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That's a weird way of looking at it.

Of course you produced nothing of value. Learning in school is about absorbing already existing knowledge. Barring some really exceptional anecdotes like Gauss figuring out how to efficiently sum series in school, it's pretty much certain that you'll come up with nothing new whatsoever.

But surely some of that had to sink in, and that was the point.

In the long term, the vast majority of things fade away. I spent a lot of time maintaining an internal inventory management app, which was eventually deprecated and now it's probably not used by anyone anywhere in the world, if not completely lost forever. Such is life. Still, I learned a lot from that.

> Of course you produced nothing of value. Learning in school is about absorbing already existing knowledge.

That's certainly how it's set up today, but I find it difficult to believe that the most optimized, useful, and productive way to teach children about reality is the method we've settled on in the modern US. School could instead be designed around the production of art, goods, and services that are actually desired and used by people in and outside of the school. This would be a great deal more difficult to set up and maintain than a series of gradeable worksheets.

> Learning in school is about absorbing already existing knowledge.

Under the current model, is the knowledge really absorbed? Math class is great example. Most people struggle through algebra and trigonometry worksheets for a few hundred hours and then immediately dump the knowledge when they graduate and can't even name the three primary triangle side-ratios five years later. Was completing curated problem sets under threat of a worse career if they failed really the best use of their time? That can't be the best way to teach them.

> I spent a lot of time maintaining an internal inventory management app, which was eventually deprecated and now it's probably not used by anyone anywhere in the world, if not completely lost forever. Such is life. Still, I learned a lot from that.

Sure, but you were producing something of value. When you learned about an issue, you went hunting for the root cause because people were actually relying on you to do so, and when you fixed the issue you felt real satisfaction, and retained a desire to remember what you'd done. Also, you were paid.

I would wager a good deal of money that what you learned while managing the app stuck in your brain a lot more effectively than if the same activity had been taught to you in a class where you completed worksheets based on the inventory management platform.

Sounds a lot like turning school into a workplace.

Sometimes when you want to learn something new you dive in and try to hack something together. But when it’s sufficiently complicated or foreign you cant do that. You have to step back and study the underlying domain. That’s school. Its an incredible luxury to do that for 16 years of your life while producing nothing of value.

16 years of schooling is a luxury only if you're getting something out of it and are intending to go to college. Otherwise, it's a prison (for the upper levels, at minimum).

If you're not inclined to book learning or find yourself in a poor quality institution, an apprenticeship in a workplace/industry relevant to your interests could easily be a better fit.

School, as experienced by most people, is definitely not a luxury. It's closer to an ordeal.

So what, you want students be actually employed and be producing something? I don't think that's going to work.

So at around 13 I'd say that I was about the only one of my 30-ish classmates that was actually producing something that resembled working code. I coded a whole functional (but simple) sprite editor in QBASIC that could write PCX files.

But honestly, that code was complete crap. I was barely figuring out what functions were good for, because most of that was being self-taught by reading the manual and trial and error. And compared to my classmates that was top 1% stuff.

Nobody actually wants stuff like that for any serious purpose. No company wants that code, or being saddled with a few dozen teenagers, some of which are completely useless. And that goes for all fields. Who out there needs a human to do trigonometry these days? What about history, or literature? What does production there look like? Do we grade them based on likes and reviews on fanfiction.net?

When I was about 8 or 9 I made an autoplay executable that would open a HTML file from a cd, and the HTML file linked to a PDF reader + the documents that were on the cd. My dad used it to distribute surveys and a newsletter to his conservation group. When I was a bit older I made a reader for saved webcomics because I didn't like the way photo viewer shrank the images by default.

"Nobody actually wants stuff like that for a serious purpose" is wrong and dismissive. Sometimes they actually do; sometimes they have a real but non-critical need of debatable seriousness, and software from a kid can fill it; sometimes the other person is a fellow 9 year old, what they want is an overly enthusiastic Harry Potter fanfiction where he meets Lightning McQueen, and both the author and reader are happy.

I don't think the suggestion was that students be employed or economically productive, just that they would be producing work to be proud of a lot more often in a better system.

