Do Adults Really Not Remember School Sucked?
ianwelsh.net
ianwelsh.net
Secondly though, school is not terrible for everyone. I didn't have a great household. My parents didn't read me books. I made a lot of friends in school, and I had good teachers who helped me chosing an education and career path my parents wouldn't have offered me. So getting out of my home environment into a different social one was vital.
I'd call the authors attitude the 'nerdy privileged kid' experience, who most likely had bad social interactions as well as a household educated and affluent enough to get a rich education outside of the education system. It's not how it works for many, probably most kids.
There's also an important aspect implicitly ignored in the article. That a lot of parents who cannot work from home, like say cashiers or construction workers who still have to go out, do not even really know right now how to manage their kids. People like that rely on having a school system that works.
Education definitely needs to reform, speaking here in terms of North America, but HN is not a a good sample pool for the general public.
I’m so jealous of people from good families. Like when I hear so and sos parents went to Yale so they did to.. here I am like: my dad sold drugs :/
Don’t all of you go about underestimating your good luck.
I went to private school and my best friend's dad worked as a middle level exec at Phillip Morris, other than the fact they had far more financial security and that time he gave us that 'only idiots smoke' speech with details about how his Industry worked (incidentally years before Thank you for smking came out) I don't think they had much of anything you would call a relationship.
His son was more like an employee than a child, he would have new cleats every other football game but only because his father insisted that he scored the most touchdowns and 'make a name for himself for scholarship money' kind of arrangements. There wasn't anything I'd say I envied of his situation.
Another colleagues father was from a poor family but an amazing mechanic with engineering and fabrication leanings, some of his patents were bough by Yamaha and even did a few years at Raytheon. Of his 3 children, 2 became an account and a physician but both tried to commit suicide as did his wife due to horrible upbringing.
My childhood was marred with things more like your own than my friend's as I came from a working lower middle class so despite my parents sending me to private school to shield me from the realities at home they were still painfully real.
If I'm honest I much prefer being an autodidact that grew up on the Internet as I know that anything I want to learn is within my grasp and and that its likely a community of people who are dedicated to this is out there too if I really want to learn from.
I lost track of my friend when we went to separate highschools as his dad got relocated to the East Coast but I'd later find out from a mutual friend that he never really amounted to much, either. Why that was isn't clear, but I know for a fact he despised being his father's only son despite him being a well paid exec that managed 100s of people.
Your pain can be your guide for success if you learn to channel it and use it in your favour, which is why I'm now seeing it a gift despite all the drawbacks it had in my past. It also probably gave you a sense of empathy for children in similar situations that you may have ignored entirely had you not grown up in such a dysfunctional situation.
Sidenote: I was big fan of 'Malcolm in the Middle' in grade school but lost interest when I got to HS and forgot all about it until the pandemic and random youtube videos, so I've been watching some of the later seasons as they're new to me and I forgot how poignant that show was at highlighting some of the points of wealth inequality and the pernicious effects of wasting Human Capital and potential: particular in systems like Ivy Leagues.
My mom used to smoke crack in front of me when we were about the same age. Poor people do not have a monopoly on being shitty parents but let’s stay on topic here: the school system is necessary for the lower classes.
What they/we need(ed) is a better school system if and when necessary and an opt out entirely for basic skills training for gainful employment for the lower class, of which I was a part of back then and only until recently.
Not everyone was meant to go to University, Society cannot function without the essential workers we have who still work to this day despite COVID, most of whom do not have more than a secondary school education--this pandemic showed just how non-essential a stock broker or a contract lawyer, or even a Software engineer is in maintaining Society's core functions that we all rely on, and we would be remiss to conflate schooling with education or skills for that matter.
The school system in question was a place that kept people like me from attending University lectures by guest lecturers or seminal speeches on various topics I took interest in because I disobyeyed my teachers, walked out of class and left school when I got bored and corrected their mistakes and still had a 3.x GPA without even trying and openly told them I spent more time on the internet and in university lectures than in their class or homework so it was best to just ignore me and let me go at it alone instead of trying to make an example out of me, which they did and tried to get me on a technicality saying I didn't attend the 'minimum days' my senior year to graduate, proving to me it was racket for financial gain at it's core rather than a place to get an education or even a proper skills set.
These very same people sent recruiters and head hunters from universities on my behalf by my junior year as they wanted a success story to tell, when I refused because I had already got accepted at another university with a near full ride (something very important to me as I had all my money tied to up to my first start up) they were offended. A not so dissimilar thing happened in my freshman and sophomore year oat the first University I attended (I went to 3 by Junior year of a BSc because of countless budget cuts and politics in impacted majors that cared more about cashing in on out of state and foreign tuition rates than educating their own populace) when I got honors when the semester before I was put on academic probation for trying to take 16 units worth of classes at a another university while working 2 jobs (call center and my 2nd startup), but I digress...
That same HS education system tried to send me into Honors Classes on campus a year before but I disliked the hands on approach those teachers had to have with me for me to be accepted, as I had already committed to a life of autodiaditic learning by 16.
Had I simply had access to more things like lathes, CNC machines and welders when I was in HS instead of make-shift garages in apartment parking lots I would have been a very successful fabricator as I would later live with a very famous roll cage and suspension fabricator and a professional driver in motorsports who offered me a role in his operation as he wanted to expand and make more in house designs and felt I had something to contribute. I declined and instead I chose biology and got burned and then went into tech as is so common a story here on HN as I refused to play the academic game and still did more outside of it then I ever could inside, which is why I focused on Ag and culinary.
Don't feel envious! My dad was also a small time drug dealer when I was a kid, and it taught me a lot about class and policing and corruption through direct experience. Going through DARE propaganda in my public school with dad in jail for selling weed was an especially potent lesson.
