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> Also, I don't miss having to fight for social acceptance, the bullying, the stress and pressure nor the hypocrisy of the ones in charge.

Ironically this is somehow the most valuable lessons learned during school, since you ultimately have to deal with this shit throughout your life in most career paths. So at least you got prepared for that.

I think that the social dynamics of being stuck with 20 to 30 same-age same-rank peers for many months is highly unusual. Only prison is like this.

In normal life, groups (Work, Family, social gatherings) are of mixed age, mixed experience, mixed rank. To become a better person, I had to forget the pettiness of High School social dynamics.

> I think that the social dynamics of being stuck with 20 to 30 same-age same-rank peers for many months is highly unusual.

This. Whenever people ask about "socialization" WRT home-schooling, I always tell people that you never any social situation like you do in school -- where:

1) Everyone is exactly the same age 2) Nobody chose to be there 3) People have little chance to change their situation 4) There are very few consequences for poor behavior.

At your work, if someone is being a bully, then either management will fire them, or you can look for another job. At school, you have to almost murder somebody to actually be expelled, and most kids have very limited ability to change schools or classes if they're unhappy.

> At your work, if someone is being a bully, then either management will fire them, or you can look for another job.

... or you figure out how to deal with conflict like an adult. If your way of handling conflict is firing people or taking your ball and going home, your long-term outlook is not so good.

Working with people in a system is a skill that you figure out by being exposed to other people and dealing with their crap. If you've worked with military veterans, maintaining focus on what you need to do while navigating insane systems and coworkers is a core skill that they usually have.

> ... or you figure out how to deal with conflict like an adult. If your way of handling conflict is firing people or taking your ball and going home, your long-term outlook is not so good.

Its the nuclear option, and it is commonly executed. Ex: Internet forums, Dungeon Mastering, various social events, etc. etc.

* The group-leader of most social groups can effectively say "We're not hanging out with you anymore" by refusing invitations.

* Bosses at jobs can fire people.

* Dungeon Masters can outright refuse play against problematic players.

* Moderators of forums (ex: even YCombinator) can silence any party and ban them.

Etc. etc. etc. The "real world" dynamics have the implicit threat of excommunication from any group. The threat of excommunication is the fundamental political weapon of most social groups.

Is this tool used often? No, of course not. But the tool is available in every realistic social setting for a reason. We humans are social animals, and humans who refuse to play ball socially deserve to be ostracized from the group.

Not all groups are worthwhile, and many groups are toxic. So the alternative here is also keeping the ability to change groups (move sideways within a company, or find new dungeon masters or basketball friends, or whatever).

The first tool exists in schools (the "boss", the school principle and teachers, have the ability to suspend or expel students). The second tool: the ability to move schools, doesn't really exist for most people.

In principle, I agree. Conflict resolution between parties that are acting in good faith is an essential skill. However, bullies do not act in good faith, and trying to reason with them as a target is an exercise in futility.

Another essential skill is learning to recognize when you should remove yourself from a toxic environment for your own sake.

>At your work, if someone is being a bully, then either management will fire them, or you can look for another job.

That's a very rosy view. It's premised on either an enlightened management who gives a crap if someone's being a bully (many don't, or are themselves the bullies) or people having the option to willy nilly quit a job because someone was a bully to them.

That might be true for a developer in some cushy job when IT is on demand.

It's not true for a huge majority of people who need their jobs and can't just jump ship if someone's being a bully or they're treated badly, etc...

Army service is the same except 4 (consequences for bad behaviour), and up until 40 years ago or so, was also the norm for a non-trivial percentage of the western population; furthermore, the "no consequences for bad behaviour" is also relatively new - the greatest generation, boomers, and the one following boomers (and their equivalents in other countries) still endured physical punishment.

So, up until not-so-many-decades-ago, your statement was incorrect. It is correct now, and indeed the schooling system has not caught up, but it is doing so slowly - e.g. the Finnish led, and others are following, in abolishing the "forced labor" homework requirement.

Yes, but should not have to learn about fire by putting your hand in it for 20 years. In a room full of pyromaniacs calling themself firefighters. As a defenseless kid.

It looks like this: https://imgur.com/gallery/YiqlS

Without the fun of it

" putting your hand in it[fire] for 20 years"?

Sorry, bad metaphor, too extreme. Nobody can do or imagine doing that.

