Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by krn1p4n1c | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

krn1p4n1c

Both my kids transitioned from Montessori to public school at 11 (grade 5) in the US. 13 and 16 now.

+ Love of learning and self-driven discovery

+ Top of class in pretty much all subjects

+ Comfortable giving presentations

+ Comfortable working in groups

+ At ease working with younger students/children and essentially mentoring them

+ Excellent handwriting

+ Respect for teachers

- Difficulty with testing that involves framing the questions in an intentionally deceptive manner

- Difficult transition to the cliques and more aggressive social dynamics of public school

- Tough for them to deal with the way many students treat their teachers and behave in general in public school

I would recommend, that a year or 2 before the kids transition they start doing standardized tests and worksheets to get acclimated to that. It's a big shock otherwise.

Overall my kids loved their time in Montessori and wish the program had gone through high school.

View on HN

> - Difficult transition to the cliques and more aggressive social dynamics of public school

Am I naive in thinking that the aggressive social dynamics of public school adds no value whatsoever to a child's or teenager's development?

Like, _why_ would anyone want to put their children through that? Is it _really_ integral to a person's social development to understand how to interact with bullies (worst case)?

I admit that I am rather nihilistic about public schooling, but I'm open to changing my mind.

I agree that a lot of it's needless and painful, but there's some merit in knowing how to defend yourself (physically, mentally and emotionally). There's a lot of the petty BS that you learn from in school that transposes to adult life. I hate watching my kids deal with it, but I'd be remiss in raising them if I didn't prepare them for that.

But why do they need this from public school over say any other social ... activity (?). For example sports.

I am genuinely questioning whether public school makes children socially mature rather than only being a traumatic experience for many pupils, for no other reason than that public schooling is the default choice.

No you're right, there is no other reason than public schooling being the default choice. Which is why its necessary. It's self fulfilling.

It's the choice that everyone goes through. So unless you want your children to be unable to adapt to the people that were shaped through that horrible system, you will need to introduce them to that system in some capacity. Sports are not really enough. School is like day job for kids until they're 18. Everyone goes through the same standardized garbage, and they will have to live their lives with other people who went through the same standardized garbage.

Your only choice is to pay exorbitantly so they don't go through that garbage, but will face adulthood with 99% of the population that did, which can have mixed results.

What school does is provide an environment of ~8hrs/day to pressure test their social skills and build coping mechanisms (good and bad). You do get that to a lesser degree from other environments such as sports and in the end it's all transferable learning. Playing on a team vs training an individual sport with a club gives very different social lessons and shapes them accordingly.

But I don't think school is what makes them mature as much as it's the adults that they look up to and emulate that shape that. And whether it traumatic can depend on how they're able to internalize it.

I was home schooled all the way through til college - never went to any regular school. I have never regretted that, and never felt that I am missing out on any skills necessary for dealing with functional adults. Indeed I see the painful impacts and lasting damage those experiences had on some of my friends, and I am glad I never had to experience it.

Kids are cruel to each other because they do not yet know any better. They are still developing empathy and have not yet learned social skills. Kids in mixed-age environments can (and do) take their cues from older children and adults; kids who are isolated into the bizarre, historically nonexistent single-age environments found in the modern school system do not have that advantage, and accordingly tend to brutalize each other. Outside of prison there is nothing like it in adult life.

Just want to point out that adults can be just as cruel or even crueler than children with just as little empathy. I don't believe or buy the idea that it just a kid thing. We live in this myth that adults are more mature but interacting with society dispels that myth drastically quick, in my experience.

I think I see a lot more kindness as an adult, but I think this is almost exclusively due to selection effects.

I do not see that kindness at the airport or the grocery store, or most other instances that are closer to a random sampling of the US adult population.

I think the idea is that everyone has to learn to be a good person. Most kids haven't yet but will eventually. some never will.

>There's a lot of the petty BS that you learn from in school that transposes to adult life.

No, you learn maladaptive patterns. Your options are artificially constrained. Most of the ways a grown adult would deal with e.g. bullies are just not available to you.

Take physical violence for example. As an adult, if you're threatened with physical violence you have the options to:

- Get out of there. But kids can't do this because they're physically confined to the same classroom with the same people, every day. And obviously you're not allowed to just leave the school when you want to.

- Fight back. Risky, but you at least won't be punished by the courts if you can argue self-defense. But kids can't do this because "zero tolerance" policies punish both the aggressor and victim, by design, if the victim fights back

- Call the police. Kids can't do this, police don't care about schoolyard disputes. Snitching to a teacher just gets you bullied even more.

- Talk the person down. Maybe this works, but in a school they'll be back again the next day, and you'll have to do it again, and again, and again. Adult interactions are not so predictably repeated, unless in some other highly institutionalized setting like the military or a prison (guess which places also have problems with violent bullying).

