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This is a deeply cynical view and mistakes what makes educating children challenging for the goals of education. Some educators suck. Some educational systems suck. Some engineers suck. Some tech companies suck. But to paint the entire educational system with the same shitty brush is absurd. I know many teachers and many people who work in education who go above and beyond to try to give kids the best experience possible. And despite what the tech universe seems to think, educational approaches change and improve and new ideas come into the mix, sometimes fairly rapidly. If anything, it's the fact that educational systems seem to be habitually underfunded that hinders them more than anything.

Fund free public education. It pays back huge dividends.

And treat teachers with respect.

I find a lot of commentary here to be false dichotomies. Here, education is either bad or good when the reality is that it depends. Some aspects are good, some are bad, some are good in some places, worse in others.

A lot of people struggle with complexity and it is telling that a forum focused on computer science, IT and general tech is so challenged to realise this.

Being good at one thing doesn't make you good at everything. See elon musk.

Whilst I love the cynical view, and it somewhat sadly clicks. I agree high school education sits in the grey. From personal experience the most valuable lesson I leaned in high school is when I was doing something I was interested in getting sleep didn't matter. But learning how to grind through work is a really useful like skill. There's no way to teach hard work. You just got to do it.

Adults ought to be liberated as the starting point. HS is full of violence even if implied

> mistakes what makes educating children challenging for the goals of education.

It would probably be more accurate to call them constraints.

> to paint the entire educational system with the same shitty brush is absurd.

I am not claiming it's shitty - I do believe you actually have to socialise kids, and familiarise with functioning of modern society, many families parents won't be able to do it.

I generally agree with your criticism of the education system as an instrument of filtering/segregation but I would argue school has some practical value.

> Three - grade people into quality batches, based off their punctuality and ability to perform meaningless tasks to arbitrary and meaningless quality standards

For example, doing math is a useful skill, not a meaningless task.

> Four - because the management has gone though the same system of education, the pupils must learn to read through poorly worded vague instructions and understand what their superior actually wants to see, even though they are not capable of expressing it clearly. Poorly worded exam papers serve as good training

There is a lot of nuance to English communication, at least among native speakers. Things like active/passive voice, hyperbole, and different kinds of logical arguments are implicit to communication in professional circles. It's important to study them.

Also you're ignoring the cultural education that studying literature/writing provides you. There are tons of literary references in everyday communication and you will be at a disadvantage if you don't know them (a "Scarlet Letter", "Big Brother", etc.). These stories are foundational to Western culture and you are expected to know them.

> For example, doing math is a useful skill, not a meaningless task.

I can't define trig relations, I sort of remember how to do multiple unknowns/linear algebra, can't even remember the definition of a quadratic equation and I couldn't do derivations if my life depended on it.

Funny thing is I used to know this stuff and actually used some of it when I was in to game dev. 10 years later anything that's above elementary school I'd probably need to Google or Wolfram.

> There are tons of literary references in everyday communication and you will be at a disadvantage if you don't know them (a "Scarlet Letter", "Big Brother", etc.)

You can look up idioms/references without reading the works.

If the above is all true, that would prepare pupils for future jobs --whether self-employed or working a corporate job.

One cannot run (successfully) a corner bakery without being able to handle routine and carry out mundane tasks or without getting up early and doing basic chores as well as being able to interact with others, keep track of your finances, etc. Corp job is much of the same.

You're getting moulded to have the potential to be a productive human being. The alternative is to have people find out what works and not on their own.

Even drugs dealers and macs know the importance of all the above.

Now, sure some people for various reasons cannot conform and revert to more "chimp self" and don't do well in civilization. But even if they became foragers and lived off the land, they'd have to learn routines, have attention to detail, patience and so on.

I argue that the school's purpose is to educate. These effects you describe are merely incidental to the process of education. It's not about producing disciplined workers for an industrial era, it just a story we concoct after the fact.

Now, could we reform the system? I supposed we could, but society relied on a set of assumptions on how schools work. If you need to implement reforms, you cannot focus on school systems in isolation.

> Now, could we reform the system? I supposed we could, but society relied on a set of assumptions on how schools work. If you need to implement reforms, you cannot focus on school systems in isolation.

Indeed, but now we are talking about change in two systems.

Like we have 100% proof that starting school later is better for the kids, but many people don't even realise that their taxes are funding childcare, so convincing them to fund additional childcare will be very difficult.

What a completely absurd and nonsense take. Where does this "purpose" get decided? Some secret cabal that controls the education system? Insane.

There are some flaws in our education system that are likely the result of the fact that it is huge, serves an incredibly diverse set of people, and thus is a very complex and difficult to manage system.

There's no secret back room of evil people controlling the populace via an imperfect education system. What a weird take.