I hated school with a passion, but realistically what is the alternative? My parents did their best and it sounds like we had similar situations, but of course they didn't help with school or homeschool, because how could they? Too busy working and paying the bills. I literally have no clue what the equivalent of this pandemic would do to a family in their economic situation. It certainly would have been worse than going to school, though.
I never went to Yale, didn't go on to become famous or do great things. But once they were able my parents got a computer and a modem so I could follow my passion despite their economic situation - more than a lot of kids had, for sure - and I learned a lot along the way. Maybe rich and connected parents would have eased my path, but I doubt it would have made me a better or happier person.
Disclaimer, I know school can be very traumatic for some people, and I am sorry if you had such an experience.
That said, I do feel more effort should be put in making students who struggle succeed instead of conform.
"I don't expect you to remember anything you learned in my classes after you leave high school, but when a time comes later in life that you need this knowledge you'll know how to learn it again."
It's not about being able to recite all the answers to the exam questions at any given time. It's about having gone through the learning process.
I've been trying grasping some physics recently and I had do it from scratch, I didn't even know basic facts.
I was pleased to see I still remember trigonometry though, and I perfectly know why: instead of studying back in school I spent time making 2d games and I often needed trigonometry.
The way we do education in school is broken. If not for everyone, at least for my brain.
By the time you're 3 years into med school or a graphics designer job, forgetting trig or how a Constitutional amendment is ratified is a feature, not a bug.
Language learning works on this principle, thus why “immersion” is the best learning method. It forces you to speak. Math is like this too, playing around with the formulas and learning to come up with new ones reinforces the principles. Writing is far more effective at teaching students to read than just reading is. Creative writing in the same style or using the same devices as a book will internalize them.
Learning is about synthesis, and it’s vanishingly rare in the education system.
This also reinforces a can-do attitude.
I compare it to my university education, where we spend most of the time (2/3) each semester doing a project in a small group. The engineering faculty of the university I attended was recently rated in the top 4 with Stanford and MIT and a Chinese one (above Oxford). I guarantee you it's not because of the quality of the staff - it's the method.
Also, kids don't retain everything, school or not. Yet also, my kids are in elementary school and I definitely learn faster at this point. They will learn even faster then I am learning now, but they are not there yet.
Though really what matters most is wanting to learn it. The problem with most formal education is that you're taught stuff that you don't really care about at the time.
It takes a lot more money to actually educate kids in a way that gets them to their maximum potential. That’s why affluent families have that rich education outside of the system: society doesn’t spend enough money on it.
While the education system has some good aspects, with a couple of them even being education-related. The focus of society should be on reducing the number of children with bad home lives.
And further confusing the issue, many other parents / families who are forced to stay home do know how to interact with their children productively, and those children have a much better time of it.
I know my home life was so bad, this would have definitely been rough. For lots of kids school provides a necessary reprieve
High school gave me severe social anxiety and I was “popular.” I know many others had it much worse than me. College was a good change of pace for me and I got over it, but then a few years into my career I worked at a place that was very high school like and all of the trauma and anxiety returned and then some. Took years to recover my confidence.
I for one, don't see how my being stuffed into a locker was conducive to any sort of "learning experience", and I've always had problems staying awake in lectures since as far back as I can remember. Give me books any day of the week.
A one size fits all approach is shitty for everyone, both those "privileged" to suffer at school, and those for whom it is an escape from a broken home.
[0] - https://slashdot.org/story/99/04/27/0310247/more-stories-fro...
The one aspect of what he said I do agree with is that most of what is taught in school is not useful, remembered or applied in daily life. It's where the "mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell" meme comes from. You spend large swathes of your childhood being expected to memorize useless information and regurgitate it back and if you aren't effective at that or motivated to do that, it's a big problem that has consequences from getting punished by your parents to affecting your ability to get into college and train for a career.
And that does suck. Imagine how different our society would be if instead of precalculus or trigonometry, there were courses on personal finance and critical thinking skills. Or practical application of the types of logic you learn in math courses (programming.)
Though, the author, in fairness, isn't off the mark, either. The current system could be better (today, it does optimize / self-select for the median). This pandemic, if nothing, presents an added incentive for folks to rethink education [0] (now that the VC money is there) one piece at a time, if not all at once.
[0] https://fs.blog/2020/03/chestertons-fence/
[1] ex: https://infed.org/mobi/jiddu-krishnamurti-and-his-insights-i...
I didn't get "a rich education", I was repeatedly recommended to do special coursework which was different from my peers' work. My household wasn't "educated and affluent enough", but the school insisted that I be treated differently or else I would have to go to special needs. I was involuntarily medicated because they thought that it would improve my performance.
Bentham was right to imagine schools and prisons as having the same basic social structure. Maybe it was alright for you, but it was traumatizing for many of us.
All of this! I can't understand why people don't see it. I'm not one to argue change for change's sake, but we moved away from being a factory worker economy a long time ago, and even longer still has it been since we've been agrarian.
People wonder why we are falling behind in R&D, well it's quite plain when you see that the lessons of school aren't for independent thinkers, it's conditioning for obedient/subservient drones.
You're GD right that our current school models were designed in the 19th century for farmers, then factory workers. Something needs to change, otherwise we can expect stagnation at a minimum, but more likely regression as a society.
I like posting this Chomsky video whenever school discussions come up. It largely reflects my own feelings and experiences in school. I think for many people who say they enjoyed school, the idea that some people might look at the school system the way Chomsky does, might come as a surprise.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVqMAlgAnlo
I believe the school systems completely fails a segment of the student population, wasting their gifts and abilities because they have created a system where docility and subservience are a prerequisite to success. If my future kids inherit my dispositions, I won't hesitate to pull them out of the standard school system and find some alternative schooling methods. The standard school system chews up and spits out countless brilliant children simply because they won't unquestioningly do what some untrusted adult tells them to.
