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Totally agree with this. My parents were good in some ways but in terms of anything related to academics they were both in the negative. They never helped me with my homework even a single time growing up.. homeschooling with them would have been.. awkward.

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’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 :/

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 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”

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.

> 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.

> 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 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.

His argument about knowledge retention also completely misses the mark. My high school chemistry teacher said it best when asked why we needed to learn stuff we'd just forget about after the exam:

"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 heard this adage several times and it doesn't match my experience.

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.

Eh, for secondary education it's more of a "breadth, then depth" minmax pruning exercise - you go through 10 or 20 courses like biology, physics, economics, drama, calculus, journalism, etc. and then you winnow those down into things to pursue further, rinse, repeat...

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.

Children are learning machines. They do it faster than adults, and they could be retaining everything. The reason no one retains things from school is because there’s no effort put into long-term retention. There’s no effort put into much of anything outside of memorization. Math is memorizing formulas, French is memorizing vocabulary, English is memorizing plots and literary devices. The best classes are the ones that the teacher asks for synthesizing something that is not explicitly given. Take some base knowledge and ask people to use it to make something new, and the learning is way more effective.

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.

Agreed. My kids go to a Waldorf school, and it's all about synthesis. They don't get teaching material, they make it themselves.

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.

My math was not memorizing formulas and French constantly tortured us with writing essays. And my school system was more tilted toward authoritarian memorizing then my kids school is.

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.

Nothing about pedagogy needs the brain to have heard facts 10 years ago about something, that's totally bogus.

Even if you forget what you've learned, having learned it once makes the acquisition faster the second time.

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.

Your last point is made explicitly in the article when it calls school a babysitting service. If you take out the explicit goal of education away from school, you get tax-funded babysitting. In many schools, the funding is low enough that the education system is mostly that.

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.

besides private schooling and private tutoring, how do children of wealthy families obtain an edge? surely there's a way to replicate it without the money.

School brings its own traumas. School can be a bit prison lite both in structure and social dynamics between children. But for some children school is still a more plesant experience than whatever is happening at home and so it is an important and life saving escape.

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.

This. I mean, if the prison lite that is school (love that term) is better than a child's home life, doesn't that speak to deeper issues? Maybe GP should try not to excuse the stories from the Hellmouth[0] that is school by saying that home life is worse for some children.

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...

Having neither had a great family, let alone parents who read to me, I can say school was a catastrophe and I very much agree with OP. The primary lesson of school, the training that happens every hour of every day of school is this: Sit down, shut up and listen. School is not about teaching and education, it is about training obedience, apathy, resignation and of course baby sitting. It is an institution from the 19th century, developed for a society of farmers, factory workers and dutiful drones of cannon fodder.

> School is not about teaching and education, it is about training obedience, apathy, resignation and of course baby sitting. It is an institution from the 19th century, developed for a society of farmers, factory workers and dutiful drones of cannon fodder.

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.

Totally agreed. It reads as a rant by someone who’s not yet over highschool and didn’t take the effort to consider how the same system might work incredibly well for others.

That said, I do feel more effort should be put in making students who struggle succeed instead of conform.

Absolutely agreed. In addition, I feel like for many people the strongest friendships they have in adulthood are forged in school, be it junior, middle or college level. Could these bonds be forged elsewhere? Maybe, but I don't see an activity which could replace this social aspect of school.

Disclaimer, I know school can be very traumatic for some people, and I am sorry if you had such an experience.

I don't think that you're quite comprehending how bad the "nerdy privileged kid" experience is. I don't remember most of school. I remember all of the facts just fine, I remember some of folks' names and faces, but I mostly simply have a massive black hole in my memory where the first fifteen years of my life should be.

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.

That, and uprooting current systems must surely take into account its second-order consequences [0].

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 don't understand the need to force an universal on everyone, instead of letting systems cohabit. Every time someone says WFH is great someone else can't refrain to say it's hell for them or others. School was great for you, then good for you. Parents that cannot work from home? School is good for them too. That doesn't change the point that it sucks for some others.

> 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.

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 thought this article really jumped the shark when he started referring to everybody as "slaves"

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.)

Agreed, this is written by an upper middle class kid, who had a great home life. Most working class people can't exactly work from home, hunger among children who can't get school lunches anymore is rampant.

I know my home life was so bad, this would have definitely been rough. For lots of kids school provides a necessary reprieve