I don't endorse the GPs view in totality, but I don't think its necessary to have some secret cabal deciding things in order to have a discussion about the 'purpose' of complex social systems. taking just the example in the OP, parents need to go to work from 9 to 5 to feed their family, so they need their kids to be in school sooner than that so they can get them out the door, so they go to school board meetings and make sure that the start time stays early. No one shadowy is making this decision, its the result of a consistent failure to address the root causes and orient the system towards its intended purpose as part of a larger social system.

If I start living in my van to renovate my house, but I never call any contractors or work on it myself, how long is it before I just become a guy who lives in a van? In the same sense as the van, sets of institutions that aren't subject to constant maintenance and orientation towards their purpose evolve to fill whatever broken niche exists by way of stochastic individual action.

That's just not what the word purpose means. Take your example:

> If I start living in my van to renovate my house

Keyword here, "to". "To" imbues the purpose. If you then completely fail to actually do the renovation, sure, that's absolutely a problem, but the van's purpose was still to help you renovate the house. You just happened to fail at it. Intent matters, and the comment I replied to implies a whole lot of malicious intent that is more likely just incompetence or unpredictable outcomes. The difference is important in understanding how to address the issue.

Thinking everything is a conspiracy is giving the assholes too much credit.

The education system is an education system. It's bad because it's underfunded, mismanaged, and pulled in multiple directions for political reasons, not to mention occasionally tasked with impossible jobs, such as keeping a roomful of emotionally disturbed children going in the same direction using only one underpaid teacher and a couple para-professionals. If it were actively designed to be malicious, it would be a lot more competent.

I'm sympathetic to OP, it's not that it's a conspiracy--it's the survival criteria of the system. It has to "work" as an institution to go on existing. Things that make the institution of education more effective tend to happen:

1. It has to be compatible with the modern system of employment (feat the 40hr workweek, generally a commute, workers who typically fit into many companies in standardized roles)

2. Opportunities to make it more efficient that don't run directly contrary to its stated goal of educating tend to happen, e.g. standardized testing. And because students move around and it's inefficient for everybody everywhere to invent their own curriculum, they need to be standardized.

3. It needs to be legible meritocratically, to its own existence and measure performance, and also to usefully input into the employment system.

These are excellent points. Especially the last one, the veneer of meritocracy is an important socialisation tool as much at is a sorting tool

> Thinking everything is a conspiracy is giving the assholes too much credit.

"maxwellhill"? :) https://www.nytimes.com/1989/05/18/business/mcgraw-hill-and-... / https://archive.is/bZKuA

I read it as less conspiracy and more an example of, "The purpose of a system is what it does." Sure, it's a nasty, cynical take, but to some approximation, perhaps it may as well be true.

I dunno man, pre-civilisation and education wasn't exactly much fun either. I'd rather be a part of the system that basically gives us everything from food to iPhones and the Internet than fight against it (while avoiding predators in the wild).

This is not to say that education, especially for boys and young men couldn't be made considerably better.

The older I get the more I'm realizing "pre-history", "pre-civilisation" are very Western European Concepts.

Like when the Conquistadors "civilized" mexico Or when the Portuguese and French "civilized" West Africa.

but iPhone!

Plus when the bombs go off over the Amazon warehouses, who lives? You, who can follow a Hello Fresh recipe reasonably well, or the paleoindian who can flint knap all the tools they need to process their calories?

Early civilisation mostly kicked off around Egypt and China so not all that Western European.

Here we go again. Just because people living in huts in the wilderness are seemingly happy doesnt mean you can rewrite history. No one is arguing colonialism isnt bad or cannibalism et cetera.

Once you really dig deep into history you can see humans have been wiping off other nations and civilizations left and right. Assyrians, babylonians - all gone. One could make an assumption genocide and warfare are almost instinctive to us.

What's left are few rocks standing, if even that, all ruined by our own hubris and violent nature.

You completely missed their point. It was well beyond that they colonized places. It's that they believed they 'civilized' places.

Sometimes I think it’s also naive to think that food and modern conveniences (for you and your descendants) will continue to arrive if you just do your job… today you may have food on the table for your family by just showing up to work. But are you sure that whoever you work for won’t keep upping their share and reduce yours as time passes?

Maybe just maybe “the system” (as you called it) is just a seemingly more civilized way of doing what was done before: surviving.

There's always the question over whether a comfortable unnatural life is better than the sort of hunter-gatherer life our brains and bodies spent most of the human generations adapting for.

No matter, without organized mechanized agriculture and the nitrogen fixation process and other technology of the present, most of us would be dead and not able to ponder the question.

You are grossly mischaracterizing the word "purpose". The purpose is to educate.

Yet the flaws in the system are quite real, and you have called some of them out. But calling out the flaws and claiming they are the intended purpose is quite simply wrong.

BTW, you can change who is in control - school boards are locally elected. Your vote has more power to change schools than almost anything else. If you want improvement, get involved.

The purpose of any system is what it does.

Do you thing the prisons are there to 'correct' inmates? It says department of corrections but it looks more like the department of shove them in a hole.

