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> I often see criticism of the school system like yours. I think it comes from a perspective of a fairly intelligent, self-motivated individual, probably from a family that valued education.

I ain't vain enough to consider myself even "fairly intelligent", but I can say that I ain't very self-motivated, nor have I been since elementary school, and in hindsight my education system's insistence on strangling such intrinsic motivation in favor of extrinsic motivation is exactly what killed said self-motivation. "Grades are all that matter, and mine ain't anywhere near good enough to go to a good college, so why bother trying?"

It's something I'm actively working on trying to fix to this day, but old habits die hard.

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I am not pursuing a PhD in pure math so I certainly have both interest and ability in doing academic stuff but I found it incredibly hard to get acceptable grades in high school.

> I am not pursuing a PhD in pure math so I certainly have both interest and ability in doing academic stuff

I don't see how the second half of the sentence follows from the first half. Did that "not" slip in by accident? Or do you consider a PhD in pure maths to be evidence of not having academic ability?

-- Yours, offended holder of PhD in pure maths :)

I guess this was written on a phone: "now" became "not"

I did too. But I've gotten much better at studying/learning over the years, and I attribute my high school problems with grades as a combination of ADD and my head being focused on trying to deal with what, in retrospect, were psychological problems. What I needed back then was a really great therapist and some training in mindfulness meditation. Alas.

> "Grades are all that matter, and mine ain't anywhere near good enough to go to a good college, so why bother trying?"

Or even worse when teachers decide it isn’t worth you trying because they failed to inspire you.

> Grades are all that matter

I think this has shifted somewhat to the standardized tests mattering quite a bit now these days.

Should we not consider alternative methods or options for education? What should everything be concentrated into one public model that follows one national standard?

maybe your vanity is so strong it prevents you from even making a fair judgement of your aptitude relative to the mean

Decent high school grades are not that hard to get. It's not 'strangulation' to have to take 'English, Geography, History and Math'. I wish I had paid more attention in English class, I did not respect how important it was going to be until later in life, for example.

The course load in Eng. or in Grad School - now that can be overwhelming to the point of exhaustion.

Your experience mirrors mine, but it's not like that for everyone. There's a group of people for which a given level of highschool education is going to be a crushing workload. Minimising their effort doesn't help them to get to a better mindset, so why do it at all?

Decent Eng Grad School grades are not that hard to get. It's not 'exhausting' to have to take 'Electrodynamics, Orbital Mechanics, or Geophysics' I wish I would have paid more attention in Project Management class, I did not respect how important it was going to be until later in life, for example.

See how stupid that sounds

Sounds about as stupid as the first version?

Theoretically the courses are probably designed to allow most people to succeed.

Your version sounds stupid, because Electrodynamics and Orbital Mechanics are notoriously difficult classes where even those who passed them use expressions like "working hard" and "difficult". And many students actually fail them.

High schoool English, Geography, History and Math is referenced as easy by many students. Typical student does not have a problem to pass that class.

Yes, your version does sound stupid.

English, Math, History and Geography at the high school level are fairly straight forward, and the subjects are important to a rounded character. They really are not hard.

Most of Grad school is utterly gruelling, there isn't time to sleep, students pulled in different directions, and studying mostly arcane subjects that really are not important to anyone.

> Decent high school grades are not that hard to get.

"Decent" high school grades are seldom adequate to even meet acceptance requirements for "good" colleges, let alone actually compete with the straight-A students also applying to said colleges.

Not that this really does anything to address the broader point: that "get into college because you'll make more money" is one of many extrinsic motivators American schools seem to push in order to strangle intrinsic motivators.

Right, but the other 99.9% of people don’t go to a “good” college. Plenty of ones that are considered quite good by the Little Folk—the mere commoners—can be attended with grades far from a 4.0 and nothing special in the extracurriculars department, if your test scores are decent (and I assure you, the cutoff for lots of them is way under what you’d consider good)

Your university does not define you. Plenty of people go to a crap university, yet can still be the top of their field one day.

It's easy to say that now, we being adults long out of high school. Do you really expect a high schooler to understand that? I sure as hell didn't back then (my guidance counselor strongarmed me into a curriculum specifically around meeting UC and CSU requirements, despite me having nowhere near the GPA to get into any such school), and thus admission into a 4-year university was an extrinsic motivator that seemed unrealistic and was therefore ineffective.

Well, I only left high school last year... I don't think it's impossible to at least guess this. I think I got very lucky in realising that the school's goals (push me to university) were not aligned with my own.

The forced cadence of certain topics actually does have a part to play. Imagine if you could have skipped all those English classes back then. Guess what? You would be learning it all right now! Just like you're _re_learning it right now. Why? Because you now have intrinsic motivation to learn it. Having entirely skipped it, you might even have realized a lot sooner the actual need instead of limping along with whatever informational crutches you managed to walk away with. The fact that we leave little room to teach the need of a subject, and force feed it in a prescribed manner rather than allowing exploration, is all commingled together into the failure mode being discussed.

Allowing children to pick what they want to explore and modeling the education after exploration is part of the baseline for Montessori education.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montessori_education

So I agree about the 'cadence' bit.

But this:

" Imagine if you could have skipped all those English classes back then. Guess what? You would be learning it all right now!"

No, no way.

It's a total misunderstanding of education to contemplate this.

Education is not 'some facts and things you learn that you may use later'.

Education at HS level is much more fundamental than that, particularly English.

It's about communicating, developing ideas, writing. Not only is it essential, it takes quite a lot of time and effort, and it's hard to just 'pick up'.

I have an Angel investor friend who just set up his own basic website (simple is fine) and wrote his own little intro copy. It's atrocious. Basically, in four sentences in writing, he reveals his own lack of education to anyone who cares to read. I mean - it's not 'that that bad' - but it really is sub professional and embarrassing. He's otherwise very smart, very educated, but it turns out he can't string together a few tightly coherent sentences to make a point.

There's no 'going back'. Both of should have paid more attention in school.

I do agree with he cadence, I think that school days should be shorter, and there should be more music and sports, shop class and longer term projects.

I agree with you. I did intend for that as a thought experiment, but I didn't make that clear. However, the part about teaching the need before the material and leaving time for exploration I'm very serious about. I think it's the biggest change we could make to the system without completely breaking the current structure of it.

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