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Comment by Bostonian | Hacker News Reader

"We need more teachers and smaller classes."

That would cost more, and reading the blog makes me want to send less money to the public schools.

Another approach could be:

High school should be completely optional. Those who want to go will benefit from it and those who don’t won’t be there to make trouble.

Move the high school teachers to middle school and elementary for smaller classes.

A lack of education is one of the most pressing issues in western democracies. Reducing that doesn't look like a good idea to me.

I agree with you but we need to re-think education. The current education system is not working in general. Class rooms are over crowded and not enough teachers.

A pre-recorded video you can pause and rewind would be more beneficial than being corralled into an overcrowded stale box and expected to learn.

Looking at the US from central Europe, I see so much weird stuff. Like elected boards of education, at county level, that have actual power. Just why? There is so much broken with the German system (early selection of school types in 4th grade, social unfairness, lack of digitalisation), and still it is giving everyone a rather solid basic education of 9 years, one you can only opt out by leaving Germany.

IMHO, this is a good thing. Same for France, Austria and most other EU countries I know of. Like healthcare, a public system is working in most developed countries. Except the US.

You need some kind of VoTech and continuing Ed for people without degrees and white collar portable skills. Otherwise you get legions of disaffected populist voters when the economic tides shift against the only industry they know how to work in.

I think this is already happening. High school is not helping…

I'm not an expert on education, or on public policy.

I see people on twitter and reddit bitch about having to learn calculus and never using it.

But you know? I don't remember how to use calculus at this moment either, but I remember concepts of it measuring infinitesimal increments of change, and how derivatives and integrations relate to rates of change.

I don't remember the mechanisms of all my teachings in school, but it made me appreciate bridges, combustion engines, biology and literature.

The honest question is: How do we determine when a child/teenager has no capacity or will to understand the beauty or utility of advanced learning, and what do we do with them?

Especially as automation takes over in the next 30 years and we have millions more out of work because we don't need taxis, truck drivers, farmers, or 60% of food service?

For some reason my comment was downvoted. Does the system portrayed sound like one that is using resources efficiently to do important things? In some respects the school may doing harm, teaching students that they can be late and miss assignments without consequences. In the private sector they would be fired.

If you think that giving less money to struggling public services is a way to improve those services, then you are part of the problem. Political opportunists rely on that line of thinking to put public services into a death spiral, and their failure becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Public schools work well throughout the majority of the developed world - the US seems to be a notable exception.

Anand Giridharadas addresses this in his infamous google-talk quite nicely I think: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_zt3kGW1NM&t=623s (I'm linking this talk on HN way too often, but it just seems perfectly fitting so very often)

That depends what you mean by "well".

Its probably because obviously not all districts are like this, and its likely that the author's entire school isnt even like this. The blog points out small parts of a single school district in the entire country.

Giving struggling schools less money when they require larger and more diverse funding almost definitely isnt the answer. The average public school teacher still spends a huge amount of money every year to buy stuff for their class to use, and we expect them to continually do that throughout their career.

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