How is this any different than the job market they're being groomed for?
Then we should pay kids to be good students?
Sounds good to me.
HN thinks the world revolves around them, see: > https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26131258
As a kid I was reprimanded and shamed for my entrepreneurial endeavors, so I get this point.
Nowadays, I think it's already different. 20 years ago we didn't have Shark Tank and the rest of the entrepreneur-as-a-rockstar environment that makes the general population recognize the value of a young entrepreneurial spirit.
True. The problem is meritocracy quickly falls apart when humans are responsible for implementing it, for example see the recent celebrity college admission bribery scandal. The Netflix series "3%" is based on this.
Given we don't radically change the % of GDP spent on education, a single system focussing on the lowest common denominator makes sense.
I mean, we could coddle your genius, but if the trade-off is lack of workers, or a society that succumbs to populist autocracy...
From personal experience most teachers simply ended up in the job as a fallback plan or a day job to get by. There was the occasional passionate teacher that put in a lot of effort and I really appreciated that, but having talked to many other people about the matter it does seem that those are few and far between.
I also got the impression that teachers tend to live in their own little world and tend to have very little experience outside of the educational system. Hence they often lack the need to explain to students why they are learning these things or how they may apply them in the "real world" (as we called it back then).
On the other hand I have met quite some folk in the pre-retirement age ~50-65 that are in technical jobs and had 30 years of experience in explaining and understanding things and are passionate about teaching what they've learnt. Most of these folk are also privileged enough to be able to start lessening their workload. I always wonder why they do not take up to passing on their wisdom to the next generation, by maybe just teaching a single course at a school?
Why is it not the norm to go into a job for, say 20 years, and after years of experience start teaching? Why would it be a good idea to have a teacher straight of college teaching kids just a couple of years younger?
I know only of one person that taught at a small school in their pre-retirement years (mostly helping out with maths) and as far as I know all of his kids performed excellently.
Maybe you only remember middle and high school. This is categorically untrue for early childhood education, which is by far the most critical.
> Why is it not the norm to go into a job for, say 20 years, and after years of experience start teaching?
Because the pay is dismal, which is the last thing you want right before retirement.
So you want an industry expert to go teach second grade?
I imagine that any successful person would want to be able to demonstrate there success, thus placing them in teaching positions well past "babysitting" age.
If you had your shit together in highschool, then great, that's why you went to Harvard/stanford etc.
But most people don't. So save the extra beneficial instruction for when they are mature enough to benefit from it.
And if you want that extra help sooner, then you sound capable enough to find it on your own.
But the guy who might show them that might, this semi-retired engineer, may not have the skills or the desire to do crowd control, well enough and long enough to get through.
I wonder what % of people don't go back to teach because of that.
I bet it's a small number. In reality, the reasons are probably even more selfish.
If "crowd control" is such a problem, I'd like to know what the people that cite that reason are doing to produce video-courses that could provide much of the same value.
That part makes me think of "those who fail, teach." Which could be a confounding factor in your anecdotal assumption that they failed at teaching because of the X, and not b/c they're failures...
And in an affluent area, school behaviors are barely an issue. Teachers that fail here, think schools with a PTA, these people will fail anywhere. Impoverished schools are another story, as in multiple kids acting out from abuses at home, on a daily basis. Having to recognize and help kids who aren't even getting their basic needs met. Only real badass teachers last in the impoverished schools, and they are the ones that make a real difference, literally heroes without capes.
What people here on HN are calling babysitting is more like the one opportunity a child gets to scream for help from often horrific abuses at home.
Might that affect your perfect gifted child's one-on-one time with a public school teacher? Give me a break.
My point is just that they all underestimated how difficult controlling a pack of teenagers was going to be, even those who were at nice schools "with a PTA". That's what I think was meant by "babysitting" above (not my choice of word), it's a real hurdle. As you seem to agree.
I'm dubious that the world is short of video courses. But many people do miss out on human interactions which could show them other paths.
Ie, "listen to me, the distinguished lecturer."
Non-educators, those not explicitly trained in how to educate, don't understand there is more to teaching than lecturing.
In a non-adult setting, good luck trying to get away with any lecturing at all.
Plenty of adults can't even converse without looking at their phone, so I doubt lecture-style works for them either.
If a "grizzled engineer" wants to make an impact in education, the best way is to teach a building block skill thoroughly and effectively, and on a platform that's free and easy to access. Leave the public school teachers to do they're jobs, they're actually way more competent than they get credit or compensated for.
Doesn't the money you invest right before retirement make the least amount of difference? You want to front load your high earning activities.
The pay is dismal, but that's exactly why people who no longer need the money (retired from industry) can afford to try teaching for a few years before moving onto a startup or opening up a pub. That's what some of my high school teachers did and that's what I plan to do.
That's a nice thought, but I'm sure this idea would be lost on 90% of the US population.
But if you think the remaining 10% "going back to be teachers" is going to save education, well, God help us.
That's not normal.
Maybe part-time reduces the pay problem too. Think senior engineers with consulting gigs, who'd like to dial it down to 3 days a week, and do something productive with the rest.
Edit: and schools don't even have money for paper/supplies.
Most students don't have well-educated parents, so I agree the exposure is important.
My point is that, if this is ever going to happen, there needs to be more money directed at education.
On a related note, I went to high school in a town where there were essentially zero white-collar professional jobs. Parents were working either on the manufacturing line, in a call center, at the Walmart, steak-n-shake or gas station. The nearest cities, Jacksonville and Orlando were both at least 90 minutes away.