Adults can, well, solve their problems like adults. Schoolkids literally aren't allowed to solve their problems like adults. Fuck, they're not even allowed to go to the toilet without asking someone first.

Is there any wonder they develop behavioral pathologies to cope: passivity, social withdrawal, self-harm, proactive aggression, self-sabotage, etc etc.

And I wonder how much of adult suffering comes down from not un-learning bad behavioral patterns learned in school? How many people have put up with being treated like garbage for years (at work, in a relationship, etc), because they haven't internalized that they don't need to ask an authority figure to be allowed to leave?

I never had the opportunity to go to more "not normal" school like Montessori, and I ended learning rather quickly, that at least in normal private schools, the solution to any problem, is violence. If that is not working, then even more violence.

At some point I had to defend myself from a bully (that probably had a awful home life, since that guy managed to come home to school 7:00 in the morning already drunk, multiple times) by bashing the guy with a metal table and then threatening to kill him with a knife. Only then, he stopped bothering me.

Also I knew more than one guy that admired Columbine guys, their reason is that it was a good way (in their minds of course) of both getting out of their shitty life and taking revenge at same time.

Thankfully, now that I am adult, all problems so far I could solve by just talking to people, no tables, knives, planks or chains necessary.

Note: I went to "good" private schools, thus nobody died or got seriously injured, but I have friends that went to public schools, and one of them for example was forced to cause serious injury when 3 older students ambushed him right outside the school, and the only thing he had to defend himself was his skateboard, so he proceeded to hit them with the metal axis where you attach the wheels, broke half of the teeth of one guy, caved in one of the temples of another, and broke the shoulder and one knee of the third, after that the school started to have the police patrol near the school to prevent a repeat of this. Also that school banned skateboards, yoyos, long rulers (specially a particular metal ruler distributed as souvenir during a political campaign, that people found out you could sharpen and use as a decent machete) and spinning tops (specially those with metal tip, one kid made a hole in another kid head with one).

What the hell? When & where were you guys going to school?

I went to a rough inner-city school and there was literally nothing like this. The fights were all between people who were already involved.

in what country

I'm honestly confused by many of the comments I find in this thread re: bullying.

I went to a pretty rough school (repeated fights, people I went to school with murdering people, etc.) and I basically was never even once threatened with violence. All the bullying is through words and making fun of people, etc.

Is physical bullying of this sort actually that common or more media depiction?

Parent commenter, for me there wasn't much violent bullying in my school. I just used those examples because they're likely to resonate with more people. It isn't that uncommon. But my overall point applies to other things as well.

- work-life balance. we expect kids to do "homework", but we don't expect adults to do work outside of actual working hours. we call those places "toxic working environments" and avoid them if we have any sense. I actually have more time to myself as an adult than I did as a kid.

- doing things only so that they can be graded for the approval of some authority figure, rather than because they are intrinsically worthwhile or enjoyable

- a peer group artificially constrained to be only of kids within a year of your age. interacting with kids a few years older or younger is out of the norm, friendships between year groups are rare. that's not how adult life works. I have a pet theory that so much bad behavior in schools is caused by this age stratification.

I would generally agree with you. However, unfortunately, a lot of organizations tend to mimic these exact same social structures. It may not be as aggressive because we're adults now, but understanding how to navigate that and when something is toxic can be a helpful skill.

I spent two years in a rough-ish public school. It was the hardest period in my life but it taught me very much about valuing people from all walks of life and especially on adapting my behavior to get positive outcomes in any social setting. I can absolutely see how that experience is lacking on some of my friends that spent all their lives in protected environments.

Fair point but can't that be worked around through having parents teach their kids to value people from all walks of life? True the lack of exposure does play a factor but I would wager it falls heavily on what parents hand down to their children and how they perceive the world.

Eh, I went to an elite private university after attending a not-so-good urban public school.

Lack of exposure is a massive factor and even with good intentions it does not really make up for it.

Most of the kids I went to school with were oblivious about poverty or even just being mindful of different socieconomic circumstances. stuff like

"yeah, let's just have all of our friends go out to a fancy restaurant and split the bill for every single one of our birthdays"

I agree with your conclusion about aggressive social dynamics of public schools add nothing to child's development, and I base my opinion on my own experiences. I pretty much hated school - not for what I was meant to learn there but because of the aggression. That's main reason I put my kids through montessori, to spare them that experience I had to go through, and which contributed nothing to my development.

There's value to teaching people how to handle conflict, in a safe, low-stakes environment. There's always going to be assholes in life, you need to learn how to deal with them.

The problem is when the degree of conflict escalates past that safe, low-stakes level (which it does for some people, in some schools). We don't have everyone spend a month in prison, as part of their education, for instance, because it wouldn't be safe, or low-stakes, and would permanently damage people.