> No company wants that code, or being saddled with a few dozen teenagers, some of which are completely useless.

This is an efficient summary of the social attitude I'm criticizing. People believe that children and teenagers are useless. They believe this because the structure of modern education requires young people to be useless. Every adult in their lives repeats variants of "you cannot and should not be trusted to do real work that other people need", and so young people grow up believing that.

If instead of resenting their presence and demanding that they be warehoused away in the name of efficiency, adults in contemporary society ought to look forward to training young people to be useful. If you take this attitude, and regard every young person as a future ally in your endeavors to maintain civilization to a high standard, it becomes clear that what's being done in most schools is inefficient, poorly-managed, and counterproductive.

And that works in some contexts, like farming, where you give the kids a simple task like "paint a fence", "carry this from A to B", or "chop some wood".

Approximately no company wants to deal with an unskilled person. It takes a pro weeks to even start doing something useful in most organizations, let alone to be an useful addition to the team. If teenagers could be expected to produce useful code, then we'd have companies hiring new, unexperienced developers, but pretty much nobody wants to.

Now of course there are some really clever 12 year olds out there that can actually do cool things. But they're a very small proportion, and if you only deal with them then it's no longer education, but a mentorship for a select few.

I think you should let kids be creative and TRY to make useful things, but the quality of most things I made in school when I was creative and developing things was rather low quality in general because I needed to have all the learning experiences. So I don't think in general kids should be trying to build quality useful things but maybe we can just let them take a shot at everything to see how to do it instead.

There is something pretty similar this called Project-Based Learning which tries to get there. Kids are tasked to find something that they're interested in, then the lessons that need to happen are modulated by their unique personal projects. It doesn't produce useful things, but it does produce things that they care about, which is nearly as good.

> but I find it difficult to believe that the most optimized, useful, and productive way to teach children about reality is the method we've settled on in the modern US.

You're spot on, it isn't. That's by design. The foremost goal of a modern education system is creating a labor force[1][2] that meets the projected demands of the economy. What is interesting to think about is that over time the type of workforce the economy needs changes and how that interacts with changes in education policy.

Don't get me wrong, there is value in trigonometry but I think classes on probability, statistics, and basic financial math like compound interest and so on are much more impactful when it comes to aggregate outcomes. I don't think it has to be an either or type of thing.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussian_education_system

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_school

Everyone always talks about financial math, but it seems like the more important thing is the math that would help you make money in the first place.

A "How to ensure that you never get a door dash or eating out or only fans habit" class, and creating a culture that didn't promote expensive status symbols might save people more money than knowing how to budget properly...

There are schools out there where kids are writing a lot of high quality essays, creating good video presentations that would hold their own against a lot of popular YouTube content, creating great photography, music, etc.

I think most public schools tend to prioritize sports at the expense of most of those other activities.

Sports culture is so crazy. Why is it illegal for kids to smoke and drink and get tattoos, but we actively encourage sports that can cause lifelong injuries, while making almost no effort to promote any kind of low risk fitness, that doesn't make you feel so awful most people will just quit?

In some cases, those sports involve gaining over 300lbs, which seems like it would largely counteract any benefits of the excercise.

Although it does seem like there's a certain number of people with some kind of major psychological need to prove themselves to themselves and have some kind of way to measure their progress and know they are gaining strength every day, and for them sports might be better than the self destructive lifestyle they sometimes do if they get consumed by feeling like they're "not enough".

I would argue families prioritize sports over those activities even more so. I have direct family members that played D1 and professional sports, and it’s wild how high the level of commitment for non-pro track athletics has become since the 90’s-early 00’s.

Just based on your post, you seem like a pretty competent writer. That's not a natural skill; a lot of people can't do it well. Do you think you would have learned that sitting at home?

Like, maybe school wasn't perfect and access to a team of private tutors would have put you in a better place today. But I'd hazard a guess your school assignments were more useful than you think. Process, not product.

Most people who go through school don't learn to become competent writers. This is shows that school does not teach people to be competent writers.

So competent writers generally did not learn that skill in school. At best they learned some foundational skills. But the competent writers that I've known, often think that there were betters ways in which they could have learned those skills.

