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Comment by MarcScott | Hacker News Reader

> In my experience, most people, the world over, are in fact self motivated.

In your experience? The world over? Can you tell me your experience. I've been a teacher for a long time. I've worked in the UK, the USA, PNG, and Kenya.

The vast majority of kids in the developed world don't really care about education. A few do, and they get great grades. Most care more about social status, their cliques, or just surviving the jungle that is school.

School is important. It teaches you how to deal with other people. It teaches you how to deal with people in authority. You can't get that at home, in front of a screen. Learning stuff is secondary. I'm sure there are plenty of people here that are not working in whatever they majored at.

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Learning stuff is secondary? Found your problem.

School shouldn't be primarily about experiencing social interaction. It's an artificial environment that disappears as soon as you graduate, and which you'll never find again anywhere else in society. You can learn social interaction in plenty of other settings, most of which are vastly more efficient and realistic. Admittedly, none of them function as daycare...

School should be (and used to be) about learning to learn, building mental discipline and a base of knowledge sufficient to bootstrap whatever other studies appeal to the student, even more so than memorizing a particular list of facts. But it seems that that position has been largely abandoned.

This is circular, how do you propose making school about that? If you’re only goal is to maximize the folks who like to obey authority then great, and maybe that’s all you care to do, and maybe you don’t care about losing the kids who don’t have the academics to make it, but you also lose a whole mess of kids at the top end of the spectrum too.

I'm not sure which part of my comment would result in maximizing folks who like to obey authority. I'm more focused on improving individual outcomes in terms of functional individuals, their quality of life, and the contributions they're able to make to society as a whole.

In any case, we homeschool.

I haven't really considered how to improve schooling at scale (particularly in an affordable way), but my proposal would be to introduce a _lot_ more granularity to schooling by eliminating the idea of grades and classes and focusing more on individual assessment.

Obviously this is likely cost prohibitive, but perhaps promoting and subsidizing homeschooling and homeschool co-ops is a good start in that direction, and could give rise to more cost-effective solutions over time. Not all parents are equipped to homeschool, but homeschooling does make use of resources which could be improved and which others could leverage as well.

I’m mixed, I definetly wouldn’t home school my kids and it doesn’t seem scalable and I do think there’s value in a population having a shared identity from education, but, at least from my own experience I suspect my kids will have their most valuable academic opportunities outside of school.

"You can learn social interaction in plenty of other settings, most of which are vastly more efficient and realistic."

What settings are those?

Community gardens, sports, religious or interest groups, collectives, contributing in a large household, early work experience, hobbies/interests. It probably is a fairly finite list because societies have optimized for the individual and people are often only active within of a community at work or in education facilities. So a part of a solution in my view would be establishing more communities that are separate from the family... they might look a lot like schools though, so maybe we should just focus on those? There's more need for new communities to be established for other age ranges.

I pretty much agree 100%. We need more, smaller communities – and we need them offline.

Notably, this is largely an American problem, since America is built around cars, which given the capitalist nature of American society proves to be antithetical to establishing local communities.

European and other countries, whose layouts and culture were established in pedestrian days, are much better off in this regard.

How does being an employee differ so much from being a student? You still get either good or bad grades for your work. You do assignments, get rules and processes you have to follow, play well with your fellow students/colleagues, etc.

I would say it's quite similar.

I'm mostly talking about the rather artificial division of students into grades of equal ages without taking into account the individual's proclivities, abilities and achievements. This separation is entirely contrary to organic human self-organization (even in work places) from a tribal perspective and results in a great deal of social illnesses (bullying, cliques, etc.) that are, although found elsewhere, exacerbated by the artificiality of the group-making (which is necessary for the public school model as it currently exists today to function).

At age 12, kids get split up in groups according to their abilities, no?

Not sure what you're referring to, tbh. Are you talking about the occasional student being promoted or held back a grade? If so, I would say that isn't a granular enough separation to be meaningful.

Probably talking about student tracking. It was definitely a thing at my school.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracking_(education)

At least in Belgium, at 12, kids get divided into different schools and systems. You can go into trades, which expects you to be ready at 18 to go work as a plumber, electrician, mechanic, secretary, cook, etc. Or you go towards higher education and so get more focus on math and/or languages. At 18 you are expected to not be ready for the job market but study further.

For my own kids, you really see the differences at 11 to become more profound in their classroom, where some are running behind while others excel. So I saw that 12 is indeed the age where a split is necessary.

You don't have that?

Edit: After some Wikipeding, I see you really don't have that. Wow, that is crazy in my opinion. I have no clue how you could ever organize those differences among students. Here is the system of Belgium: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Belgium.

