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Comment by outlace | Hacker News Reader

I think we significantly overestimate how much school actually matters compared to family milieus. My wife and I highly value education, so regardless of when the school says children should learn algebra, I am already tutoring my 6 year old in basic algebra. If school did nothing other than be a daycare for my kids so we could work, they'd probably still be better educated than most kids going through public school because my wife and I will make sure of that because we teach our kids a lot on our own (and we're not hiring tutors or after school programs). If schools were more rigorous then it would save us time from having to do a lot of the educating ourselves, but it won't change family values.

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This. I strongly suspect that the biggest problem in school for children from good families isn't the schooling but rather the presence of children from bad families.

My sister is a primary teacher and the things I've heard make it clear that the system tries to make up for bad parenting but it's and uphill struggle.

You are correct that in our world currently and maybe even in the past, the kids never truly learned math in school. I studied in the top university in my Indian province with 50 million people, and most of my undergrad colleagues truly didn’t understand what differentiation and integration actually meant.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. The kids are supposed to learn things in school, we just need to pull our heads out of our assess and acknowledge that almost all current learning systems suck and try to reset from the ground up.

This is a recipe for an ignorant underclass from which one can never escape. What is a bright kid supposed to do when their parents have a third grade education? Functioning public school is supposed to solve that problem.

Public libraries were invented a long, long time ago. These days, the internet is even better than the public libraries used to be.

> What is a bright kid supposed to do when their parents have a third grade education?

What do they do in the current system? Get stuck in a class that can’t move faster than the average student?

I think even moving as fast as the average student is a generous assessment. My dad was a math teacher at a public high school in Southern California. At the end of his career he was the math dept chair. He retired recently but he was constantly battling administration who wanted them to focus on bringing up the bottom of the class. It was a battle that partially led to his retirement. The admins just wanted the test scores to go up and they saw focusing on the bottom as the easiest way.

School doesn’t matter when school is made useless. Almost a tautology.

Yes. However, public schools should provide opportunities for children to break free from this destructive cycle.

And it is not about “family” values. What the single grandma can do? Or single mom having drug issues can do? And these two examples are 100% real world examples.

But that’s sort of the point I’m making- schools can’t fix drug-addicted parents and that’s probably going to make much more of a difference in a child’s educational attainment than how good their teacher is at teaching math. Unless schools are going to do more than just teach academic subjects. They will basically have to function as reliable, disciplining parents.

How do you teach your 6 year old algebra?

I'll give her simple problems like "x + 5 = 0, what must `x` be to make this true?" (First had to teach her the number line and negative numbers) or "2*y = 6, what is y?" (Taught her multiplication as a copy-then-add operation, ie she knows that 2*3 means to make 3 copies of 2 and then add them all together. She hasn’t yet learned the times table)

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