Where do we find the retiring-professionals for these students?
There may be opportunities for more blue-collar variants. I'm trying to think where but there was some program to hire former soldiers as teachers, which is a bit like that.
That would solve the aforementioned issue, because people will move to BFE for the money.
Specialized and advanced subjects can be taught easier and cheaper. Their students are capable of learning virtually, giving them access to the best teachers in a subject area, and at as fast a speed as they can go.
What Public schools need to focus on are the lowest common denominators, your arithmetic to liberal arts, so that students are prepared for a more-self-guided education in specialized/advanced subjects. I'd argue people with experience in industry wouldn't even be valuable at this level, as their experience no longer generally prepares the students for further education.
That would be the Prussians, the origin of the compulsory universal education system with obedience and conformity as its foundation. The indoctrination worked very well, no wonder the system consequently spread all over the world.
Teacher pay varies greatly from area to area. Where I live in VA pay starts at $36/hour and goes up to $67 per hour. They also receive what would be considered by most to be excellent benefits. Over recent years my locality has been substancially increasing teacher pay each year especially on the upper end of the scale because the high end is actually behind nearby counties which we compete against for experienced teachers.
My early education was in the NE, and I had many distinguished teachers, and many were even from the south. Very few young teacher.
In FL, many young new teachers. Many from PA, NJ, and other competitive markets.
> pay varies greatly from area to area
In the SF Bay area, average SE comp is upwards of 200K, representing a small percent of the full market for software engineers...
Children don't sit through lectures, and even in high-schools the students are still children.
How on earth did you come to that conclusion?! Maybe your experiences have shifted it that way, but my teachers, my friends that are teachers, and my kids teachers certainly do not give that impression at all.
> "Why is it not the norm to go into a job for, say 20 years, and after years of experience start teaching? Why would it be a good idea to have a teacher straight of college teaching kids just a couple of years younger?"
Because they know the subject matter? I'm not really sure what you are getting at, so jobs should only be for those that know how to do something already - or only if you need to teach it?
Not sure there are jobs that would help a primary school teacher - they cover all the subjects - so multiple jobs over 20 years to satisfy that? How about a history teacher - should they be an archaeologist first? Or a Biology teacher, probably get that stem cell research in before teaching about the plant reproductive lifecycle.
It's seems to be hard enough to attract people that actually want to be paid peanuts to teach the next generation how to do things.
There’s been some movement here in the last few years in some places, for example up until very recently if you were a college professor interested in moving to the high school level somewhere like New York - sorry, no, you’re not qualified because you don’t have a degree in education.
There are positive spins for the types of credentialling that have evolved around the professions but I’d argue none of them are in the interest of students.
Source: teacher and administrator in various countries
Because teaching to everyone and not just the motivated is really freakin' hard. And it takes an amount of energy that most 55+ year olds do not possess.
My father taught high school for 35+ years. The biggest problem was not knowing the material--it was motivating students to want to know the material.
And that is a very rare skill.
And he retired because eventually that skill took too much energy for him to muster up at his age.
My youngest (5) is missing school because he can't play with his friends or teachers - and he loved coming home to tell everyone what he learnt.
Depending on the age of the children, they actually do really want to be back at school - primary school was super fun (as I remember it) - learning the basics and it's all new things. To be honest, I think my eldest would even like to be back - just because it's not being at home.
Both are not liking doing work at home - it has basically made the place that we chill, watch tv, play in, into a pseudo school environment - which then puts a strain on family life. Neither of us are trained to deal with teaching kids stuff in a structured way, and how to respond when they don't - certainly not the same as convincing someone to do homework.
A sliver lining may be that once everyone goes back, there may be opportunities to do work outside of a school setting if needed - and not have to worry about fines and falling behind.
He is currently doing all the work he would be doing but on our kitchen counter with his mother or I. He gets all the hard bits of school without the fun bits.
Perhaps the writer of the article should try asking the people he is talking about?
Presumably the author believes it's possible to structure more fun outside of school if the community were into it. It's too bad nobody is really on that discussion atm.
As a tangent, here is a photo of a German kindergarten.
So using that, "All happy students are alike; each unhappy student is unhappy in their own way"
I hated school. I was a good student taking "challenge" courses in elementary, then honors courses in middle school then AP courses, but the overall experience of k-12 was horrible for me. When I think about it, I cannot imagine having to go through it all again. It was horrible for me in my own way.
What would suck more would be no school, or weed-school (get high on weed).
Work is a bit different. Sometimes there are interesting projects and you get engrossed in work, which also shouldn't take over too much of your life. Other times, the politics and fakery absolutely sucks.
I don't think we can expect things to not suck at all, ever.
One thing that struck me while reading this was the influence of American culture. You often see school depicted as a sort of weird jungle with jocks-vs-nerds dynamics coming from America. Some of the kids at my international school emulated that and it wasn't pleasant, but I got over that eventually as well.
In general, most people I know across cultures think back fondly to their school days, minus Americans. My American friends are the ones most likely to point out the things Ian mentions. The jumping through hoops, wastes of time, the production of wage slaves.
Yep. I don't remember jocks vs nerds or any other gang warfare forms when I was in school. Neither does my kid and she only finished high school recently.
Must be an American thing, or an american movie thing?
Very much, and the American kids made it seem more real. Otherwise we'd have just ignored it. But a bunch of them decided they had to have popularity cliques with in-and-out people, just like in the movies.
Luckily our sports teams were so terrible it didn't create a second substrate for this.
