history, how to tell a good story, how to organize a group of people to accomplish a common goal.

Of course, you can't let 13 year olds teach themselves, because they don't know what's out there and they don't know the best way to spend their time. But that's not the same as not allowing them to do things that they're interested in. Incidentally, I don't think that we shouldn't have any sort of required education, just that they should be a small part of the whole educational experience.

We already tell all children what they should be learning, and apparently a huge portion of them end up without basic literacy and numeracy. That's as bad as it gets. It's hard to imagine how these adults would have been worse off if they hadn't gone to school at all. Perhaps they would have stumbled across something that interested them and learned something.

Being highly motivated by something is a prerequisite to great self-learning. Video games (especially?) can be a great launching point to learn about math, programming, writing, design...

Being motivated by nothing means students will not learn or retain knowledge.

So yeah, I think letting a bunch of 13 year olds play video games all day would actually provide better results than keeping them locked up an a pseudo-prison like environment teaching them things that they're not interested in learning and for the most part wouldn't need to know anyway.

"18 year olds don't know anything about anything"

Come now, that is blatant overstatement. When I was 18, I knew how to read, write, do calculus, use Microsoft Office, do a bit of coding, and even enough to work in a biological research lab.

The problem is most skills needed in the economy are not aligned with the skills taught in school. Is it necessary that a plumber can read Shakespeare and analyze it? Is it necessary that a nurse knows all about the Civil War? Well no, in a purely skills-based sense, their schooling was "not valuable" and they "don't know anything".

I said most, not all, and do you consider yourself average? I would consider an 18 year old with your skills to be rather exceptional. And 18 year olds like you were tend to go off to college and not enter the workforce right away, anyway.

And your last paragraph is exactly what I'm talking about, we argue about whether a plumber needs to know Shakespeare or whether a nurse needs to know about the Civil War, as if they know those things but would be better served with other, more practical knowledge, but, in my experience, basically nobody knows about those things, anyway, beyond a few cursory facts. Meanwhile, apparently a huge number of people can't do basic math.

As an aside, the kind of people I know who do know a lot about Shakespeare or the Civil War are the kind of people who would have learned it whether or not it was a subject in school.

Knowing about history makes for a more informed voter. In the very short term for the individual it may not seem very valuable but in the long term it is very valuable for the country to have a populace educated in history and the liberal arts. By knowing our past we can hopefully not make the same mistakes in the future.

The idea that the value is only defined by usefulness to capital is the most pernicious idea in all of American society.

You haven't been exposed to average 18 year olds if you think one could understand Shakespeare unassisted, let alone analyze it. I have tutored fellow university students at a rather prestigious school who lacked basic skills which should be learned in Algebra I.

> a ton of people are making it through the education system without learning anything at all

Well people learn something. What is interesting in the NCES national literacy surveys they've consistently found that around 45% of adults who didn't graduate high school are illiterate, about 20% of adults who did graduate high school (but no further schooling) are illiterate, and about 10% of the population overall is illiterate. There's also non-zero illiteracy results for various levels of college graduates, ranging from 1 to 4% depending on the degree level.

Now these students that are graduating high school and college illiterate are extremely interesting. What's going on? Do they have incredible memorization skills and learn from listening to books on tape? Or have they selected degrees and colleges where literacy is not required, perhaps an art or physical education major or something of the kind at a small private college. They are submitting at least some papers and taking tests in their classes most likely. Papers can be bought or ghost authored, is that happening to the extent that illiterates can get a degree? Test taking, perhaps some professors will give everyone a passing grade just for attending even if they turn in blank tests. Is that happening? Or perhaps the illiterate people self-reporting to NCES that they have a Masters degree (1% of Masters degrees holders are illiterate) are lying either about about their degrees or intentionally failing the literacy testing just because they thought it was funny?

At the high school level though I am pretty sure the case of large numbers of illiterate graduates is that a lot of schools pass you with Gentleman's C's just for showing up, remaining quiet and obedient, avoiding fights, and not causing any disturbances or problems for the teachers. If you do this and don't turn in a single assignment and guess randomly on all tests you can graduate from many US high schools.

I have met several illiterate high school graduates so I know it is a real thing that happens. They all had great personalities. Some of them are successful business owners. Graduating illiterate might require some people skills.

It's worth poking around the sample questions on that literacy survey: https://nces.ed.gov/NAAL/sample_results.asp they're not using literacy in the sense of just being able to read english prose. I, at least, can see how you might fuck up the survey but still be able to muddle through writing a couple pages on Duchamp's Fountain, it wouldn't be easy but 1 in 100? yeah sure.

Hey yeah in the study methodology they do a 7 question simple screener at the beginning. Those with poor scores do not take the questions you mention which are intended for people who definitely have basic literacy. They instead do a test involving someone sits with them and shows them photos of laundry detergent and asks what's the name of the brand. If it's Era and the person says Tide that's a half-credit, if they say Tide it's a full credit. And so on. It's to determine exactly how bad are things.

But even with the test you mention you and I would definitely score far far above the "Below Basic" level that is a comparable term to illiterate. Sure they can recognize their own name and the word cat and dog, but they can't read a sentence in any newspaper or make sense of it.

Learning is a skill. If you can teach your children how to think and teach themselves whatever they need to know in whatever situation they find themselves in, they will be successful. It's what my parents taught me, and I'm grateful.

What makes it so difficult to change/improve the syllabi?

I don't think it's that difficult, but I think people spend way too much time arguing about the last half of the syllabus (what we should be teaching high schoolers) and ignoring the fact that a quarter or a third of students aren't even making it past the very beginning of the syllabus. It's like, arguing whether a kid should focus on computer science or Shakespeare, when the kid can't read. And obviously, there are tons of kids who are at the point of choosing between CS and Shakespeare, but it just seems like such enormous low hanging fruit to just make sure that everyone in the world can read and do basic arithmetic.

The problem is, for the education system to work, students need to be faceless cogs. The reality is that we're all interested in different things and would be better suited by an individualized education.

The fact that the majority of high school graduates are not educated enough to hold down a full time job to support themselves is proof the public education system is a joke.

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