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Comment by zabzonk | Hacker News Reader

The whole thrust behind this article is that grading and testing is a bunch of crap. And that's entirely correct, IMHO.

We should restructure our whole Western (and Eastern, for all I know) education system on the lines of Ivan Illich's book Deschooling Society https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deschooling_Society which (simplified) suggests that everyone gets an educational grant that they can spend about which and who they study with they can freely choose. But it is not going to happen, and we will stay with the whole grading and testing bullshit.

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That's putting the cart before the horse, people need teaching to learn how to spend, trial and error is the slowest learning strategy and should only be used when there are no alternatives

> trial and error is the slowest learning strategy

But that's what they do now! I can't see any alternative to that, but people could be given an increased range of learning possibilities.

I do not understand how self directed learning like this is expected to work at all for children.

If you replace a high school with letting the students do whatever interests them, a small fraction might study something, and the majority will spend the time watching tiktok, playing league or legends / fortnite, listening to music, etc. maybe you think that letting kids do whatever they want for “education” like this is better, but IMO this proposal is much worse than the current system of directing students to spend time on things that are moderately useful to society and determined to be valuable to intellectual development

That is not at all what I got out of the article. The main thrust is that policies that are apparently dumb to non-teachers are not actually dumb. They are well-justified responses to the ways students will attempt to defeat the purpose of the system.

> students will attempt to defeat the purpose of the system.

Given any system, why would people not attempt to defeat it? And if they can defeat it, perhaps the system is wrong?

Yes, people will attempt to defeat systems to their own benefit. That is why these policies discussed in the article exist -- to harden the system to such attempts.

"Wrong" in your comment is underspecified. It depends what you mean by the word.

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