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Comment by Moissanite | Hacker News Reader

I had never heard of Montessori schools before this thread so I'm sure there is more going on than I'm aware of - but I wanted to point out that what you describe here:

> school had about 15-25 kids / class year. Some of the larger years were split into two groups with separate teachers. Every year, maybe one or two kids left to go to other schools and one or two new kids joined, but for the most part I grew up with the same core set of children for several years.

seems perfectly normal from a UK primary school perspective (up to age 11 or 12 depending on the area). I'm surprised to hear that kids younger than that age would be expected to have larger peer groups in the US.

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Huh, is that the maximum number of students of the same age? To be clear, the Montessori school I went to had a little over 100 students with all 6 class years combined.

For context, in the US many public middle/high schools are like two orders of magnitude larger per class year. Many schools have like 1000 kids / class year.

It would be fairly typical for a UK primary school (up to age 11) to have up to 30 kids per class, but only 1 class per year - so ~210 kids total. Some schools have 2 classes per year, so double that for 400-500 in the whole school - but that many is rare in my experience.

Secondary school (11-16) is more commonly around 30 per class, 7-12 classes per year, 5 year groups in the school - so 1000-1500 kids. 16-18 can either be at the school (which would then be a smaller cohort than the 15-16 year group due to some people going elsewhere), or an external college which is highly variable in size.

In France, a typical primary school will have between 100 and 200 kids total maybe 250 in Paris but that would be a large one. A middle school will be between 400 and 800 students and a high school around 1000.

1000 kids / class year is unheard of. That seems huge to me to the point I can’t understand how it would work. I knew mostly everyone in my class year up to high school and even then I probably knew more than half. Might explain why the social scene is far less brutal here than in the US.

The 38th biggest high school in the US is Cypress Bay, with 3980 students (presumably over four years).

1000 kids / class year is quite unusual!

https://highschoolguide.org/624/top-100-largest-high-schools...

It is also the norm in parts of Eastern Europe - having the same 20-30 class year between the ages of 6-7 and 16-17.

Could it be that the social life at the 'prestigious college' was just rubbish, e.g. geared towards extraverted mba-types with 'default' social activities being clubbing and drinking?

I went to school in a rural area of the US and we also had about 20 kids in most classes. It started to get a little more crowded towards high school as there seemed to be a lot of people moving to the area and it didn't seem to be expected. But everyone was worried there were too many kids in class when there were 30 at that point.

So I think this varies quite a lot across the US. I tend to feel that large cities have more crowded classes than rural areas, but I have no data for that.

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