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Comment by getwiththeprog | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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