I'm not sure how this makes since with "classroom" education far predating the modern era. See English boarding school stories or any number US girl coming-of-age stories. Certainly none of them justify the idea that education's purpose is to support two income families.

With that, I think you'd find that most leaders of politics and industry had some manner of classroom education. Homeschooling is not a common practice among the elite. It may still serve the purpose of "habituating chimps into highly unnatural behavior" but if so, it's behavior that is so commonplace as to be indistinguishable from "natural" behavior.

So I'm not sure how we can ascribe all these negative objectives to the Education System as few better methods have come along and found wide acceptance. There's the Waldorfs and the Montessoris and the variety of homeschool co-ops of course, but they are serve a pretty small percentage of students worldwide.

Don't forget: separate students into age cohorts so they can't learn from each other. Set the expectation that the oldest cohost will disappear forever after a token yearly celebration.

My dad is a teacher, and each day when dropping my off for high school he used to say "be careful, it is an institution out there."

"They want obedient workers. Obedient workers, people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork.... " -- George Carlin

Do not get life advice from podcasters, standup comics, or anyone who lives in NYC.

(Because they'll all try to get you to do coke.)

Sounds like that Carlin quote hit a nerve.

Some of this is true, and some isn't. It is quite a mishmash. That said it is easy to find places in the world where kids aren't required to go to school, and those places aren't any kind of utopia.

I agree mostly with your points, but what they describe is the 'schooling system' and not an education system. Its the Prussian model or the industrial age factory model of education.

If 1) is such a priority, why not have a hogwarts style boarding school rather than what we've got already?

An alternate implementation might be a larger condo / apartment where there's a dedicated 'house mom / dad / babysitter' to mind the kids during the day.

In a later stage society with strong / real AI I could see the supervision role entirely as part of the social infrastructure.

+++

Long term we probably need to engineer society for less children and a target of gene propagation at equilibrium / replacement rates.

#iam14andthisisdeep

On the more serious note, this crap which is so popular among the people who have zero understanding of what education is gets really tiresome.

Nice that we can have a conversations here. Where did you learn how to read and write? English is not my main language, guess where I learned it.

I don't know your background, but we learned loads of things in school.

Go talk to some kids in the world that are unable to go to schools, and explain them how lucky they are.

It's all in the numbers.

1. In 1945, corporations paid 50% of federal taxes; now they pay about 5%.

2. In 1900, 90% of Americans were self employed; now it's about 2%...

It's called consolidation; strengthen governments and corporations, weaken individuals. With taxes, this can be done imperceptibly over time.

"Corporations" don't have interests. Their shareholders do and those are individual people.

Corporate income tax doesn't matter much when the same money's going to go to an individual and can be taxed there.

…by "90% of Americans were self employed in 1900" do you mean they were farm workers?

There should be two categorizations for students: highly creative students should be placed on a different path to adulthood, everybody else could use the current system. Highly creative people are more likely to be successful dropouts.

To force highly creative people into this routine, is dictatorship of the mind. That's how it was for me.

Edit: I upset the academics :)

Nice caste system you've got there

That's like, the opposite of a caste system

How would you identify highly creative people? Genuinely asking. If you advantage them, parents will do everything they can to make their kid look like one even if they aren’t one. And some kids will not look like one due to a bad home life or food insecurity or untreated developmental disorder.

You don’t advantage them. A creative track is probably as infuriating to a non-creative person as the current system is to creative ones. Creative tracks should still have outcomes.

It’s like trying to cheat your way into professional sports: if you are not a good fit, it won’t be pretty. And indeed we do have a track for athletes.

To think that all students are identical and they all deserve the same track is myopic. Turns out, we are all different people.

People do cheat their way to professional sports, though. We had a whole collegiate scandal explicitly to get non athletes into the athlete track.

Why not three? One stream for creative types, one for practical types, then the rest. For the practical stream, unless it's changed, we already do this - from year 10 (about 15yo), Australian students can begin an apprenticeship/trade. From that age group, students are choosing electives and focusing on their strengths or interest, whether STEM or arts or physical electives.

And otherwise or for highly creative people, a grounding in most other things is useful. If you're an artist of some sort, you're going to be writing supporting documentation for exhibitions, or running business admin selling your work. To some degree, I think it's healthy for people to be pushed out of their comfort zone here and there.

Do you suppose there should be a test to get into the creatives path? Because every kid will want to be there

Isn't this how we somehow (per|con)verted "likes computers" into STEAM? Everybody deserves to participate!

I would love to see your system/tool for predicting future creativity. Or some evidence that creative people are more likely to be successful dropouts. The evidence I've seen at least suggests the biggest predictor of success is grit: the ability to grind through and stick with something longer than others. Now, you might argue the measure of success also needs to be updated to accommodate your "creative people" hypothesis, but then you're basically designing the question to meet your predefined outcome.