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Comment by gloryjulio | Hacker News Reader

The problems is that it doesn't matter what happens, all the competitive parents that I know of regardless of race, country, class would choose the schools and private tutors. They will pay what they can afford to push their children ahead. That's just how it is.

And then we can see who are truly left behind

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That is not my experience in Australia at all. Many of the best students go to public schools and do not take tutoring. No one needs to be left behind.

Real learning requires real inquiry, which unrelated to your comment, is what the NZ Education Dept is trying to do - make subjects about the world around us to focus on problem solving - rather than the rote learning of say Newtonian laws.

The issue is that many things ultimately still require rote learning. Most STEM subjects cannot avoid it unless you are genuinely talented and mathematically inclined. You can appreciate Newton's laws in classical mechanics as much as you want but you still need practice if you want to apply the kinematics and force equations in any reasonable amount of time during an exam. Same with Hamiltonians and Lagrangians. The further you go, the more intuition requires rote learning to build up. (I would note however that rote learning doesn't necessarily impart any mathematical maturity, but it does help with achieving conceptual understanding of the problem. Solve enough differentiation problems on pen and paper and gradient descent and backpropagation become obvious, but proving epsilon deltas won't necessarily be as helpful.)

> You can appreciate Newton's laws in classical mechanics as much as you want but you still need practice if you want to apply the kinematics and force equations in any reasonable amount of time during an exam. Same with Hamiltonians and Lagrangians.

As a general rule there is exactly zero of any of this for the overwhelming vast majority of primary school children in their first 7 years of formal education in either Australia or New Zealand.

Ok thanks, I was here thinking my elementary school must've been terrible. We learned that pushing an object makes it move.

We got the same, mention of the stationary-action principle and application of Newtonian, Lagrangian and Hamiltonian equations of motion came some time after sporting milk moustaches in primary school.

I don’t see how your comment is related to mine?

Schools have to make choices about pedagogy. I think this is a debate about which choices give the best outcomes.

You’re pointing out that access to educational resources is allocated by wealth to some degree, which is obviously true but I don’t understand your point beyond that?

Because so long Bloom's 2 sigma observation holds, pedagogy only matters at scale. In other words, it mostly affect the lower middle class and poor people. Good education systems can ensure that most people get educated. The elites and upper middle class are more than capable of giving their children an excellent education anywhere. Working class parents don't have time to babysit every single homework problem or to fix every gap and flaw in the school's syllabus by themselves.

It's the aggressive parents that u need to show the results and convince that the new system will show better learning, better resumes, better applications to the universities, make their children more competitive than the others.

Else the parents will take the matters to their own hands, because they know the moment their children r in the real world internships or entrepreneurship, they r in the world of stack ranking and result based fierce competitions.

Have we seen these kind of reforms would make the children more competitive by those parents standard? Tbh no so far. I don't think those parents will take the chances

The private high school in my small NZ town costs half of the before tax salary of someone on minimum wage. For a good IT job in this town, probably still 1/2 to 1/3 of your after tax salary. Private schools here are very much a minority option.

Even on my bigger-city tech salary, putting both of my kids through private high school would be about 1/3 to 1/2 my after tax income.

Yes it's an option, but it's a big sacrifice.

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