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Comment by dkz999 | Hacker News Reader

I agree that classical schooling has fallen far away from learning (as the author defines it). That has even crept more and more into "higher education". This is a travesty and produces worse people, citizens, what have you.

But i'll still make this point: its an oversimplification to say that education (as defined) is bad.

No matter how much it doesn't align with your passion, you will need to have a basic set of book smarts to hope to thrive in the world. If for no other reason than there will almost certainly be some aspect of that passion that touches on those missing rudimentary skills.

I also personally don't want to live in a world where a significant portion of people don't know basic history or understand eating tide pods is bad.

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> I also personally don't want to live in a world where a significant portion of people don't know basic history

As quizzes on late night talk shows have shown for the past 20+ years, the current education system doesn't accomplish this. Additionally basic numeracy drops of _severely_ after leaving school, which means a majority of people aren't really absorbing anything beyond arithmetic on the math side.

> which means a majority of people aren't really absorbing anything beyond arithmetic on the math side.

which is probably happening in spite of school :)

Let’s not pretend those interviews aren’t heavily edited to create an “look how dumb everyone is” narrative, if not outright fabricated.

On one hand, this is fair. On the other hand, when 19% of high school graduates are functionally illiterate, I don't think it's too much of a stretch to say that the system is obviously not doing what it says it is.

Out of curiosity, what do you perceive the system to say it is doing? I see statistics on number of meals served, students per classroom, faculty per student, $/student, % who graduate, % who get admitted to college, average salary per graduate, number of students enrolled, number of employees, various budget shortfall numbers and other indicators of money spent, athletic win/loss records, operating hours when students should be supervised by a professional, and lots and lots of other stuff the system says it does.

Are you saying that none of these statements are true?

Or are you suggesting that the system claims to be instilling some level of competency in various subjects? Or perhaps you meant that the system is not doing what it _aspires_ to do. Or perhaps what you aspire for it to do.

> Or are you suggesting that the system claims to be instilling some level of competency in various subjects?

I am. Otherwise why would there be standardized tests to attempt to measure this?

There's use in the education as a public babysitting service/meal delivery for young children, but that its it's main benefit, we should radically alter the way it's all set up. It could be radically cheaper as well as destroy way fewer children's love of learning.

> 19% of high school graduates are functionally illiterate

That bunch in encompassing people with massive learning disabilities including mental retardation, neglected kids and kids from severely disadvantaged situations.

That same exact bunch wont have better results when being homeschooled, with possible exception of some learning disabilities where homeschooling parent still needs a lot of support.

Something like half of people don’t understand how marginal income tax rates work, but many of them have all kinds of strong opinions about federal tax policy. This is probably the single most important concept to understand about income taxes, isn’t complicated, and is something they deal with every year. Still, you’ll frequently hear them worry aloud about “moving into another tax bracket” as if it will apply to all their income.

We may expect other kinds of “basic” knowledge not to be much more widely-known than this. It’s easy to turn up similar results on fundamental civics and history. Stuff like “are Puerto Ricans US citizens?” you get a similar 30-35ish% who give the wrong answer and 15ish% “I don’t know”, pretty close to rates on questions about marginal tax rates.

The loss of numeracy also reflects the vast majority of adults never using high school math or greater… like, ever, at all.

I used to be Ok at math. I would now fail any math test past 10th grade (forget college), and I’m not so confident about 8th or 9th either.

I also used to be pretty good at French. I’ve lost most of it. Rarely having a reason to use a skill means you lose it.

So why do we spend enormous amounts of time and money teaching people things we know most will quickly lose?

Ask the folks who set the math curriculum. If it were up to me nearly all math in school would be application-first and exceptions would be carved off into separate classes, presented very differently, and mostly not required.

Do you think high school students are qualified to decide for themselves whether they'll need math later in life? I never imagined having the kind of career I ended up with. I always thought I'd work as a writer. I ended up as a software engineer.

No, but I think we could make math more useful and less unpleasant for most students by focusing on applications with just a little time for proofs or whatever in case that really piques some student’s interest. I doubt this would discourage many kids who’ll go on to become math majors, and it’d serve everyone else much better. You could still cover a lot of the same stuff.

That’s my guess, anyway.

Because we've inverted the pyramid. School enables people to work and make money. Education is a side effect of the daycare, and unless you go home to motivated and curious parents, likely the best you can hope for is they get socialized enough to not chronically get fired in pretty monotonous careers.

