Hacker News Reader

A middle ground is requiring those courses but letting students choose when. Further to the obvious absurdity of everyone learning at the same speed, is the idea of everyone being equally interested and enthusiastic about every topic at the same time as everyone else. Let me go on a History shtick and then get my math together and then...

I don’t think that would necessarily work because some of the subjects deeply integrate with one another. For example, English and math have huge crossover because English classes are about being able to convey ideas and you need to have a strong grasp of English to succeed in, say, a statistics class.

I think if we could fine-tune instruction to skill levels, while still requiring a strong foundation in each subject, we would be much better off in the education scene.

There are school systems that does that — Alaska, for example. It was already impractical to get everyone growing up in the boonies to get to one place. Kids learn at their own pace, but you need to complete the required courses for graduation. Graduation can come earlier … or later.

(And then, there are the really radical departures — Unschooling, for example).

If you had given me an internet connection and freedom from school I would have taught myself. As I continue to do. One of my kids is the same. He doesn’t need school and shouldn’t have to go, as he grows older it will only hold him back.

I take you are responding to the “unschool” thing. What I was thinking of still have people acting as resources, and a curated learning environment. Maybe I was using the wrong term there.

i believe this correlation is more accidental than planned. i doubt that there is anyone who can claim to know exactly how much schooling in your native language is necessary before you can successfully pass a statistics class.

i believe the reverse is true. taking a statistics class will advance your language skills, because you learn a lot more by application than by theory. and there is no reason that these language skills need to be learned in isolation before you can apply them.

so maybe this slows down your learning for a bit, but even that is hardly provable because of different learning speeds of each student which likely vary far more than than the variation that language classes or the lack thereof would introduce.

actually, the whole concept of classes for your native language doesn't make sense in this context. learning your native language permeates everything. you learn language in every class, be it math, biology, sports or whatever. a dedicated native language class at best fills in gaps such as learning grammar, linguistics and literature. but it is not, and should not be a prerequisite to learning anything else.

the situation is a bit different when the language being used to teach is not your native language. a certain foundation in the language is necessary before you can follow classes, so a number of language classes are a prerequisite in that case

Contrary to popular opinion, I actually found my English classes incredibly useful— all the way through English Comp for my University Core curriculum. They were less about learning grammar and whatnot (though they did teach to write more eloquently at the higher levels) and more about digesting information and thinking critically.

People love to wave English around as the most useless class of them all, but when taught correctly it’s really the most important. It influences how we consume media, how we write, and how we communicate with one another. All of those skills are incredibly important in all other classes and I think having a concentrated environment to learn them is valuable.

> ...but when taught correctly it’s really the most important.

I think this is the most important point in most discussions about education.

I feel that everyone I know has had classes or professors that they either really disliked or really liked, but I also feel that there is a strong chance that many of the cases were not due to them not simply enjoying the subject matter, but instead the content being taught poorly. No matter how well we optimize the selection and ordering of classes, it is of no use if the content is not taught well.

For what it's worth, I thought all of my English learning was pretty atrocious.

I think part of the problem is that we don't tell people why they're in school learning things. I certainly thought my English classes were useless not even two years ago. I'm sure you've heard the classic "when am I ever going to need to know about Hamlet in the real world?"

School, at least beyond elementary education, isn't about knowing all the arbitrary points that you learn. It about learning to learn. The problem, however, is that you can't simply teach people how to learn, so the content you cover in classes is simply a proxy for the real "meat" of education.

Some might argue that you can apply this by teaching only classes in a student's focus area, but I argue that being exposed to historical information, statistics, math, computer science, biology, etc. has made me a much more well-rounded human and I possess the skills necessary to understand just about any concept presented at a sub-journal level. That's a skill I've noticed not many have, and it has proven incredibly valuable.

oh, i didn't mean to devalue native language classes in general. apart from the issue that the value of any class depends on how it is taught, i merely wanted to criticize the suggested dependency to other classes.

case in point, digesting information and thinking critically are things that should be taught in all classes. i actually find it problematic if a teacher expects that it is some other teachers job to teach any skills that are necessary in their own class. this is just an unnecessary division of learning, when, as i believe, integrated learning should be more effective. this culminates in the concept of project based learning where the whole concept of subject classes disappears and is replaced with interdisciplinary projects that cover all skills necessary to complete a project.

love this

This is a new movement of families who are setting goals for their children's education and picking and choosing classes, activities, tutors and skill shares to fill out those goals. As the movement grows, there will be a need for greater accountability and standards, which I think still can be fulfilled better through a Modular approach then a centralized education system. How great would it be if individual communities and families also had more authority over establishing the standards for this foundation of knowledge.

