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Comment by Kosirich | Hacker News Reader

In my mind a "better high school of tomorrow" would be the one that utilizes the best available classes and material available online in a physical class room environment, except for classes that are unique to the national curriculum. So a school would have people employed in some new role of mentor/teacher with whom you take the classes online with help and guidance.

What would be the stoppers from implementation of this that are not bureaucracy and rent seeking by existing structures... or just pride?

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Students! Many of them actually want and need to sit in a classroom and have someone teach (!) them.

Having a shared syllabus is not really the problem.

(I am teaching... I wish more people would actually study independently and I could just mentor them, but in my experience this isn't the case for many students. You may claim it's a matter of habits and education but that's not bureaucracy)

Thanks for the reply. Let me start of by saying that I'm aware that a good portion of students will require a more direct approach the same way they will require "parental" oversight for homework. Perhaps I should have restricted the question to the kids/students who have enough discipline/drive/habits for more self-study oriented education.

I think a competitive, decentralized system is the way to go.

Basically, you would have independently set and assessed requirements. In the case of universities, it would be admission requirements, that the universities set and independently assess. Students, that want to get to these universities, then use any resource available to them to learn to those requirements. This could be through a mix of online and offline classes, remote learning, evening classes, day school, textbooks, tutors etc. "Official" high school is de-emphasized in this scheme, as there is no way it can provide the right thing for everyone. Nobody should be punished for school absences for pursuing their (academic) interests.

Schools should also do all they can to emphasize academics and de-emphasize sports, to counter-balance the natural tendencies of teenagers.

> Schools should also do all they can to emphasize academics and de-emphasize sports, to counter-balance the natural tendencies of teenagers.

You are over-generalizing. This “natural tendency” does not apply to good portion of teenagers, they are all very different.

More importantly, if they show an inclination towards sports, then why must we nudge them away from that? Is there something fundamentally wrong about teenagers engaging in sports?

Yep, it calls blended learning and already implemented/practiced in many schools. https://study.com/academy/popular/top-50-blended-learning-hi...

> except for classes that are unique to the national curriculum

Curious where you draw the line on this one? At high school age _most_ subjects are unique to the local area. <insert language here> literature classes would likely focus on more local authors; when I studied english lit in ireland 15 years ago our focus was on Irish authors. You would expect UK based students to study English/scottish/welsh authors, and americans to study american authors. My middle school and equivalent geography classes were predominantly talking about globally applicable topics but with more local examples.

Virtual learning will cause massive unemployment among teachers given a virtual teacher can replace the millions of chalk and board teachers. So there's that big lobby who will always oppose such digitalization. Secondly online education is not that good right now. Kids with tiktok attention spans haven't really been thriving in online schools during covid.

One-on-one tutoring with a mastery-learning approach can raise educational outcomes by two sigma compared to mass lecturing with no differentiation. There will always be plenty of work for good teachers.

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