No
I moved ahead by studying computer science at the university when I was 13 years old. Thereby I was taking courses at school and university in parallel. But the school courses were all at regular paces. Then I had to repeat topics at school that I learned years ago at the university. I had almost finished my bachelor degree before I had finished high school. The school was a complete waste of time. I also got demoted by one or two grades in school for "not asking enough questions in classes"
Eventually this cultinated in a row between my parents, the tracher and the headmaster.
Because mu parents had my back, she stopped creating dramad but I never got the grades i was meant to.
As to jocks and nerds my elementary school was full of bullies and it was basically a prison culture where any kind of deviation from the norm was severely punished. Short? Walks in funny way? Not so good complexion? You were treated as an alien and bullied around while no one cared. If you made stand you were punished for stirring trouble.
I don't know how American school system and culture works but I get the same idea from the things I've read. Sure, the methods of teaching at school were slow and even boring at times but it was always fun with friends and even teachers. There were some boring time periods here and there but overall it was really great. Almost if not all the people I know have very fond memories of school days.
However, there was a strong American cultural influence e.g. shows like Saved by the Bell, Fresh Prince of Bel Air, Simpsons etc were all popular and had strong nerd as social outcast themes.
However I don’t think they were the cause of this social dynamic, it was much older and entrenched.
As a caveat, it could of course be that someone else in my class had a completely different experience of the same events.
We moved from the US to Sweden while I was in the middle of elementary school in the 90's. In the US there was very much the culture of "school sucks!", and when we were let out for summer vacation, everyone would cheer that school was out for summer!
Imagine my surprise when we were let out for summer in Sweden and kids were crying they wouldn't meet teacher until next school year.
Of course, there's also the variance in the schools I went to in the US and Sweden - the US one was more urban than where we ended up living in Sweden. But I remember there was much more of a media (TV) culture of "isn't school lame and boring?" with patronizing PSA style "no actually learning is cool!" propaganda that fooled nobody and actually served the opposite purpose
When the pandemic struck, and we closed down from April to late may, our schools actually reacted decently. It was a stressful situation, everything was new and has to happen here and now. So the lower quality and chaos was to be expected, but I think our teachers and school administrations pulled through and did really well given the circumstances.
What troubles me is that when the second lockdown hit in November, nothing had changed. We knew it was coming because it was happening in other countries before it hit us, and still, we were as unrelated as the first time?
Why didn’t we have videos of the curriculum prepared nationally instead of still relying of thousands of individual teachers to teach classes as though students were in a class room? Why weren’t we prepared to let students go through material on their own, and then have “classes” with teachers in smaller groups of 4-6 with the teacher preforming a mentor role, which is what worked best during the first lockdown?
I mean, it’s really just silly that we’re still pretending the online class room is similar to the real physical class room, and it’s leaving weaker or challenged students behind.
I do think children are wanting to go back to school though. Not because of school, but because of the social life going back to school brings them.
We're talking about school, not university, right? Kids don't do lectures, it's all interactive.
Plus what do you reckon the teaching unions would think about that plan? You want them to just put all of education on YouTube, and then be done?
Have you ever met a teacher in school who was better at using a computer than you? (Assume you're a dev). How could you expect them to have everything done between April and November when they're as lost as the kids?
In any case, we are talking about grade school kids, from a few years old to maybe 12. You cannot just plop them in front of a computer to view content at their own leisure, and then expect them to come up with intelligent questions to fill in the gaps. That's what you do with university students.
I have both of these in my household, and I can assure you that while it works for the master's student, the kids have a tough time without interaction.
¹ FWIW: I agree that lectures are not suitable for school pupils.
The thing is, I don't see how it really matters. You still end up requiring kids to sit still when they can't do it. I guess my focus is on smaller kids. I fully agree with modern comms you can do the inverted classrooms with people older than maybe 12 or so, I'm unsure where the line is.
Because in practice, this amounts to one teacher for 4-6 kids and assumption that kids are good at individual preparation.
It's a tool to condition people to become obedient little serfs who don't question authority so they will become good cogs in the corporate/industrial machine. It's also there to be daycare so parents can go be good cogs in the corporate/industrial machine. Education is a distant third at best. At least this is how it is in America.
All these people talking about the socializing are probably the same people who hate telework and miss the office because that's where they do a lot of their socializing. It's completely orthogonal, socializing should not be dependent on school or work, and maybe if they are such a huge part of our life we either admit they are broken and restructure them, or commit to less time dedicated to these activities.
The entire goal of school is not to "prepare you for life" but to fit you into a box, any box, with a bow for your employer. Nobody that I applied to ever asked me about my degree or university experience; it was but a qualifier on the CV.
As the author said, probably the only thing my peers remembered positively from their school days was their social circles. That's probably the biggest reason school was bearable.
Hopefully the pandemic will change things, but its doubtful. There are universities that still, after a whole year of covid, haven't figured out remote teaching. They can't use or agree upon software, don't know how to do the exams, can't organize schedules and keep reverting to proctoring solutions that invade privacy.
How can institutions, that are supposed to prepare us for the future, be so backwards?
This is a person I had countless conversations with about how much a determent formal schooling is to actual problem solving to Society's most pressing issues, as she wanted to teach but wasn't sure if University level made sense, and about how Society could benefit from a smaller private specialized tutor system for specific subjects.
We also did our respective undergrads at the same university for a semester and we both realized how absurd it was even during the 'good times' in the bubble era how many people didn't get a job that had anything to do with their degree. Something that was always just brushed under the 'you will make more money with a degree' chart.
I also learned quite a bit. Of course it was pre-internet, pre-smartphones. I went to school in the Apple II era. But I learned file i/o, sorting, and a bunch of other programming related things. I didn't become an expert in biology or physics but my knowledge of those topics still mostly comes from or at least stared in school. The periodic table, the atomic weights, electron shells, basic genetics like how recessive genes propagate. A bunch of history. Famous books an authors that still have influence in our culture today.
