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Comment by SaltyLemonZest | Hacker News Reader

It's hard to identify which practices are responsible for which outcomes. Suppose you wanted to combine the high happiness rate of Denmark with the low crime rate of Japan; how would you figure out which are the policies you need to accomplish that?

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There is research, and it's pretty intuitive. Create stability. Reduce income inequality. Focus spending on social programs. Help people out of addiction, crime, give them a network, healthcare, education and jobs. People who cannot work need funding. Enough to live a dignified life. People are happy when they don't have to worry. People who are happy with the system doesn't really commit crime.

Why has no-one thought of this before?

We can surely agree that cheap wide good education has to be one of the policies necessary for that, yet it's quite ignored even in some rich countries.

I agree. There are many practices common to countries reporting high levels of happiness that Americans (And certainly other western nations) ignore seemingly on principle.

How should the United States address this issue given that it is usually in the top 5 with spending on public education per student every year?

We would have to analyze the actual distribution of that spend. When this is done, we see wealthier places have higher spending per capita because public schools in the US are funded primarily by property taxes.

Yeah, and local property taxes, at that.

I mean, if I were designing a system to reinforce inequality in districts and schools, local property taxes would be first on my list of policies.

One of the thing Americans do differently is setting up systems for inequality from the get go. First past the post voting, but also using education to produce/select 'winners', rather than use it as a tool for equality. One could say this is a choice and there's no wrong way to make it, but to me it seems clear that it is the root cause for many of the issues in the US. I think superstar systems and mentality necessarily produces inequality and inequality necessarily produces problems.

A big problem is that many educators and school boards treat education as indoctrination. i.e. "Teach people what to think"

The real goal of education is to teach people how to think. Logic, rhetoric, analysis, scientific method, how to identify logical fallacies, understanding statistics, falsifiable theories, analyzing history not only through secondary sources, but actively seeking out primary sources to corroborate secondary sources, so on and so forth.

A useful education for a healthy well-functioning society is about inquiry, not regurgitation.

I can't agree with that, no. "Cheap wide good education" is not a policy. What policies need to be set to achieve it?

There's near-universal agreement that education should be cheap and wide and good. The question is which policies best accomplish those goals. Should we add vocational high schools like Denmark has, where teachers can focus on practical skills since it's already been decided the students won't go to college? Should we add 60 more days to the school year and universal high school admission tests like they do in Japan?

These are the kinds of questions that need to be studied and answered. But instead, politicians just say “‘Murica is #1” and leave it at that. The platitudes need to stop. We need some policy wonk technocrats to take over government.

I don't think this is something we can blame on the politicians, though. People got grumpy enough about Common Core; imagine how much worse it would go over if a school district announced that it was going to transition towards rote learning.

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