This just sounds like a more informal form of the private academy system in East Asian countries, where parents pick and choose different classes, activities, and tutors from the different private academy offerings. There are basically academies for most subjects, from art to science to sports to performance arts to languages, so a child's education and specialization can be individually tailored.

> If most people opt out of basic math classes, society will be worse off.

I doubt this. The overwhelming majority of people never use anything more complicated than algebra. Most people probably don’t even use algebra in an average year. And primary math instruction is an enormous waste of time. You can teach a twelve year old the entire primary math curriculum in well under a 100 hours. It would be great if we could make more of the population numerate but most Americans can’t name the three branches of government[1]. You’re not going to get them to learn statistics.

[1] Not a knock on Americans. The US has a great education system. People are people everywhere and most of them don’t care about nerd stuff that they find neither interesting nor useful.

> The US has a great education system.

Also not a knock on Americans. The US has many great things, but the education system isn't one of those. Sure, there are excellent educational and academic institutions in the US, but that alone doesn't make the country's education system great.

Switzerland has a great education system. There are almost no private schools because public schools do a great job. All universities are almost free and they are still among the top academic institutions globally (e.g., ETH). Furthermore, those who want to learn a trade early on can do apprenticeships combined with schooling instead of going to university and still have a great career. If they wish to go to university later, they can go to a university of applied sciences (Fachhochschule) or catch up on some requiremnts and go to a university.

One caveat: Reputation has a long lead time on reality. I think the US university system is no longer world-leading. It's still good, mind you, but it's no longer spectacular.

The best-known US institutions -- Harvard, MIT, Stanford, etc. -- are riding based on having been fantastic institutions in the sixties, eighties, nineties, and even early 00's. I think it will be decades before reputation catches reality, but at some point, it will happen.

It turns out massive endowments and fundraising didn't make schools better; they misaligned incentives, brought in the wrong types of people into leadership positions, brought in conflicts-of-interest, and led to all sorts of corruption.

The second-tier seem to still be doing okay -- the WPIs, Georgia Techs, state schools, and so on -- but the elites populate their faculty ranks, and you can see culture slowly creeping in.

More money doesn't always make things better. Go figure.

TL;DR: If you went to top-20 school, and you're asked for donations, donate to a local state school, an HBCU, an educational not-for-profit doing good work in your community, or elsewhere.

You are missing the forest for the trees. Quality wise, most American first and second tier universities provide largely similar levels of undergraduate education, with perhaps slightly differing rigor depending on the institution. The top 10 schools are uniquely able to provide strong networks, money, and access to opportunities that are not available to everyone else. That has very little to do with research output or its academic strength. You cannot buy old money. If academic rigor is the sole determinant of institution quality, then continental powerhouses like École Normale Supérieur and Science Po would be ranked on the same level as Stanford and Harvard.

PISA says America doesn't have a great education system. It used to. Personally, I think this is the greatest threat to American dominance.

And COVID19 in the US can be summarized as: Policymakers and citizens don't understand exponents, let alone differential equations.

A key reason that America doesn't have a great education system is exactly what you've expressed; people don't have any faith that America even COULD have a great education system. That's kinda across the board; America doesn't do big things anymore.

> PISA says America doesn't have a great education system. It used to. Personally, I think this is the greatest threat to American dominance.

US whites do better than whites in every country bar Estonia. US Asians do better than every country bar Singapore and the fake Chinese results. US Hispanics do much better than any Western Hemisphere Hispanophone nation. Looks pretty good.

> And COVID19 in the US can be summarized as: Policymakers and citizens don't understand exponents, let alone differential equations.

This does not make the US look particularly bad. Everywhere else in the Western world but Israel is run by clowns too. Even Australia and New Zealand have shown themselves clowns, with their incredibly botched vaccine regime.

With universities there are usually some basic requirements for graduation, which may include things like math and writing requirements (along with other requirements such as sciences, humanities, languages, etc.) but there is flexibility in how and when you fulfill them.

Yeah, universities get away with that because the students have already gone through primary education and already have the required foundation of knowledge.

Universities will require one class in a number of different fields to market themselves as liberal arts schools, but don't pretend like one algebra course gives a person all the math skills they will need in their life.

Most Highschools currently don't really require math beyond geometry and algebra.

I don't know how this would produce less educated people.

The High School degree, like the higher education degree, should require a set of unit from various subjects to be completed. The only difference is how those classes are consumed by the student.

I fear that the high school degree will become (even more) a marker of the passage of time than one of a minimal level of educational mastery.

Let kids take what they’re interested in and put off what they’re not, so long as they eventually do it. What could possibly go wrong? In university, if you clown your schedule, you just don’t graduate until you sort it out. Are we going to have the backbone to do that to high school kids, especially if we find that wealthy, college-track kids manage the flexibility just fine while other students struggle to get the guidance to help them navigate the flexible schedule? I doubt we would.