For example my daughter is 12 and she is in a class "STEM and moderns languages". Very focussed on programming, science, math, and they also get Dutch, French and English. Some of her classmates at the end of the schooyear had to switch because their grades weren't good enough.

So in Belgium, there are even different schools for different tracks.

That sounds so dystopian. What do kids even do at 12? How can you ask them to decide the course of their life at 12, generally they get segregated while choosing an undergrad major around 16 right!

At 12, there are already big differences among them.

Let's divide it into kids that like to learn vs kids that like to work with their hands. The 2nd group would learn how to work with metal, wood, .... Way more practical stuff, very little theory. The other group is the reverse of course.

At 16, some kids are really tired of sitting in a classroom. For example plumber track would have these 16 year olds already doing an internship with real plumbers. At 18 they can start their own company already.

It's also no secret that a 16 year old in Belgium learns math that in US you would only see at higher education.

I think it works great, and what I saw with my 2 oldest is that last year when they are all still together at age 11, the learning differences really start to show. It's neither fun for the smart ones nor for the slower ones.

Definitely not everywhere.

Work environments tend to be class sorted. You also have recourse to handle people who behave horribly towards you. Disruptors are removed. Everyone is generally aligned towards the same goal. The two are vastly different.

Anyone who hits someone, says truly horrible shit about others, doesn’t do the job at all, constantly distracts others while doing a poor job themselves, blatantly sexually harasses people, et c, is highly likely to get fired from a job, and may go to prison.

The same person as a student, gets tons of chances before maybe having to leave. Depending on what they’re doing, you could just be stuck with them for north of a decade. No escape.

I mean, we can joke about how actually such people still exist at work, but it’s a far less widespread problem and manifests differently.

You can look for other jobs if you want out of a bad work environment. Probably, you’ll be able to find somewhere else to go. Getting out of a bad class is way harder.

There’s a couple huge differences.

As discussed in another thread already, it seems my own Belgian system differs very much from the US system. (I basically found out with this discussion :D)

And to be honest, I have no idea how you can make the US system work, so I probably agree with you. Come to Belgium and let your kids study here :D.

I had no idea that Belgium has already implemented a lot of this stuff! That is amazing and gives me a lot of hope.

I wonder if there’s literature analyzing Belgian academic outcomes alongside American academic outcomes.

Actually, until the mid 20th century almost everyone agreed that school was about building character, which can only be done in a social environment. As a British government report put it in 1846, schools should be "a little artificial world of virtuous exertion".

I believe we agree? Character and mental discipline are closely aligned, perhaps even the same.

Character was specifically moral character, which is related to how you interact with others.

Mmh, I have to read more about this, I'm not really familiar with British schooling models of the 19th century.

In any case, the problematic schooling model that persists to this day was introduced around the time of the Industrial Revolution, which predates your references.

I don't think the schooling of that period was the same as the schooling of today in all regards.

You could read more in my book: https://www.wyclifsdust.com.

Learning stuff is 100% secondary. If it wasn't these two below would have same-ish chances in life/career.

Student A: Went to College X and majored in Y. Finished all XXX number of credits and graduated with Bachelor's Degree

Student B: Went to same College X and majored in same Y. Finished all XXX-1 number of credits so is 1 credit short and never got a degree.

Student B is worthless even though she/he learned exactly the same thing as Student A. School (especially in USA) never was and never will be about learning ...

I agree that learning is secondary in practice, but in theory is the whole point of school, and society would be a lot better off if we managed to draw theory and practice closer together.

In your example, I would argue you haven't taken my position to its required logical extent. I don't believe in the value of college degrees at all, the way things are currently structured, and I would discourage my kids from going to college unless they had a very specific career path in mind for which the degree is required. The measurement of learning has become the goal of learning, unfortunately.

Yes teaching how to learn is the way for schools, but it is hard to explain to kids and lots of adults.

Just a nitpick that school enforcing memorizing particular list of facts or memorizing poems - is indeed teaching people how to learn, because how else will you explain to a child or an adult "hey you know if you read this thing 10 times and then try to repeat it another 20 times from memory - guess what !!! that is one trick to learn to memorize something."

But if they spend time on finding out how to memorize hand picked for them stuff and how to perform on exams on limited and picked topics - that sounds like they will be able to learn anything but still too many don't realize what the real lesson there is.

If the goal is learning how to memorize, I think it would be better to have specific courses or lessons on memorization rather than making all the subjects needlessly boring and stressful just for the sake of learning memorization techniques.

Knowing how to memorize is occasionally useful depending on one’s profession, but I don’t think it deserves such a heavy emphasis. People naturally remember what is interesting and useful to them. Force-feeding facts or dates or speeches or poems into memory is not fun and has very little educational value. That time and energy would be much better spent on projects that use and integrate the knowledge.

