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Comment by Lhiw | Hacker News Reader

Why do you have to agree there is institutional racism in schools to think this is garbage writing?

Worried you'll get called a racist for suggesting an anti racist is wrong?

Actually on topic though, Asia is laughing at us.

Removing homework and grading? Because "racism"?

You shouldn't be penalizing well off people (white or not) with worse schooling because some lower class students (black or not) dont have enough time to study after school.

What you should be doing is figuring out how to not penalize those with less opportunity to ensure they can either catch up or at least not fall behind.

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They mention that because it emphasizes their other point.

It's the equivalent of "I'm a vegetarian but even I drool at the thought of bacon". You don't have to mention that you're vegetarian....it's there because it places extra emphasis on how appealing bacon can be.

sigh did I really to break it down like that

There's the other side of the coin though. You say that not to emphasise the point, but to protect yourself.

"I'm not a racist because I agree with x", don't call me a racist for disagreeing with you.

Sort of, was an "I don't have to be a racist to agree with X". Or "Hey, I'm on your side, but you did X poorly."

When a comment appears to a be a troll, is overly hostile, etc it's usually helpful to look at the account creation date and their posts history before bothering with a response.

Sometimes it's someone with a varied history burning karma for a topic they are passionate about, but in this posters history it's obviously not.

> Why do you have to agree there is institutional racism in schools to think this is garbage writing?

I'm only going to argue this point. I could claim an idea is bad because I disagree with the idea. Let's say you say that something is racist and I disagree and we have an argument about whether that thing is racist or not. The article claims (among many other things) that there are racist undertones here.

However, that's not my point here. The problem here is the article claimed to talk about A (school reform) but spent 70% of it's page space on B (things suck, and racism is involved). And I didn't care about B when the author promised me A and the author DID NOT ACTUALLY COVER A. I'm not attacking the B idea, just the inconsistency of the whole writing.

Malcom Gladwell (for example) covers institutional racism in schools VERY WELL in his podcast Revisionist History. He delivers B quite successfully. And I'm sure other authors are great at discussing B if they want to.

> Why do you have to agree there is institutional racism in schools to think this is garbage writing?

I Don't think this is what GP said. Where do you get this from? These two things are unrelated, the way I interpret the comment.

>Worried you'll get called a racist for suggesting an anti racist is wrong?

That's a reasonable worry in these days.

I don't have an issue with it and spend zero time worrying about it. Why do you think it is reasonable?

> Actually on topic though, Asia is laughing at us.

Are you really that self centered that you think that people around the globe care.

They don't have to care to laugh at us for dumbing down our kids.

This.

People in other places do not care that much (setting aside the worrying possibility that this kind of thinking may be later imported to their own countries), but given the prominence of English in worldwide communication and the massive role of American media, they will read the news and either laugh or frown.

American internal problems are much more visible to the outside world than, say, Italian ones.

>They don't have to care to laugh at us for dumbing down our kids.

Why laugh? I guess they will be glad they will winning the competition. If anything, they will encourage the US to continue on the same path, they'll might even praise it.

Was that a question? I live in Asia, America is a constant and dependable source of laughs. We care. Keep bringing the laughs please.

They care very much. Most other countries follow the US pretty closely.

I have a weird thing going on in my personal life where every so often a Chinese friend will suddenly ask me about something in American domestic politics that I've never heard of. And every so often I'll ask about something in Chinese domestic politics that they've never heard of.

I think the more important question is whether we should care what China thinks. Is China really what we want to aspire to?

Maybe you should care if China is on a better path towards the future than your country?

>Are you really that self centered that you think that people around the globe care.

In EU we copy most stupid things US is doing but none of the good things US is doing. So I do care.

Stupid people learn from their own mistakes, smart people learn from other people's mistakes.

How is this penalizing well-off students? By making it harder to automatically get ahead in education just because your poor classmates are sliding off the slippery slope of a negative feedback loop? I wouldn't call it penalizing.

They're dropping the homework requirement. This is a huge amount of extra study time to absorb and practice what you've learned throughout the day.

Underprivileged or not, homework assignments are ridiculously over assigned. Kids go to school for 8 hours to learn, then they are expected to go home and ... work some more?

Just like I don't think it is fair for my employer to expect me to work when I go home, children should stop school work when they go home.

There is usually a 1 hour study hall period for students in high school. Teachers should either provide time in class to do any assignments or limit the time required to do those assignments to whatever share of that daily study hall hour they can negotiate among the other teachers/subjects.

This is actually a fun thing to talk about, but an HN thread is insufficient. There are schools and countries out there who focus more on excellence and cater to the top students. They put a ton of effort and praise on the top % with contests, a dense curriculum. I think most of eastern Europe, possibly Russia and likely a lot of other places fall into this category. On the other side, you have places like Scandinavia where the curriculum is less dense, and teachers focus on getting everyone above a lower knowledge threshold.

It's a great topic to research if you want to actually improve the education system. Go have fun reading and learning about it, the more you understand about the tradeoffs of these approaches, the better! But that's clearly not what the author of the article, or the commenter referred to. _sigh_

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2016/dec/30/no-excuses...

This school takes really deprived kids and gives them a great education. But it gets a lot of grief.

Edit it's an old article I believe they now have ex students attending Oxford and Cambridge.

From the article: “In other schools that would never happen. You’d never see a teacher ask a pupil to pick up a grape, because they’d go mad.”

If this sentence is true, i'd worry about education in your country. And if the bullying bit is also true, it's even worse. And i fail to see how "same punishment for everything, no matter how small" is a good thing to enforce. It's lazy for the teachers and a very poor habit and thought process to teach.

No, honestly. I've taught children, schooled, homeschooled, sometime at a youth camp, sometime on perischolar activities; i'm pretty sure i've taught better habits in hours than this school can do in years. I mean, if you want button-pushers, this school sounds great, i'd rather have the children i teach understand why they are learning, how they can learn more, and how safely do stupid experiments, like my some of my math, chemistry, physics and history teachers did.

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