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Yup. Schools are really designed to crank out people from the factory worker template. Obey, don't question, meet your targets, and then disconnect.

It's in every part of the design:

- The focus on getting things "right" rather than exploring why things are wrong.

- The grading the discourages exploration and challenging oneself.

- The endless back and forth about how children fail assignments. Other than in very special circumstances, the teacher is the one having failed if the children on aggregate are not performing as well as they should.

- The way "learning" is defined as "remembering what the teacher wants to hear".

I could go on. It's crazy. When the children of today become adults, they won't, generally, need to become obedient factory workers. They will need to be creative free thinkers in knowledge jobs. School robs them of opportunities to learn that.

Montessori is a small win, but my years in Montessori was also plagued by some of the above. In particular, even though teachers were not allowed to set formal grades on assignments, they came up with their own pretty transparent improvised grading systems. (For example, it was clear that "Excellent" > "Outstanding" > "Great" > "Very good" > "OK". I still have a deeply rooted sense of this hierarchy and feelings connected to it, some 25 years later.)

> 2. These rules work because there's a significantly smaller portion of the population who truly knows themselves and embraces their eccentric characteristics. We typically lose our identity when going through a formal means of schooling because we want to fit in and thus be "average". Even those valedictorians are quite "average" outside of working harder to get perfect grades. How many do you know that went on to do the amazing things expected of them? Usually it's the people who were eccentric and didn't do so well in school.

I don't know if I agree. If you look at many of the most influential positions in many institutions, it's far and away majority filled by valedictorians, first-in-class, degree havers. Very few times will there be a highschool drop out neurosurgeon, or never graduated college politician. Even the technical geniuses in code of our time often came from wealthy backgrounds, attended MIT or another well regarded technical school or had direct tutelage/mentorship from someone else with that background. You can obviously point to examples, so-and-so dropping out of Harvard... but at that point they were already in Harvard which one doesn't get to do if they sucked shit at school.

High school (in the US) is so easy for gifted students that they barely need even try to earn a 4.0 and be the valedictorian.

Not all kids with good grades go on to do awesome things. But it makes sense that many of the best and brightest, the 'eccentric' ones, happen to have an easy time in school.

I certainly learned to do the bare minimum required to get a 4.0. It was pretty easy in the end.

And then had the shock of my life at college to the point where I said "screw this" and dropped out. Got a dead end job. Realized I did actually need to put some effort in and went back and graduated. The school system is not fit for purpose! Higher ed does OK.

Hmm no I found college much much easier than high school.

> You can easily tell the difference of "engaged" students who have a great teacher they will remember forever

Have you ever come across some topic of history or biology that just seemed soo boring at the time it was taught in school. But only years later watching some random YouTube video explaining it and now you realise how interesting it has always been.

Often.

I do know YouTube-based learning has it's flaws, but I find it much more enjoyable to engage with vs. the 9-5 teachers/professors I had growing up. The YouTube essayists are often way more passionate and informed on their topics as well.

Then you get the value of a community coming along for the ride... In school there wasn't a comments section where discourse can happen regarding the subject being discussed/instruction. I get that YouTube comments are often horrible, but for many of the educational stuff I've watched good/insightful/corrective comments do seem to trickle to the top.

Also - there's the "my time" aspect of it. This is _huge_ in comparison to normal education. I can move the slider back and listen to a part over and over again - sometimes topics are tough for me and I need to hear it 3-4 times. I can put the video on 1.25/1.5x if I want to bump the pacing up. I can study/learn when I personally learn best which tends to be late at night.

Finally there's the technical aspect of it. I didn't go to a nice college - I went to a very expensive private school in the midwest. I went for both design and computer science. With 100% confidence I can say that every topic that I studied from math, to programming, to electronics, to art history, Adobe Suite... _all_ of it has more up-to-date and functionally better instruction on YouTube available 100% for free. This sounds like an exaggeration - I promise you it is not.

Yes - YouTube learning has it's problems... but anecdotally I have learned so much. I have saved money fixing my own cars. I have jumped into topics that would have _never_ interested me before. I have improved skills professionally. It's a resource that I now can't imagine going without!

These ring true for me. I had both of these experiences you describe, and I feel like my life approach is a mix of them. I went to a Montessori school for preschool and kindergarten, then regular public school after that, and was in fact my high school valedictorian.

The Montessori "curiosity-driven" approach definitely stuck with me. I'm always interested in reading and learning about how anything works, and to get my hands on some introductory way of doing it myself. But I don't have the drive to turn that into any bigger successes. I skated through public school and never really learned to work hard, and I'm now that "average" valedictorian as you describe - pretty good 9-to-5 software job, but I'm not going to be achieving anything bigger.

I find my greatest satisfaction in small self-contained challenges. Things like competitive board games, Rubik's-cube type puzzles, juggling. Where I can hold the entire activity in my head. But then I lose interest when it reaches a level of complexity that requires a more disciplined and organized approach. I ascribe these tendencies to having the Montessori education early to be curious and hands-on about everything, but then the public school education which just teaches to the next test and doesn't train for anything bigger.

I struggle with this as well. I would describe myself as very curious, and love to read about new subjects.

I wish though, that I was more organized and ambitious. I always want to accomplish more instead of just dabbling in a million different things and never producing anything very large.

Would you have preferred to stay in Montessori for longer?

I'll never know, but in hindsight I think so. I probably would have been better off going at my own pace for longer, rather than becoming accustomed to the rigid pace of public school.

> I think Montessori-esq / curiosity driven schooling is the future given 2/3 the world is on the internet and there's actually exciting, inspiring, and engaging teachers around the world doing an amazing job.

I'm not sure I agree about online. One thing that Covid forcing everybody online really drives home is that the psychological change of mode to a "place of learning" really matters.

I saw this in several of my friends with children. They initially tried to make education at home functional--they did okay. Two of them then got a teacher and created a little "pod" (4 students max) in their local area with a couple of other parents. Their children did MUCH better.

This was for younger children (5-8 years old).

I agree that it's very easy to tell between the students of a great teacher and a bad teacher. I've found that the best teachers are ones that came from industry, they did their work, and then went into teaching. That's why my school's engineering department is great, as is one of the physics teachers who sadly only teaches me once every 2 weeks.