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Comment by lordnacho | Hacker News Reader

Even though I recognize all the things he says about school, I mostly liked it. Yes, they teach stuff slowly, but you are free to move ahead yourself, right? And yes you need to be babysat, but it was mostly socializing with peers.

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.

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> In general, most people I know across cultures think back fondly to their school days, minus Americans.

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?

"Jocks vs nerds" pretty much just existed in the 80s. That really hasn't been a thing for a long time.

> 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.

I'm still very happy with the fact I went to a university with no sports teams and no frats or sororities.

I'm 50, so nerds vs jocks was a thing in the US in the 1980s, but not so much these days when "nerdy" things align more with pop culture. Also, back in the 1980s, except for severe cases where physical violence was involved, bullying was more or less tolerated and the advice to the bullied was just not to react, which was supposed to cause the bullies to lose interest. These days even name calling by bullies is taken seriously and can result in punishment of the perpetrators.

I'm 42, jocks versus nerds was still a thing in the 90's, can't speak to after that. I hope and would like to believe things have gotten better, but that's probably only on the social fronts (less social division between cliques these days), and that the problem of a one size fits all approach inherent to didactism is still there. This has long been a recognized problem with the "standard" schooling institution, just look into deschooling or unschooling.

It's hard to move ahead yourself when you are forced to sit in a chair for 6 hours per day plus 2-3 hours of activities around it (waking up early, breaks, homeworks). I remember it and it was like a torture. I don't intend to have children but if I had them I would never impose public schooling on them. I would home-school like my sister does. I am from Poland btw. For me school was traumatic 12 years which killed my curiosity, will to learn and faith in humanity. I still managed to learn quite a bit on the side but to this day I can shake out the thought of the best years of my life being wasted by the system.

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 grew up in Western Europe and experienced exactly what the author of the article is talking about so it’s not just an American experience.

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.

This may be very dependent on individual class composition too. I was always a nerd, and can say my school experience was very nerd-inclusive, bully-exclusive. I attribute this to the strong girl groups in my class who seemingly had a rather clear sense of what's right and ethical. Any bullying was shot down very quickly.

As a caveat, it could of course be that someone else in my class had a completely different experience of the same events.

I experienced this.

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

In what school system are you “free to move ahead yourself”? Pretty sure at most schools you’re expected to participate in the current curriculum and take the tests as scheduled.

Can't you take the tests ahead of time if you ask? Even if not, driven by curiosity you'll find math and science tests in school pretty easy if you've bothered to read ahead.

I remember (West Europa, not US), from middle school already feeling no motivation to move ahead in the material, because I was forced to keep following the lessons anyway. No skipping of classes/tests. Of course I don't really know how that could've worked if you take into account the social function of school.

Or you can just read the textbook after you understand something. That's what I did, after it became apparent that reading other books during class was strongly discouraged.

>Can't you take the tests ahead of time if you ask

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"

I studied english extracurricular and was far ahead of school curriculum - we were plabbing to emigrate so it was part of preparation. The school English teacher felt that it was undermining her authority. She kept coming up with random reasons to discipline me and mark me down.

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.

Definitely not over here in this post-communist country, and there are few standardized tests - most are invention of a teacher so good luck 'finding' them beforehand.

> In general, most people I know across cultures think back fondly to their school days, minus Americans.

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.

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