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Comment by bedobi | Hacker News Reader

This article did a great job of articulating something I've always felt strongly about but haven't been able to put into words.

I'm sure I'm not the only one who felt like my schooling was mostly a giant waste of my time and energy.

I was waaaay ahead in subjects I liked, because those things I learned myself out of innate interest. Rather than the system accommodating and encouraging being ahead, in those subjects I was held back and forced to sit through material I already knew, because "in year x we learn this and in year y we learn that". Don't get ahead. Zero agency.

In other subjects that didn't interest me, I was forced to sit through stuff only to forget everything I "learned" soon after.

It really begs the question, what's the point? And while I'm no genius at anything, surely a system like this will kill many, many actual geniuses, just like the article says.

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Daycare. The point is that school is, first and foremost, a daycare. All the talk about education is just marketing.

Unfortunately college puts up the same barriers. Much of the time I spent in high school learning to code was for nothing, because my university wouldn't let me even attempt to test out of the first- and second-year courses. In another instance they also wouldn't let me count a graduate statistics course for a baby-stats elective requirement. "We WoULdn'T bE an AccREdiTeD iNStiTutION if wE lEt yOU do THat!"

I ended up majoring in math instead of compsci as a result. It ended up being a good choice, because now I have skills in both areas. But I was pretty disappointed as an incoming freshman, enthusiastic about computer science, that college was nothing like what my parents and teachers made it out to be.

I had a similar experience, with my university and AP classes.

University would not accept the AP classes, and basically two years of college to learn what I had already been taught in high-school.

Wow had the same problem with my CS department. I think part of the problem is that there was much more demand for slots in the CS department from people who were woefully unqualified but looking to make bank.

I transferred over to the maths department who welcomed me with open arms, took all my credits, and then beat the every living shit out of my brain so much harder than the CS department ever would have.

I think this depends on the college. Because mine barely gave a shit about pre-reqs and frequently let me swap requirements / graduate for undergraduate courses.

It's a culture thing, and how annoying the admin culture is there.

It's not, though. Kids with stay-at-home parents are still required to go to school. Compulsory education is near universal at this point, but at least in the American tradition, the first publicly-funded, mandatory schools were mostly for instilling community values into kids, and this was in communities where women weren't even allowed to work outside the home. Kids were actually expected to learn reading and math at home before they even started school.

History isn't the present, but the reason most laws exist today is just inertia, not some principled stand of the legislative bodies that might otherwise be able to repeal them.

Kids can homeschool and cover all the same courses taught in school in 1/3 of the time, which leaves a lot of extra agency for the things the author talks about - doing meaningful work from a young age, exploring the world, self-directed learning, etc. etc.

My daughter, three years ago at age 12, felt that she could go at a faster pace on her own, so she asked to be home-schooled. We were really nervous at first but it's been great and agency is the reason.

She still takes math at school but that's usually her only class. Otherwise she's doing things. She's gone to Florence (with us) to take art classes there. (She wants to be an artist or author.) That first year she made a video game (#17 here https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2018-01-02), and this last year she wrote an 80,000 word crime novel. If she can get the kind of score on the SAT that she's getting on practice tests, she has a good chance of going to one of the schools that she wants. (Her early application choice is Yale.)

She's doing things and that gives her meaning to what she's learning. It's not just words on a page but something that she sees value in knowing. We get a lot of eye-rolls when we say she's home-schooled but for her, it's been a game changer. And agency is a big part of that.

> It really begs the question, what's the point?

To educate the highest number of children possible, as a reasonable cost, to assure a steady supply of capable labor year after year.

Sadly, this results in low-salaried teachers, cookie-cutter teaching plans, and teacher-to-student ratios that are not adequate to cater to the outliers that need attention.

> Sadly, this results in low-salaried teachers, cookie-cutter teaching plans, and teacher-to-student ratios that are not adequate to cater to the outliers that need attention.

In my view/experience the real outliers need only to not be held back (implicitly by culture, or explicitly).

Gentle reminder that there are outliers on both ends of a normal curve who are being let down - sometimes, it is the the same student at different ages. Catering to the needs of both top-/bottom Xth percentile requires additional resources, effort, time or money, in a field that is already under-resourced.

I’m not too fond of that narrative, partly because I don’t think it’s true (top percentile don’t need much more than some encouragement / acceptance), and partly because “we have to prioritize our resources and it’s more important to help the bottom percentile” is used as an excuse to hold the top percentile back (or used to be, in Sweden at least).

Through the confines of scheduling, I once found myself in the lowest level of biology and AP biology in the same high school semester with the same teacher. At first she was perplexed, wondering what the hell was going on. But once she got to know me, she realized it was a scheduling thing and that I did not really belong in the low-level class. It got to the point where I just napped through that low level course and she didn't care at all. She was a good teacher.

> giant waste of my time and energy

Telling people not to go to school is bad life advice.

> I was [in school and thriving]

I don't, would you go into the time machine and like, not go to school, as a young person?

There are other types of schooling which are more tailored to the individual. You won’t find them in a public school though, with one teacher schooling 25-30 kids. It’s just not possible to cater to every individual‘s needs in that context.

The only way to get more individual schooling is to have well-off parents who send you to a school with smaller classes, and ideally with a more relaxed schedule, like Montessori (I personally find them a little cult-like, there are other approaches too). Or, get born in Finland or Sweden, they invest heavily into their public education system, and it shows.

Haha hate to break your bubble but I am born, raised and schooled in Sweden :)

I don't live there anymore though, I left as soon as I could, can't stand the place, but that's kind of a side note, lol.

Finland and Sweden's schooling systems are very, very different.

I wouldn't have enjoyed the Finnish one either, just saying.

It must be weird to read all the fetishization of Scandinavia here? :)

For sure! It gets talked about every now and then, this one generated a bunch

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24886659

I‘m not fetishizing. There is lots of hard evidence that at least the Swedish model is superior to what eg Central European countries have. Our country sends delegations to Sweden to analyze what they are doing better, and maybe get inspired by that. Sorry for throwing Finland into the mix, I probably misremembered.

Apologies, I didn't mean to say you were fetishizing, just that there's a lot of Scandinavia fetishizing on HN (and everywhere else for that matter) in general, haha

You should have a look what public schooling looks like in most other countries, you‘d be surprised how good you had it. The fact that you dreaded school proves nothing.

> would you go into the time machine and like, not go to school, as a young person?

Kind of, yeah. I'm not saying school is 100% useless, but I like to think I would have been better off with maybe 80% of the curriculum cut out.

I could have put all that time to much better use developing knowledge and skills in those things that I had an innate interest in, let alone spent more time being active, around others, and outside - not sitting down at a desk.

But society disagrees, so there's little choice but to conform.

I did this.

I realized what the GP said when I was 13. I was either bored working on subjects I liked because I knew them or bored working on subjects I didn't like and had no interest in. I was an angsty teenager who could not handle this, so I dropped out.

At 18 I got my GED, after doing no studying, and that got me into a local college. After my first year I transferred to a less than Ivy League college in my state.

I had no support, and therefore did not use this opportunity to do great things, but I still ended up pretty much where I would have had I not dropped out. I look back on that time as my pre-working early retirement that allowed me to figure out what was important to me.

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