I did not like school most of the time, i barely was able to finish it without extra loops. And i will do anything to have my kids not beeing forced to relive that experience.
However, both my parents were working to pay for our live. Based on the "normal" situation most people are in they simply do not have the time to actually replace school, its unlikely my parents would have been able to provide me with all that education and social experiences next to working. There was not even Wikipedia and childrens social life still happened mostly outside.
So i dont see not going to school a realistic option for the masses until we adopt universal income. And even then many parents won't be able to properly teach their children.
Edit:// However i agree that our school system sucks and should be focusing on indivudual strengths much earlier these days.
A big difference between that school and others was that there was no memorization or note-taking. Before, good grades meant you had to be good at memorizing and recalling exactly. There was a lot of note-taking too. In the US HS, every single subject was self-contained, meaning that you could get the best grade without prior subject knowledge. Exams were meant to be completed with an open textbook. All that was dream come true for me.
Now I think it might be that everyone else also thought the same, only with a different set of reasons - the non-nerdy kids feared maths, the popular kids were getting involved in the struggle to be popular.
Maybe parents suppress the memories so as not to face what they're doing to their children just to get them off their backs for a while.
On the other hand, as an adult, there is no way I'd want to go back to school life. That "you'll miss it when you're older" never came true for me. Now I have money, freedom and a satisfying career - and I don't have to ask anyone for permission to go to the toilet.
There are certain things I miss about being young though. Summer holidays, long days where everything was novel, easy friendships, death being so far away I didn't think about it and being able to fall off a tree without spending the next two weeks convalescent.
> Some, yes, are lonely and miss their friends. But the vast majority expressed that that they don’t feel that disconnected, because their after school habits of texting, Discord, and video chats remain intact.
[1]: https://twitter.com/kingsleymalo/status/1354129303919800323
Examples of issues: a kid got very jealous whenever friend paid attention to other kids. That escalated to bullying of the "if you play with him I wont play with you anymore" kind. This worked well, because other kids were generally more needy then usual, so it was harder for them to say "so what".
Then there was reduced ability to solve conflicts or deal with them. They escalated much more quickly over much smaller things. Other kids having different opinions was sudden new shocking unpleasant experience.
Finally, reduced ability to deal with frustration. At home, you are not confronted with interpersonal issues nor new situations. Mostly, you get your routine and that is it.
Children should be free to explore, learn, play, and be productive in things that matter to them.
Not really. TFA does say that for some (or most?) parents, school is a babysitting service. The author says, despite that, school isn't a terribly good place for a child to be growing up either.
Again though, anecdotes.
I look forward to seeing the actual data that comes out of this period and how it's affected childrens schooling. Personally I suspect it will be a net negative.
My kid do want to go back to school. They were happy when they heard the school will start again and disappointed when it did not. To large extend, they want to be with friends again. To the rest of it, teacher is actually better teacher then us, they enjoy learning part in school more then in home.
It has nothing to do with what I remember about my school. It has to do with what they say to me now and what situation makes them happy.
From my point of view, the time home did taught them some things that were not present in school. But overall they were learning much less then when they went to school every day.
As an introvert with a little above average neuroticism I viscerally despised returning to school after a long holiday break from K to 12 without exception. Zero excitement or longing to return. I had good friends, too. I would have much preferred just staying at home and playing video games, getting my social interaction online and keeping in touch with a select few people of my choosing rather than forced interactions with 300 people.
Whether this would've been better for my health is another question.
A few days ago the school organized a poll and around 70% says they prefer normal school whereas the rest prefers online classes.
Have you ever met someone who didn't graduate high school?
No one naturally understands how to approach a free market.
Your comment is so off-base it's shocking.
Well let's be grateful your not passing on those nasty anti-societal genes of yours!
I like that. All it takes is about 2 years for an adult to learn the basics of what one normally learns in the decade long schooling.
The free market will also ensure that we have less of the educated fools around. It's an experiment worth trying. A fool is better uneducated than educated. The illiterate peasants of yesteryears are the corporate workers of today.
Here's a random example: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-politics-53723611
> He said it was better for children’s health, mental well-being and educational prospects if “everyone” went back to school full-time in September, adding it was “our moral duty”.
And while I don't love the time at school before, I clearly remember it and it's a million times better that the adult life.
The worst of my problems were if there was a "surprise oral exam" or something like that. But I had friends, and free time to spent, and energy, and loooooong summers.
There is a reason most of the best sellers (books, movies) are teen/youg adult stuff... adults DO NOT HAVE THE TIME to read, or enjoy plays.
What I did like about school was all the extra-curriculum stuff. I learned to act on stage and in a movie, produced a comic, and more. That happen inside the school building, so it was "school" and it didn't suck.
With a bit of experience in this, I can say rather easily: during the school year, getting a chance to avoid going to school is wonderful. But months of being stuck at home becomes boring and miserable.
I loved the long summer breaks, but I also loved going back to meet all my classmates afterwards.
There are so many wonderful schools and teachers. Sure you can have bad experiences in school and I am sure for many it sucked, but there are probably just as many for who school was a safe haven from the shit they had to deal with at home.
For me, I would have preferred the option to escape both of them, permanently.
E.g. School teachs things t slow. That’s true, for some of us, yet we also knew that group of kids how won’t move beyond 5 grade math, regardless of how many years you’d spend teaching them. Schools try to teach both sets of kids, and those somewhere in between at the same time.