Gotta put your kids through the damage of school social dynamics so that as adults they'll be equipped to interact with other people who were also damaged by it.

This is not how it works, though. Your damage compounds with the damage of others, it doesn't negate it.

Kids who go through Montessori, Waldorf, etc, have a much better foundation for dealing with damaged people. If you start from a place of self-respect and expect the same of others, you can recognize when others aren't going to reciprocate and you can cope with that.

I mean, for what it’s worth, I’m not being serious :).

I don't know how to frame this that doesn't come off very Stockholm Syndrome, but ... the environment of human beings is not the jungle or the tundra, it is other human beings. As such, being able to navigate among the majority -- whatever they are -- has some kind of utility.

I'll throw in a side of "Americans are often 'stuck' in high school on some developmental level." I couldn't necessarily say the same about people in Europe or anywhere else.

Handling social conflict is a reality of adult life.

The reason that's valuable IMO is that once you get into the Real World, you are going to run into these complex social situations and need to be able to navigate them with grace. Especially in the business world.

I dont think anywhere i have worked was anything like my high school.

Except in the most generic sense that there are lots of people and occasionally there are petty disputes.

How will your child cope in prison if they've never experienced school?

Just want to point out this sounds more like a private->public pros and cons list. I’m not doubting it at all, just not sure if it’s due to the Montessori method. Most Montessori’s are or are operate similar to the private setting.

There's definitely a strong overlap in that sense. Probably also because these institutions tend to have smaller class sizes which allow better teach/student interaction and more time. Public schooling in the US could do this too, but has been hamstrung for decades.

In math the kids definitely leveraged the binomial/trinomial tools, beads and other tactile methods to have a better understanding of the concepts of mult/div/exponentials/roots long before they would have approached in the standard US arithmetic methods. They were also doing algebra and geometry by the end of Montessori.

Montessori also spends a lot of time working on holistic views with regards to science and history and then give the kids the freedom to do their own research and projects on the topics. The normal school models tend to take more of a cause-effect + memorize the dates method as that's what tracks the testing. It's not generally till university that they then go back to something that usually requires critical thinking.

On critical thinking there's an emphasis there in Montessori on involving the kids in asking more questions and then building a model to analyze and defend their position. Public school is optimizing for learn by rote and it's a culture shock going to Uni where they back to something that's utilizing critical analysis.

My older child is in IB at the moment and they're using much of this as it's taught in more of Uni style.

By IB do you mean international baccalaureate? Do you recommend that over standard curricula?

Yes and yes. All of the teachers at the IB here hold a masters or higher in their topics and teach it like it would be at uni. Only one of high schools around here offer anything near it in course depth and focus.

I also like that philosophy is compulsory, I feel that the humanities are under served in our current school systems.

I attended a small, private, religious, non-Montessori school through middle+high school.

While the atmosphere wasn't toxic like I hear people say about public school, few of my peers were interested in learning, excelled academically, etc.

A non-negligible portion of the kids in my school were the ones kicked out of the public school for grades or troublemaking. I think they did better at my school, but that population affected the academic experience. My brother went to another nearby religious school and it was the same.

My school was caught in a loop of poor funding -> sub-par teachers -> less enrollment -> less funding.

I expect a school focused specifically on self-actualization and skill-building to have better results than an arbitrary private school.

This is a good point. "Private" encompasses a wide variety of experiences and quality. My private experience with my kid is of the somewhat elitist variety. They simply would not accept expelled students from any school. They heavily curate enrollment to create an environment for success. They're building a cooperative community of Families that will reinforce the holistic development of each student. Parental involvement is required and with fairly high expectations.

If you just throw kids together and expect the syllabus/curriculum to prevail, you'll quickly find the Lord of the Flies elements of public school social dynamics come into play and for a child often are more important than academics. At that point, simply being "private" has no advantage.

> At that point, simply being "private" has no advantage.

Based on the experience given above as well as my own experience, I'm going to guess the poster was talking about Catholic parochial schools. Catholic parochial schools were the original public schools in North America and still operate as such today, except obviously no public funding in the United States (they do in some provinces of Canada).

Either way, they'll accept basically anyone. However, they do consistently give better results anyway, even adjusting for income and social status. Actually, the effect is most pronounced in the lowest incomes. The richer you are, the less difference parochial v public makes (of course going to super cushy private schools puts you at an advantage).

Thanks for sharing - those are some very valuable insights. If it's not to personal to ask what sex are your children?

I suspect transitioning out may be slightly different depending on a large variety of factors but maybe how children are raised to socialize in a traditional sense. To be fair its been many years since I've been in school but there's probably still a bit of a lean for activity based socializing for boys vs girls but hopefully that's changed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com