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Comment by qiskit | Hacker News Reader

Ideally, the basics ( reading, writing, arithmetic, etc ) should all be done at home with their stay at home moms ( or dads ). Once they reach a certain level, then schooling should start ( maybe 7th grade or high school even ). Not only would that be better for the kids, it would be better for family bonding and community building.

But the modern education system was created for the exact opposite. To limit family bonding in favor of allegiance to the state and teach them enough to be drones for the factory/work force/military. Children are resources to be processed by the state via their factory-like schools into products to be consumed by corporations, government, etc.

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I was homeschooled until 7th grade. If your parents aren't monsters maybe it can be good. But many if not most parents who choose to homeschool their kids are zealots of some kind or another, or have serious control/paranoia/narcissim issues. Exposure to people outside the home, who aren't hand-picked by the child's parents can go a long way towards teaching the child that there are people in the world who are different from their parents. I think that would have helped me a lot.

> Children are resources to be processed by the state via their factory-like schools into products to be consumed by corporations, government, etc.

When the word "resource" gets thrown around at companies and they obviously mean a human being, it peeves me. I will never use that word when referring to a person. When I'm involved in a conversation where someone uses it, I always ask for clarity that they mean a person, employee, contractor, candidate, etc.

I know it's just a word, but calling people resources makes it seem like they are nothing more than something to be expended and used. And maybe that is the case, but I don't think it should be encouraged and perpetuated.

I agree with you but in this case I think the word choice fir the tenor of that parent's comment well--whether you agree or not is a different story but children as "resource" makes sense in the factory metaphor.

I'm not a fan of the more people-centric ones either, since they still are super abstract. Like "headcount".

It's Bob. You mean Bob. You want to change the project Bob is on. Have we talked to Bob about it?

What was wrong with personnel?

>But the modern education system was created for the exact opposite. To limit family bonding in favor of allegiance to the state and teach them enough to be drones for the factory/work force/military. Children are resources to be processed by the state via their factory-like schools into products to be consumed by corporations, government, etc.

I always see takes like this but it just strikes me as a Conspiracy theory. We can easily get to the modern US education system via poorly thought out incentives and incompetence. You don't need malicious actors to get there. I would be curious if you had evidence to support a claim like this?

To the downvoters: Do you honestly believe there is a Cabal in the US Government who sit in a room and say "Yes we must crush gifted students and make sure our education system is terrible so we have more drones for the factory/work force/military??

I think this is a claim about emergent effects of the interaction between education and the wider economic system rather than the intent of a particular group of people. In practice I don't think it makes much difference if a system is accidentally having a particular effect or having the same effect with some particular group of people's intent. It's similar to how I don't think it's too misleading to talk about evolution creating species, there is an underlying level it helps to keep in mind, but talking without the abstraction would make things too verbose

>In practice I don't think it makes much difference if a system is accidentally having a particular effect or having the same effect with some particular group of people's intent.

Of course intent matters which is why we make distinctions between things like Manslaughter and Murder, and OP was explicitly stating that this system was very much intentionally built to have the outcomes they described.

> Children are resources to be processed by the state via their factory-like schools into products to be consumed by corporations, government, etc.

I see that claim often, but never any evidence of it. I do see a lot of evidence of imposing political and/or religious views on the students. Everybody wants to shape the students into their own image. Hence all the fights over the curriculum.

I found a good balance by starting with a preschool that had a proper teacher but also parent involvement as part of the curriculum. In public elementary I volunteered whenever I could (field trips and occasional classroom assistance) as well as after-school activities. By late middle school and high school I could step back and volunteered in support roles that didn't involve much student interaction but still supported his interests (PTA, Band Booster Leadership).

Obviously, every kid has different needs and every parent has limits on how much they can be present during school hours but putting kids in traditional public school doesn't have to be a passive experience of surrender to the state.

This only work if the parents are skilled in teaching young children. But we don't have that much people with those skills. So if they are capable of doing this, they should be teaching at schools instead!

Unless you want to say that this isn't skilled work and it can be done by anyone with no training. In this case: why do you think that?

this mean pool family kids have no chance

What does this mean? (Is a pool family a family with a swimming pool?)

Based and tedpilled

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