The thing I’d like to have seen schools during Covid lockdown is to experiment with teaching at different paces. Depending on the child I believe that you could avoid some level of boredom while teaching 3+ years of math, physics, or whatever subject the kid excel at. Some kids could skip years ahead had their education been more focused during this lockdown.
That still leave the weakest students, but they could perhaps benefit from more one on one time with the teachers while the strong tackle the more complex assignments on their own.
Wishful thinking. Tʜᴇ Pʟᴀɴ is strictly reglemented at national and provincial levels, prescribing both educational material and teaching methods. Ministry of education metes out punishment for teachers who attempt to deviate from it, ensuring that the systemic goal of conformity and obedience to authority is never endangered.
A lot of us like to think that the sole purpose of school is to educate kids, so they can go into society with a portfolio of knowledge and practical skills. While in reality it is just a part of it. I would argue that "kindergartening" kids, so parents can work a 9to5 job, and socialization are just as - if not more- important. The pandemic gave us no time to prepare, so education is the only thing that we are able to do. Kids are left to do homework, and nothing else. They do the shitty bits of school without the fun part stripped away.
Currently some teachers VASTLY overestimate how much work can actually get done within 45-90 minutes. Do you really think that kids actually do 90 minutes of work? It mostly boils down to 15-30 minutes of truly productive time, a good chunk of time is spent with chitchat and ... _I don't even know_ .
A skill school never taught very well is time-management. Any deadline you give to students WILL be procrastinated by most students to the very last second. Thanks to the wonders of modern online-platforms, such as Moodle, you can have deadlines at arbitrary times, such as 12am at night. Late deadlines are made with good intent, but are horrible in practice. Believe me that some student indeed do their homework at 11pm to turn it in at 12 am. Which undeniably is terrible for a kids mental-health.
As a student who gets through school without any effort at all, I am now forced to do repetitive and _stupid_ homework for the sole purpose of being busy. Before I could simply participate in class and show that I understood the material, while others were doing their work I was tolerated to just read a book (as long as I participated in class).
I truly miss just hanging around with my friend :( Discord just can't replace face-to-face interaction.
The only thing positive aspect is that I have a lot of time to spend on personal projects. I finally feel comfortable with IDA and x32dbg and my C-programming (and Golang, Python) skills have improved greatly :D Although I often feel unmotivated to actually do personal projects and go through depressive phases :/
Although not entirely related, I suggest reading Paul Grahams essay on nerds: http://paulgraham.com/nerds.html
Secondary school was just 5 years of being constantly exhausted. Blows my mind that whoever was planning it thought that was better than stumping up the cash for a second bus run (this was mid-00s in a country that was supposedly booming).
It's kind of impossible to gauge it beyond that. I guess the inflexibility of the structure ties in there though, like, if something about it is bad you don't necessarily have that much choice to change it and it will grind you down hugely.
This is, of course, why parents aren't concerned with getting their children into good schools, why there aren't any universities that can command huge tuition fees, and why you will never see a job advert asking for a degree or an employer hiring from a certain school.
That epidemiologist measuring the R0 rate isn't using math and knowledge they learned in school - no doubt they taught themselves because of their passion for the subject, and it's completely coincidental they were in a school studying the subject.
/s
For instance people actually don't learn all that much in school, it's all about the connections you make. Then it makes sense again to pay up for it, even though you don't learn how to do anything specific.
It also means there's plenty of opportunity to read up on how R0 works if it happens to tickle your interest.
School or university material is very basic and that is true. Unfortunately too many people expect that school is going to give them tools to deal with everything in life. School is giving only basic tools upon which one can build his own. Epidemiologist got his basic math in school but to be able to measure R0 he had to put in his own time, otherwise he would not become a specialist.
School system has to provide set of tools to large quantity of people. Where mostly people who nag about school, look at it from "gifted child" perspective.
Finally, basics of how things are built and repaired.
A lot of people never go to uni, and the schools seem to do their damnest to avoid teaching kids anything practical.
More along these lines: https://genius.com/Boyinaband-dont-stay-in-school-lyrics
Yet he argues someone should teach him how to trade stocks and give financial advice.
This summarizes why Robinhood broker is a bad idea.
For basic understanding law and psychology you have reading assignments. Reading novels is meant to show basics of human psychology, after reading assignment there is always class discussion on what you understood from the lecture. I also believe that if you have history classes you get basics of law and how that law was created. Not to mention that in reading assignments you probably also get in touch with basics of law, let alone that you are learning how to read and understand what was written.
I understand that some people need more hand holding to connect the dots.
Its a self reinforcing system, top universities pick top students, arguably these people are so bright you will get noble prise lauriates even if you educate them in rural mongolia.
My parents were always clear that this is a game in pursuit of a paper certificate that open doors to the next stage, and your wellbeing depends on it.
They were never under impression that your wages are fairly adjusted for your knowledge.
(1) The classroom vs. the rest of school (friends, extracurriculars, etc.)
(2) Experiences vs. outcomes
Do children hate the experience of sitting in a classroom? Sure they do. I did. Do they hate the rest? Not so much. Many of them miss it. My daughter (HS junior) actively replicates as much as she can of that experience, mostly online, all on her own initiative.
Learning is also important, and yes, most students do learn a lot in school. OP's claim that "most of them could barely remember anything" is disingenuous at best, and I suspect actually dishonest. The fact that they couldn't articulate what they had learned, on the spot, doesn't mean they hadn't actually learned anything. That's especially true if faced with an authority figure obviously hostile to the idea that they had learned. That "barely" is also doing a lot of work. How many did answer, but their answers were deemed insufficient? It hardly seems like there was a good-faith effort to gather data in a scientific way.
