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Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

Where did we decide that we want kids to think for themselves? Schools are by design meant to disuade such things. Standard public schools are about deciding who best comports with societal norms, rewarding those who society deems most fit, and providing childcare during working hours. The best thing a kid can ever take from school is a grade good enough for them to attend a proper institute of higher learning. The best thing one can ever take from highschool is getting out unscathed.

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Schools have their issues, but children learn essential skills and knowledge of the world at schools. Without public schools, most children would learn almost nothing in comparison and society would absolutely deteriorate.

There are scarcely any other institutions, parents included, that are capable of teaching children how to read, write, do math, science fundamentals, etc.

We should be dumping 1000x the amount of money we currently are into public schools. Teachers ought to be among the best paid members of the middle class. Yes, schools have their issues, but the solution is to recognize the critical function they serve and the massive underselling of what they could do for us if treated properly as an asset, and to start funding them correctly.

The contents taught at school are overrated. They can be learned with 1-2 hours a day of homeschooling. It’s mostly about childcare and people who just repeat what they went through. Even coping with bullying is taken as learning how to deal with “real life”. I think it’s mainly for childcare and is great at producing obedient employees and soldiers.

Higher education (for IT and business) is overrated by people who paid so much for their own that they only hire their likes.

> The contents taught at school are overrated. They can be learned with 1-2 hours a day of homeschooling.

Did you? Why not? Myself I didn't.

It's true that the content could theoretically be learned in 1-2 hours a day of studying systematically - if the student is a highly motivated adult with some amount of uninterrupted focus time during the day, and no executive function issues. Children at school are none of this. They're not adults. They're not motivated - or capable of being motivated - by school. They don't have fully developed executive functions. And their parents don't have 1-2 hours a day to spare to homeschool them.

Public school system isn't optimized to help the few ideally-suited children excel - it's optimized to give a chance to grow to everyone. This includes being a daycare, so the parents can work, so the society doesn't break down. This includes giving reliable baseline education to everyone. This includes working as a safe space for children who, due to no fault of their own, were born into poverty, or in pathological families, and would otherwise not have access to proper nutrition and healthcare (this was a big deal during COVID lockdowns). Public school system is, arguably, the only thing enabling any kind of upward mobility in the society.

Official grade level material for math and English in US primary schools is pretty basic. I spent a couple of weeks per grade on the math workbooks and absorbed English primarily by reading books (usually fiction borrowed from the school or public library.) Spelling drills might have helped with spelling. Handwriting exercises did nothing until I discovered (beautiful) cursive italic some years later.

I think you're right that public education is intended to provide a basic useful level of education to everyone. This is a good goal, though I think many students would benefit from asynchronous (vs. lock-step) study and a less rigid grade structure.

Agree. Not going to school is only for some privileged people who can live on only one income and at least one parent can guide (not “teach”). I wish the benefits of homeschooling could be scaled to mass education (self paced, adapted to each kid, no bullying, more time to play, and more)

What a person needs to know to function ethically and practically in contemporary society is only increasing. I'd love to hear how the majority of children can be expected to be taught what's needed outside of a public school system. Set aside the suboptimal pedagogy of the current system; I grant it. But getting rid of it is basically giving up. The only real path forward is improvement of education -- the staff, the lesson plans, methods, hiring, funding, etc etc.

I’d leave ethics to the family even in a traditional school.

If you believe that it's not a responsibility for a school to teach ethical behavior, then you have a very narrow view of ethics. Cooperation, sharing, boundaries, transactionalism, turn-taking, equity, etc., are all ethics. Any institution requires some modulation, encouragement, and enforcement of such practices. One of the primary jobs of a school is to impart the skills needed to deploy various ethical frameworks in service of a healthy, functional practice of life. It's not possible to have a school without ethical practicum.

Go to any schoolboard meeting in the last decade. Look at who is being elected to those positions. The last thing that we should do is give those people more money. Reform has to come before new funding.

I agree. My point is not that the current system needs to be reinforced, but that it needs to be improved, and we should be willing to eat the cost to do it, because if we let the current system stand, it will fall apart, and if it falls apart, game over, because almost everything decent in modern life depends on well educated citizens.

>Where did we decide that we want kids to think for themselves?

There was a ~30yr period were western society gave it some lip service while backing that up with no reinforcing action. Say 1980-2010 or thereabouts.

And that lip service explains much of the state we are now in. "Think for yourself" is all well and good when the only place to find information is a library of carefully-curated books. Those kids are now "thinking for themselves" on the internet, doing their own "research" and falling down rabbit holes that end at anti-vac and flat earth groups. Perhaps we should have better taught kids to have some respect for the pursuit of knowledge. I have a grown man, a product of 70s and 80s public schools, who thinks taking horse dewormer is a better idea than getting a flu vaccine. And I cannot call him out as an idiot because this is a "political issue". THAT is what schools in the 70s and 80s did to people.

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