As for the sword cartoon you linked to: there was nothing better than getting my first Boy Scout knife. Within a few days I had blooded my blade by cutting myself, thereby learning new respect for a tool that lasted decades. My experience is that every boy cuts himself once with his pocket knife, and then begins to pay attention to what he is doing with it(1). Every child should be given a pocket knife at the appropriate age.

I liked school. I learned all the basics there. The teachers wanted to help me.

I saw only one case of physical bullying in 24 years of school. I was never bullied, perhaps being too tall and too willing to engage people in conversation.

Most discussions of bullying bring out old grievances that should have been dealt with long since and then forgotten. But they often merely fester. That's a shame.

(1) it's like the "hand in the fire" thing. I remember the first time I put my hand over the stove flame - the picture of it remains in my head! Wow, was that ever a lesson! Do that with a neural net!

> I saw only one case of physical bullying in 24 years of school. I was never bullied, perhaps being too tall and too willing to engage people in conversation.

Yes, being a tall extravert will discourage bullying. I was 4'8" when I started 7th grade, but 5'10" when I started 9th grade, so I saw the difference rather drastically. (FWIW I was personally physically bullied well more than the one time you witnessed, and I was nowhere near the most bullied kid in school).

From your experience, associating schooling with bullying is probably foreign. From my experience, I can't imagine anyone going through school without witnessing more than one act of physical bullying, because all forms of bullying were so omnipresent. Perhaps the term "Umwelt" applies here.

As physical bullying has become less socially accepted, the harms of non-physical bullying may have surpassed the harms of physical bullying today. I know many kids who were driven to self-harm from non-physical bullying. There was a teacher who would bully certain students causing them to drop out of the advanced math track (she was the only HS teacher teaching the 10th grade requirement for the track).

> >" putting your hand in it[fire] for 20 years"?

> Sorry, bad metaphor, too extreme. Nobody can do or imagine doing that.

I think, for some kids, it's not too much of an exaggeration, which is exactly why many kids drop out of school. I have heard stories of (and personally witnessed one) bullied kids jumping out of moving vehicles to avoid going to school.

I think for most kids, public schooling is "okay" for some it's great, but for many others, calling it institutionalized torture is not much of a stretch.

I was not an extrovert. Quite the contrary.

I have little doubt that (height) matters: it puts off males who have even begun to challenge me if I stretch out my arms in even the most non-threatening manner. Seeing that someone can reach you a full foot before you can reach them may put off aggression.

I had two classmates who were significantly shorter. Their personalities contrasted: one was confrontational and aggressive, often got into fights and did not do nearly as well as the other who was quiet, studious and was the first boy I knew who had a hobby: I was astonished how much knowledge he had acquired from collecting postage stamps.

I was aware that these classmates were physically vulnerable but I could only help by being a friend. In general, the shorter men I have met tend to excel in professional life.

I still think the "hand in fire" metaphor is too far-fetched. The best I've seen is someone putting a hand over a candle for about 30 seconds. He was drunk (which may account for the time) yet withdrew his hand voluntarily before others could intervene.

I understand what you are saying, but the level of damage you are implying is way, way higher than the vast majority of students go through.

I say this as someone who was regularly bullied through primary school.

Social dynamics are important, and you learn best through experiencing it. If it's as bad for you as you are implying, that is a massive failure on the schools part and that sucks you went through it.

Kids, since millennia, had hanged out and played in communities with kids of the same roughly age (and some bigger and scarier) before mandatory education / school was a thing...

It's not like absence of school meant kids would just be alone in their homes...

But, why do you say same-aged children? In the generally smaller communities of the past having [lots of] children of the same year of age would be much rarer.

In the village I grew up in the out-of-school friend groups were often across several years of age; and that's from a background of schooling.

Kids I know now, that are non-schooled, have very broad age-groups of friends and seem, to me, to be much more comfortable with company of any age.

Or is the issue that school starts rewarding this kind of behavior, and it carries into adulthood?

That's a basic human trait.

Perhaps we shouldn't encourage it.

Or you die trying like some people at my school did.

I am sure there has to be a more human way to learn to deal with this.

Oddly enough I never got bullied in school, but did (and still do from time to time) get bullied upon entering the workforce.

Never fought for social acceptance, just kind of fell into place. Actively pursuing it would exhaust energy that could otherwise be directed to productive or fun activities.