Is school necessary to learn? That's a complex question, with answers dependent on many factors. The most we can honestly say is "sometimes". Not always. Not never. Pedagogy is a real thing. It's a skill that can be trained, and some people have more aptitude for it than others. I contend that most parents suck at teaching their children, and most children suck at teaching themselves, and most teachers might not be that great at it either but they're still better at it (on average) than the other two. And you know what works better than any of those 99% of the time? Teachers and parents and (at least older) children working together, each contributing what value they can. Which isn't going to happen as much when anti-educational diatribes like OP go unchallenged.
"School sucked" is just not useful. How about ideas for making it suck less, or for other things that don't suck, or ways to combine the two? I don't care about Ian Welsh's experience, which surely owes as much to him as participant as to anything else. I care about how to ensure that present and future children have a better experience.
> claim […] is disingenuous at best
I am inclined to believe Welsh's theory due to the fact that school does not use any long-term memorisation techniques which is mentioned elsewhere in the comments. – If we want to make the world better, I am very much in agreement that this must be examined in a scientific way.
> anti-educational diatribes like OP
That's a straw-man. He does not criticise education, but school.
> I care about how to ensure that present and future children have a better experience.
This means participating in politics which is almost anywhere a nearly hopeless endeavour. For me this explains why Welsh became a cynic (afaict from his article) instead of being proactive like you wish him to be.
Are you unaware that "education" is often used to mean both the process and institutions devoted to it? Perhaps I should have said "anti-school" but that would only make it a poor choice of words - not a strawman.
> politics which is almost anywhere a nearly hopeless endeavour.
Do you expect everyone to share that assumption?
So like Churchill's assessment of democracy, public school remains the worst form of education except for all the others.
Is it though? We have records (sometimes questionable, due to bias) of different forms of government, dating back thousands of years. Where's the comparisons of educational systems? I'm no expert in pedagogy, but I'm also no expert in governing systems, yet I can name at least five different forms of the latter, and only one of the former.
They exist, it just needs putting in a little bit of effort to look them up.
> yet I can name […] only one of [educational systems]
I am also not an expert in pedagogy, but I can name: education in the home by parental units and private teachers, Waldorf, Montessori, democratic schools, MOOC. It would be interesting to find out how you would end up in a situation where you could not.
Kid still have school... it's just in a different form. Maybe it's a form that the author would have preferred (and I agree that this form may be better for a subset of students, just like the previous form is better for another subset), but it's still school and it still something that I would have hated. The part that we hate is the teaching, and maybe there's a form that I would have enjoyed while being kid, I never experienced that until way later in my teenage years, so I really can't know if that's even possible, but whether it's remotely or in person, I'm pretty sure I would have hated both.
I don't know if the author even tried to take a full day of class remotely too. The first time I had a 3h+ meeting remotely, I understood how much worse it must be for kids that need to do it remotely right now. I had my fair share of 3h+ classes in the past, I was fine, I may not be the best student, but I was going through them, but that 3h of remote meeting was so awful.
So kids may hate both form of teaching, but why would it be better for them to be able to go back to class. In a few word, to make friends. The author may have had difficulties with social situations, I'm sorry for him if that's the case and I hope he got better at it with time, but we all had recess, there's no way anyone can believe that it's the majority of people that had that much issue making friends. It's that part that they are missing.
Sure there's others ways of making friend remotely, but it's not as easy as it was in school. It's a thread I see from time to time on Reddit, how to make friends now that we are no longer at school and the answers are always much harder. Sure you can be social on some video games, but again, not the same. We tried with my friend group, watching movies remotely, a bunch of games, but it get so much boring so quickly.
That means that the bad part of school would have been even worse for me, and the only good part would have disappeared...
I realize I and the other children in the area at the time were lucky though.
In recognition of Valentines Day, I will make the analogy: Remembering that school was good is like romantic couples who break up only to later in life get back together but just long enough to remember why they broke up the first time.
Or
School is the "cruel mistress" of childhood memories.
Happy VD everyone :P
And in just in case: 0 sarcasm in this whole comment.
That sentence reads very sarcastic. Could you clarify?
I simply read the sentence and read it in a very honest voice and then in a very sarcastic voice.
The very sarcastic voice sounded more approriate, so I asked you to clarify.
College was a lot less productive than high school in terms of academics for me but it was also a lot more fun.
Even high school wasn’t so bad. I’d realized toward the end of high school that I never had an original idea of myself and was at peace with being mediocre.
I remember sometime in the mid to late 90's the teacher asked the class how many people had a computer at home and only about a third of the class raised their hand. The school however had plenty of computers since they were willing to pick up whatever the local business park was throwing away. "Computer free time" was probably the best part of the school day.
This is a generalization. There are plenty of places where humans treat each other awfully - roads, corporative politics, queues in supermarkets. This all doesn't mean the solution is to don't buy a car, don't go to work or do only online shopping.
My senior high was the opposite.
OK let's listen to them, and just delete school and see what these kids say in 20 years?
Maybe kids don't like school, but school doesn't exist because kids like it, it exists for different reasons such as :
- parents can work in the mean time
- kids can be taught things
Kids not liking school is not a point in the "school should be open" debate. It is one in the "how to make kids pleased to go to school" debate though
> I used to amuse myself by asking recent university grads what they had learned, most of them could barely remember anything. Since I was widely read, often I knew enough to ask basic questions about their discipline, and they wouldn’t know the answers.
One has to wonder if the author's perspective on school might have been tinted by this kind of arrogance.
> Parents want their children to go back to school because it’s a babysitting service,
Speaking as a parent of school age children, I want them to go back to school when it is safe to be there because I know that they miss their friends and their school community and the variety of school life. And while they're too considerate to say it, spending a year with their parents 24/7 must certainly suck for them too.