Comment by donw | Hacker News Reader

Comment by donw | Hacker News Reader

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I've been asked to step in and take this over for our neighborhood, so I'm learning about this process.

Doing so has really showcased one thing that I truly like about Japan: people tend to take care of their communities.

This starts from a young age: even in grade school, kids are responsible for cleaning their schools, and for serving lunch to other kids.

Back when Mom was alive, I asked her about why we didn't do this in the US -- she was a school-board member -- and it boiled down to: "The parents will sue us for a gigantic list of reasons, the union representing the janitors will sue us because having students clean violates our work contract with the janitors, it probably violates child-labor laws, and the media will eat us alive for all of the above reasons."

In the case of my neighborhood, we have a communal trash area, and there's a rotating roster for which household gets to handle cleaning that trash area for any given week.

I am heavily incentivized to ensure this area stays clean, as it is immediately in front of my house. :)

Even when I was living in a high-rise, where trash was handled by the building, we had a "floor coordinator" -- also a resident -- that handled a number of things, including emergency drills. The coordination of which was assigned to me after I slept through the first one, thus ensuring that I would not make that mistake again.

There is this solidarity part that I like but in my case I find it really outweighed by the bad parts that force individuals to conform and to do no waves to be part of the community.

In our case it culminated with a PE teacher of the local school who was hitting the students members of his kendo club and sent one to the hospital. And the discovery that all the parents of the club members knew about that.

Yes, if there is one thing I would like to take from the Japanese school system it is the cleaning of the classroom and serving of lunch, but if that meant also importing the sempai-kohai system and the bullying culture it enables, forget about it.

I'm not sure how cleaning schools requires the sempai-kohai system...?

Besides, while I'm not a fan of the whole sempai-kohai thing, it's not like bullying isn't absolutely rampant in US schools which wholly lack that cultural mechanism.

I wan unclear. No it does not require it and I would be happy to import that part alone. But that part alone is not enough to make me favor the Japanese school system that comes with a lot of issues IMO.

Oh, absolutely.

It does prompt the question: what education systems do you favor?

I have been disappointed by both the French and Japanese education. I'd love to give Montessori and Freinet style of education a try.

But I find it weird that education can't reinvent itself radically. The system we have was based around a scarcity of books and a need for the production of standardized workers.

I suspect the education system's main constraint is not the needs of kids but the possibility/will of the current teachers.

The education system is a complex organisation. Having the will to change means little if everyone wants to change differently.

Education reinventing itself radically needs a goal. The current (public) system has evolved to be frugal, which is a real consideration.

> The current (public) system has evolved to be frugal

Oh no it hasn't.

California averages $12k per student on an annual basis. Illinois averages $15k per student. Both are more than the median for private schools, and in a private school, you're getting a smaller classroom size as well (average of 19 vs 25 students).

Now, this wouldn't be a problem if the results were in-line with costs, but they aren't, not by a country mile -- public schools drastically underperform, and by a wide margin.

I know why, but find that immaterial next to the outcome, which is this weird sort of social Darwinism which sorts students into roughly two buckets: "wealthy with a largely successful peer-group" and "poor with a largely unsuccessful peer-group".

the argument that i keep hearing is that school was designed to create obedient factory workers.

montessori has all the things you liked above and more.

cleaning up after yourself, and serving food, working with various household tools are apart of the curriculum. they are not just chores, but already in kindergarten kids are learning these things playfully.

kindergarten age kids are interested in the adult world, so for them, cutting fruit is an interesting activity just like learning to count. i can trust our kids with sharp knives and scissors, because they learnt how to handle them.

i don't know about the older levels, but cleaning up the classroom would be a natural continuation of kids cleaning up after themselves.

> But I find it weird that education can't reinvent itself radically.

Long version: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_Against_Education

Short version: The existing system is good for those who win at it, so they have no incentive to change it. The important thing about schools is not education, but certification. Spend five years doing difficult but ultimately meaningless tasks at school; the school will certify you "this person is smart and hard working and obedient", and the employers will prefer you to people without such certificate.

Improving education would go against the goals of the current system. Imagine that you can make learning 100% fun -- how would you now distinguish between obedient people, and those who are only doing it because it is fun? Imagine that you can explain things in a way that literally everyone could easily understand -- how would you now distinguish between really smart and average people?

The fact that many kids fail at school is a feature, not a bug. The purpose of the school is to select elite employees. Their knowledge is less important than their character traits (intelligence, hard work, obedience), because if you employ the right kind of person, they can learn everything they need at work. Make no mistake, even startups who want to disrupt everything, don't want to have their own workplace disrupted by the same personality type.

So... if you want to be an employee, and you are smart, hard working, and obedient, the current school system is great, because it will give you a certificate that gives you an advantage over your competition. If you want to be an employer, the current school system is great, because it will certify for you the kind of employee you want. And if you are neither rich nor smart, the system works against you, but that's okay because your opinion does not matter.

What's wrong with the French system?

The school can't do it but in plenty of communities there are community organizations where parents and kids help clean up their local neighborhood and beautify things. I grew up in such a place, in what was often a troubled neighborhood in Chicago. It doesn't have to be the school that does it.

It depends on what your goals are. We had similar volunteer programs where I grew up. Things were clean enough, but the classrooms were still a mess, and people still threw their trash away on the street for the volunteers to pick up.

For Americans that have never spent time in Japan, Korea, or Switzerland for that matter, they are nominally clean in a way that is rare-nigh-on-extinct in the US.

In Japan, seeing trash on the ground or graffiti are both very uncommon. Moreso now than when I moved here a decade ago, especially in Tokyo, but the toilet at my local public park is cleaner than the one I last used when I visited a hospital stateside.

The problem with volunteering is that you only get volunteers. When everybody grows up learning that community care is their responsibility, and not just "somebody else's job", there are some big benefits to a society as a whole.

Japan and Korea have a homogeneous population with a self-conscious national identity which is a source of pride to each individual. That's the difference you're seeing.

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