I have sometimes been accused of writing competently. And so it should be no surprise that I agree with them. School was a terrible way for me to learn. And I credit most of my skills to things that I did outside of school.

This goes doubly for homework assignments. As https://www.alfiekohn.org/homework-myth/ explains, research shows that homework is useless overall. It can help, or it can hurt. And on average it balances out to no net benefit.

I have ADHD. This reduces the odds that homework helps and increases the odds that it hurts. Growing up, homework was a constant burden on my life. I would have been far better off if I'd been given less homework. Particularly homework which looks like a practice drill.

Absolutely. After pondering over this website myself for 20 minutes, I felt similarly to OP regarding the long slog through elementary and secondary schooling to finally feel like there was "progress". It's clear filtering by grades in the sheets, the tempo of the exercises is painfully slow. I remember as a kindergartner being able to produce and memorize multiplication tables after being taught the process. It took at least 3 to 4 more years until school ever began expect it.

The thing is many of these concepts and ideas and facts _are_ simple and straightforward. In seventh grade I literally stopped doing my work altogether, and was offered by the teaching staff to move onward to eighth grade instead. I felt then that I still understand now, that forcing yourself through the paces is important too. If I skipped a grade who knows what little things I may have missed.

It's like lifting weights, you're better off being gradual about your increases and pushing your rep counts -- instead of doing two reps of something you shouldn't even be attempting.

The truth is any good teacher and school would be able to provide projects and exercises that would help apply the types of rote work the sheets present. Even if you only ever did the sheets on the site, it'd still take some kids the whole year to get through them. If teachers are creative enough, there should be enough flexibility to cater to both student types.

Thank you for your compliment.

To clarify, I'm not saying that it's possible to learn to write without writing a great deal. I certainly wouldn't have learned to write well without writing often.

However, I didn't learn to write particularly well until I was out of college and had begun writing for myself. In school I was rarely interested in ensuring that what I was writing was interesting, well-phrased, or enjoyable to read. Those qualities simply weren't prioritized, which is weird, because those are the qualities by which writing is judged in "the real world".

I certainly relied on basic writing practice I received in completion-based classes, but my claim isn't that I didn't learn anything useful in school, it's that the time I did spend in school was poorly allocated and resulted in an underdeveloped product.

"If children started school at six months old and their teachers gave them walking lessons, within a single generation people would come to believe that humans couldn't learn to walk without going to school."

I think a lot of it does come down to scale. Imagine the challenge of being a teacher tasked with teaching (science/english/math/etc) to 150-200 unique kids per day, often with little to no budget or support from admin, parents, etc. Unless you are truly exceptional at teaching, you have to teach to the middle to compensate, or your class will tear itself apart.

You are correct. But, as a teacher myself, it doesn't matter if you are good or bad as a teacher, you can't give every student what they need to best excel. Everything you do is a tradeoff that helps certain types of students, and others not so much. Perhaps make some disinterested in the topic.

As a teacher or institute, you decide on a teaching philosophy, which then determines your tradeoffs in practice. And you live with the result.

This is no different from, as many on this forum will understand, writing software for a certain type of user. Changing the UI or featureset will tradeoff the type of users interested in your software. You can't satisfy everyone.

Also in the US the incentives for going into teaching are totally wrong. We should train the best and brightest so that our kids learn from them, but the salaries and working conditions are so bad that it actively discourages people.

What's the advantage to having the best and brightest teachers if they're in a room of average and dim students?

Both teachers and students should be tracked by ability. Best teachers for the best students. Mid teachers for mid students.

that assumes that average and dim are constants and unchangeable. but the point remains is that we're not even getting the best teachers to begin with, because the job is so unattractive if it's not your passion.

Average and dim usually seem pretty fixed by adulthood.

Were teachers better in previous generations? I remember the majority of mine being excellent. Might it be more unattractive now than 30 - 40 years ago?

People are not going into the public school system during adulthood.

Inflation-adjusted average teachers salaries have fallen over the past decade, and starting salaries are at the lowest levels measured: https://www.nea.org/nea-today/all-news-articles/average-teac...

A lot of teachers in the US now work two jobs to make ends meet, which is a recipe for disaster.