“It's an artificial environment that disappears as soon as you graduate, and which you'll never find again anywhere else in society.”

Whoa there, society functions like a school environment.

You have cliches, bullies, enforcers, popular kids, the weirdos, etc.

What are our political parties other than massive cliches?

Bullies you can meet on the road, in stores, and nearly any other place you go.

Enforcers are police, detention centers, and fines.

Popular kids you need look no further than influencers, movie stares, etc.

The weirdos are anyone that doesn’t fit into our cliches.

Also, Foucault would have a few words with you as society is also an artificial environment.

The drama of daily life that plays out just happens in a larger more chaotic scale, but when we left highschool, highschool never left us.

I won’t contest you entirely, but I do ask this: if society functions like a school environment, why do we need a school environment to learn social interaction? It seems at best a secondary or tertiary benefit of a structure that should primarily be focused on intellectual learning. It’s a facsimile of the real world, and facsimiles are always lacking.

Also, I think the biggest thing that present in school environments but missing from other environments is the forced segregation by age range, which prevents the more organic tribal self-organizational practices to which humans have adapted over tens or hundreds of thousands of years.

And I would also add that there are degrees of artificiality and what really matters is not so much whether we have constructed our environments so much as whether or not they have stood the test of time, and adapted to us as much as we’ve adapted to them.

If I made be jaded here. I did extremely well in school(s). I was never a trouble maker and was a top athlete, student, and musician. I think education is supremely important. However, school didn't teach me any of what you mentioned. Because what life teaches is that unless you're Type A, you're not going anywhere. Life teaches that hard work and determination and doing the right things does not get you anywhere. Life teaches you that thinking differently is downright discouraged and rejected.

We mainly teach either boring material or outright lies about how life works. Because we try to put our education on rails, teaching students that that's how life and education works, that's why it's a complete failure. The fact that students in COVID didn't respond to remote lessons is partly because they weren't even engaged prior to COVID.

We don't teach students how to be present, to know nature, how to explore their thoughts and emotions, or how to collaborate.

> We don't teach students how to be present, to know nature, how to explore their thoughts and emotions, or how to collaborate.

Montessori schools do. Wish they were more common.

I mean ... many people went to school as students for a good 12 years. That's likely tainted experience, less objective perhaps, but nontheless valid experience.

Those same people will say "I wish school taught me <X> (things like how to fill out a check book etc"

It did. You didn't pay attention. You want school to teach media literacy? It did, but you complained the whole time "when are we going to use this?". My school taught us how to interpret a "source", how to write well defended arguments (even if I don't always rise to that level), how to calculate mortgage interest rates and payments etc etc etc.

But people will swear up and down "school doesn't teach anything important"

because they didn't pay attention to what was taught!

The primary problem with education in america today is that a huge proportion of parents do not give a fuck about education, see school as just a thing you have to do instead of a constant opportunity. When a kid sees their parent complaining about education being "Liberal brain washing" every other day, why would they pay attention in class?

Education requires emotional and ideological buy in from parents and students for best results.

> It did. You didn't pay attention.

It didn't. I specifically remember the hole where my class should've explained what a court case actually determines, how the process runs, because I noticed things were missing / being swept under the carpet (we did some mock jury stuff but without the right context for it to teach us anything).

> You want school to teach media literacy? It did, but you complained the whole time "when are we going to use this?"

Nope. I specifically remember watching movie "making of" videos and my teacher saying "write this down!" about irrelevant technical details that distracted from the more important stuff the director was saying.

> But people will swear up and down "school doesn't teach anything important"

> because they didn't pay attention to what was taught!

Nope. I was an engaged, attentive student (indeed a kind of star pupil). I still learnt more in spite of school than because of it. Indeed some of the stuff that's most important for my education and career is stuff I was actively punished for doing at school (poking at the computers to see how they worked). Schools, at least the standard-ish state school that I went to (which had good official ratings) teach the wrong things and teach them badly.

While I'm thankful for schooling for teaching me a variety of things, occasionally recognizing my passions and helping to hone them, it is amusing the disruptive and annoying things I did with the school computers that ultimately became my carreer.

Agreed. There's a really specific form of nostalgia where a matured and adhd-managed person would simply LOVE to do school over again now they see the benefit and realise how absolutely fascinating and achievable learning is. Imagine how easy school would be for a mature adult! I wish being held back a couple of years was normal and encouraged, especially for boys. My life satisfaction would be way higher.

> Can you tell me your experience. I've been a teacher for a long time.

And as a result, your experience is mostly limited to kids who are forced to be where they don't want to be. That's a hugely biased data set.

> School is important. It teaches you how to deal with other people. It teaches you how to deal with people in authority.

And yet it does a worse job at it than those who are home schooled, as most studies show.

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