Because even if you can't literally rattle off the stuff o to a 10th grade algebra exam, you remember the general gist and some of the details. I could not do a line integral right now but I know it exists, what it's for, and if I ever had a programming problem that was a line integral, I would remember it and be able to Google "line integral Wikipedia".

There is also, in my opinion, great benefit to just training your brain. Even if you forget all the details, I think someone who learned calculus and then forgot it is going to generally be in a better place to handle any general mathematics than someone equal who never learned calculus at all.

People use different aspects of their education and it’s vastly faster to pick something up the second time. So you may have never used a given lesson, but other people in your class may have found it really helpful.

Sometimes going a few steps deeper helps you retain some useful bit of info. I ended up making useful of various bits of chemistry decades after taking the class, but understanding the basics was still helpful.

Finally basing things on utility is just a prediction. Some things that seemed useful turn out less so as technology filled in a gap.

To filter people out from opportunities.

I mean… I don’t know that many people but, even so, I know a couple who are in most ways smarter than me and who’d be very-capably contributing a ton more to the economy if math classes hadn’t blocked them from it. They’d have been way above median at a ton of important jobs, but weren’t allowed to do that because they were bad at, specifically, some math they didn’t need for those jobs. No degree, so, life path permanently altered in a way bad for both them and all the rest of us.

If I know a couple, there are probably many such folks.

I’ve not seen the same thing happen with any other subject.

The difference is that if you knew it and lost it, you can relearn it pretty fast. If you never knew it, it takes massive amount of effort.

The person who would fail that math or French conversation right now, would be able to get up to speed in days, weeks or months depending on what exactly you want if needed. However, learning French from nothing would take years again.

Have you tried watching Only Connect inside?

Some televised "quizzes" are picked through for the dumbest possible answers (eg: Australian late night comedy shows doing VoxPop quizzes asking 'random' US citizens to name a country starting with the letter 'U'), other quiz shows audition contestents to select a pool of bright people.

Public schools or home schools should ideally teach about innate bias in sample selections.

I don't think many highly trained professionals, scientists and professors do online talk show quizzes. You're basing your argument on a sample strongly biased towards mediocrity.

Good thing you put the + in 20+.

> I also personally don't want to live in a world where a significant portion of people don't know basic history...

I think you've already been living in that world for a while now. I'm having trouble finding it right now, but has anyone seen those lists of what books students were reading in the late 19th, early 20th century? Not that long ago students were reading classics like Dickens or Tolkien. These days that's well beyond the literacy of the average US middle/high school student.

> No matter how much it doesn't align with your passion, you will need to have a basic set of book smarts to hope to thrive in the world. If for no other reason than there will almost certainly be some aspect of that passion that touches on those missing rudimentary skills.

Are you suggesting the only way to get these skills is through formal schooling? That not going to school means it is impossible to learn what you need to thrive?

If schools started teaching babies to walk, would you assume that people would lose the ability to learn on their own? Keep in mind that our mass education system is only around a century old. People learned the “rudimentary skills” and much more on their own for most of human existence.

And your examples - not knowing history and knowing to not eat tide pods - are heavily associated with people who attend traditional schools!

    > I also personally don't want to live in a world where a significant portion of people don't ... understand eating tide pods is bad.

I assume this is written in jest. Do you really think this is true? If yes, you really underestimate the intelligence of an average person.

As a reminder, in most high-developed, democratic countries, about 1/3 of people have a university degree. That means the majority of your society doesn't have a university degree. To me, the point of public education (through high school) is to prepare people to be good citizens.

Suppose there is a developed country with a population of over 300 million people. Suppose that about 40% of that country's population are between the ages of five and 35. So, let's say 120 million people.

Now let's just make up a number, say 240 people. Nah, let's go 2400 people. Let's say that is the number of people who are dumb enough to eat a Tide pod.

Now let's say we grossly overestimate the intelligence of this population so we bump the number of pod-eaters to 24000.

That represents 0.02% of the population between the ages of five and 35. Not 2%. 1/100th of 2%.

If just 1/4 of these people ended up in the ER in a single year, I would still consider that to be a significant portion of people.

If that is the number of people who failed chemistry class, I would not consider it to be a significant portion of people.

The portion of people who don't know history very well is much higher than 1/100th of 2%. The portion of people who would be willing to, oh say, burn downtown to the ground if their favorite candidate trips is incredibly small. But it is significant enough to be scary even at the municipal level.

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