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Comment by macspoofing | Hacker News Reader

It's not the school. It's never the school. It's never the teachers either.

Take the mother in the profile. Her kid has been failing most of his classes for years and she blames the school for not knowing that?

>> He didn't fail, the school failed him. The school failed at their job. They failed. They failed, that's the problem here. They failed. They failed. He didn't deserve that.

No. She failed him. He failed himself too. But she neglected her responsibilities of raising him. You can't delegate raising your child to an education bureaucracy, even if it is staffed by well-meaning individuals.

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If you roll a dice and it comes up 1 you're not justified saying it's a loaded dice. If you roll it a hundred times and it comes up 1 more than half the time, you're right to be suspicious of it.

I think the mother and the student have definitely failed. That said, the school is producing many such failures. At some point blame needs to transcend individuals and start attaching to the system or context those individuals are in.

>At some point blame needs to transcend individuals

We're not anywhere near that point. Half the people here place no responsibility on the parent. At all.

So maybe we should actually try this 'individual responsibility' thing before blaming the system, or aliens, or the Illuminati.

The individuals are to blame, for sure, but so is the institution (at least) for failing so many students. Imagine a single teacher who fails 80% of his class while most teachers fail only 5-10%. Perhaps the single teacher is just unlucky that 80% of his students have no "individual responsibility" - or maybe there are other issues at play.

This is even more true, I think, when it is not a single teacher whose class is failing but a school's, and, I expect, a large part of that school system is failing. We should investigate and understand why and a satisfactory answer is not that one particular mother and child were derelict.

I agree that the problem is systemic but it's a bit more complicated than this - the reason why such a high percentage of the students are failing is likely because the parents of the students that wouldn't fail have disproportionately opted out of this school, whether by moving or through charter/private schools, which makes things even more difficult for the school administrators and the teachers.

The real systemic issue is that nearly ever competent and rational actor is incentivized to run away from the problem. This applies to parents, teachers and administrators. No one's life gets better by taking this problem head on and making things incrementally better, so the only people who are left to deal with the problem are the ones who don't realize how bad things are, don't care or don't have the means to move away.

Yeah I can't help but wonder. She had no idea about his GPA, no idea about any of his class grades, seemingly never went to a parent teacher conference where she could learn this, and is shocked to learn he flunked out and has to go back to the 9th grade? For 4 years she had no idea what he was even doing, just assumed because he wasn't kicked out that everything was fine. The school should have done a better job of contacting and informing her, but she's the one who dropped the ball.

I work and my wife doesn't and our one kid exhausts us, and this lady worked 3 jobs and raised her kid alone. When whould she have the time to raise her kid? This is America's failure, every American failed here. It takes a village, but in America the village looks down on you and denigrates you rather than helping.

She's working 3 jobs to provide basic subsistence for her and her children. We all failed here.

Where's the other parent?

"We" collectively didn't decide to produce a child with no thought for their future. So I think some of us failed more then others.

I agree. In a perfect world, it would not matter who wins the lottery of having conscientious parents etc. and the government would make sure that everyone has the same chance to achieve their potential in school. But in the real world, it is crazy to expect that state resources could ever provide the same benefit as a "tiger mom" willing to go to battle with her puberty-stricken teens over finishing their coursework 24/7.

Do you need a '24/7 tiger mom'?

Surely there's something between that and not knowing that your kid has been failing (and skipping) most of his classes for years.

Society failed him too. Is there any good reason we don’t throw kids like this into a boarding school focused on discipline?

> Is there any good reason we don’t throw kids like this into a boarding school focused on discipline?

If society cared, it would intervene well before they needed that, and it wouldn't reach that point.

Since it doesn't, it doesn't intervene at all, and it still never reached that point.

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