Stress, pressure, and hypocrisy seem like natural occurrences. But yeah, unless someone has 0 responsibilities (work, life, family, hobbies, etc) these aspects of life are nearly, if not completely, impossible to never encounter

>> Also, I don't miss having to fight for social acceptance, the bullying, the stress and pressure nor the hypocrisy of the ones in charge.

> So at least you got prepared for that.

This has nothing to do with "preparing" people.

Couldn't have said it better myself

Something you didn't mention though which always drove me crazy with school was how often it robbed me of the discovery and exploration portions of the learning experience.

Those portions form the substance of life, for me anyways, and every time a teacher would explain things I was on the cusp of understanding on my own anyways it drove me absolutely nuts. Like someone telling you the spoilers to a book or movie you're deeply engaged in.

And when I had already understood concepts the curriculum hadn't yet reached, and had my own perfectly correct and effective methods which happened to differ from whatever they taught when we arrived there, I'd be in trouble for using my familiar and preferred methods. Despite the fact that I actually had a deeper understanding of the problem than someone only having memorized whatever method was being taught, since it was something I had actually encountered in life and figured out independently. This happened so many times in math classes, my teachers started accusing me of cheating on tests because I would ace them while not doing any of the homework. Later on after switching to a non-religious school it became even worse, because we were rehashing stuff all over again like it was a year behind my previous school.

If I had to do it all again I'd have fought harder against school and religion from an earlier age, it was all an awful tar-pit that burned so much time and caused a lot of suffering.

Not that much related, but it's one of the reason I love the game "baba is you" so much.

It explains nothing.

But it is carefully crafted to drive you in the right direction so that you discover things by yourself, step by step, from early to very late levels.

It's a very difficult balance for a puzzle game, espacially for something as original as baba is you, that requires you to think a lot out of the box:

- a level completly chalenges your perception of what you are as a player

- another one forces you to put yourself in a loosing position to win

- one requires an object that does not exist at all in the entire level

It's a joy to understand those new mechanisms. But it is a hard game, so it needs a way to help you without spoiling the fun of solving it.

If you like level design like me, it's a treat, and a good example of great tutoring.

Now as a teacher, I do that as well. But mixed to traditional teaching because I teach adults, and they want to compress the learning time and be productive fast, even at the price of a more superficial understanding.

I think that the point of school is in no way education. The point is to mold individuals in order to fit within 2 standard deviations of the norm, and it does all it can to do so (tests, medication, etc etc).

If you are in the upper percentiles, you are used to bring the lower percentiles up, if you are in the lower you are used to bring balance.

Now we are almost at the point of making not going to school illegal. (you can argue if mandatory is the same as illegal)

-b

> Now we are almost at the point of making not going to school illegal.

I'm fairly certain (at least for the US) it has been illegal. "By 1918, every state had a compulsory attendance law on the books." [1]

According to this table, school attendance is compulsory for every state in the US for specific age ranges: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/statereform/tab5_1.asp

[1] https://hslda.org/content/docs/nche/Issues/S/State_Compulsor...

At least in the USA there are options for alternative schooling and homeschooling, which allow exceptions to compulsory public school attendance. Look to Europe though and you'll find places where it's absolutely illegal to do anything but go through the child brainwashing factories. Germany is a good example of this.

In alaska there is no real punishment for skipping school

>School is an upgrade from child labor, but I now have enough experience to know it's a downgrade from what I can learn of my own.

Is it? I'd bet most kids, left to their own devices, they'd eat fast food, watch cartoons, and play games all day, and not learn anything...

>Also, I don't miss having to fight for social acceptance, the bullying, the stress and pressure nor the hypocrisy of the ones in charge.

Aren't these the basic things school teaches? Socialization?

People aren't all kind lovable beings, nor are situations non adversarial in life.

From this there's retreat to isolation from life (e.g. like those Japanese who refuse to exit their homes), or learning how others can be, how you can respond, how to make friends, win over enemies, ignore or defeat people who try to put you down, etc. Tertium non datur.

I was going to write a lengthy comment to say the same, but I think you pretty much nailed it.

>School is an upgrade from child labor, but I now have enough experience to know it's a downgrade from what I can learn of my own.

This might be true for you but I don't believe for 1 second that the common person is able to "learn on their own". Literally everything they want/need to know about anything is available on the internet but very, very few taught themselves to be educated.

That might change if they had to.

Teachers who have experimented with "reverse classrooms" claim that 1. Students hate it, and 2. It is very effective.