No they don't enter public school during adulthood, but if none of the interventions move the needle by the time their adults, what's the point?

Have inflation-adjusted salaries for other industries? They're not great either. Look at average attorney starting salaries.

The best students may actually be fine with no teacher or a very hands off method.

The students struggling the most may require the best teacher (and useful administration).

Because that's the system that built the modern world?

Send the best and brightest to thow themselves against the dull and dim because the best students will be fine with no teacher.

The best and brightest should be challenged and pushed to excel at academicly rigorous programs. The dim and dull should managed through a course of study that has more achievable standards.

The US k-12 school system is well understood to, as a first approximation, optimize for average or a bit below. There are often carve outs for interesting tracks for kids.

I'm not sure the right approach. Rigorous testing and sorting from an early age into silos of tracking kids has its own major flaws.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastery_learning

Mastery-based learning is good, but there is a degenerate path that is important to avoid. Some students can master basic computational tasks (like addition and multiplication), but don't have the maturity to reliably produce that mastery; in other words, they're sloppy. A human instructor teaching to the mastery approach will move on with them, and when they are learning a later skill and they make a basic error (7+4=12, for example), will point it out to the student, and let them fix that, and show that they have mastered the more advanced skill. A computer, on the other hand, will just decree that they got the question wrong, have not achieved mastery, and force them to repeat the instruction. It's very demotivating, and still not fully solved, although Khan Academy's recent change allowing students to reset/start-over tests without completing them has helped.

So I am not necessarily going to disagree that the way school is setup up the optimal strategy is to cram and then purge the data after the test.

However I have had a revelation recently in regards to learning where I realized that even if it is an intellectual skill we are trying to master, repetition is still required to do anything other than move a vague knowledge to applicable knowledge.

I think part of the problem of schooling is that we focus so much on having knowledge and completely divorce it from practice or application in any way, meaning that the knowledge largely feels useless, and it results in students being unmotivated, and feeling as though time and effort is wasted. This is probably driven because most of these tests are simply "can you regurgitate the knowledge by filling in the right bubble? After all we know that the mitchondria is the powerhause of the cell, but there isn't much application anyone gets beyond knowing that fact.

I think if our efforts were on mastery of a skill there can be value in worksheets, and homework.

EDIT: I'll add given that you are on HN you probably also remember and understand more from school than you realize.

> I'll add given that you are on HN you probably also remember and understand more from school than you realize.

Maybe--my claim isn't that I didn't learn anything in school, but that what I did learn was a fraction of what I could have learned, and that most of the material I was shown I now struggle to remember. I can barely recall a thing from any science class that wasn't reinforced by my engineering degree, and most of the things I know about history I learned after college when I started actually paying attention to it. Even my current geography skills are from repetitions outside of college as an adult.

When you listen to the average American trying to put together a coherent argument about society, politics, foreign countries, history, etc., or even just to write a coherent email, you're seeing the result of years of worksheet-classes. These are people who are certain they possess a great deal of knowledge, when in fact their recall of specific facts and ability to reason logically are heavily atrophied from years of educational neglect and accidental gaslighting. "I got an A in English class and a 28 on the ACT, so I must be good at English!"

> repetition is still required to do anything other than move a vague knowledge to applicable knowledge.

I completely agree with this.

Funnily enough, one of my issues with worksheet-classes is that there's not enough repetition. Topics in classes from mathematics to English to science are treated like Pokemon moves, where once you learn the move you retain it forever.

This is in stark contrast to the teaching of artisanal skills like cooking, sports, music, and art. Even if they're learned in a class, the successful execution of the skill is required every time you interact with it, and explicit attention is paid to the necessities of repetition.

In music, if you can't play a passage, you slow down and repeat it many times, and if you still can't play it, you move backwards to fundamental skills and repeat those. In high school math, if you can't execute a problem, you get a few weeks to voluntarily try repeating it yourself, and then you're given an exam, and then the entire class moves on with or without you.

If the education system worked some spaced repetition into courses, they would be able to teach more material with less effort. And people would retain it better.

No amount of intense cramming upon the first encounter can help You need reinforcement over time for it to stick.