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Comment by seiferteric | Hacker News Reader

Exposure is good, but success in school requires you to be successful in these subjects as well. I have had similar thoughts recently as OP thinking about what I want for my young kids and what my experiences in school were. Being _really_ good in one thing should allow you to make up for being subpar in other areas, but it doesn't. You can only get an A (or A+) in math for example, even if your a genius. But maybe you should be able to get an A++++ that makes up for D's or F's in English for example and still get accepted into top universities. We need a system that accommodates spiky people better.

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The admissions process to universities in the province of Ontario in Canada has a direct solution for this, which applies to well-known universities in the global technology industry, such as the University of Toronto and the University of Waterloo.

Most of these universities look at an applicant's grades for just six courses. After looking at the courses required for certain programs (such as calculus and physics for certain programs), the remainder of the six courses comprise the student's top grades for any courses at the Grade 12 (final year) level.

So, a high school student aiming for a top engineering or mathematics program will not be hamstrung by a poor grade in Grade 12 English, nor will a student aiming for a top international relations program be hamstrung by a poor grade in Calculus. At the same time, the student going into a STEM program will have an exposure to Shakespeare, which can provide inspiration and a rich set of works to explore later in life. The student going into international relations may later be inspired some years later to study mathematics for its beauty as a hobby, some years later.

I remember the feeling that I was wasting time with many of my courses in those years, despite having good teachers for many of them—I thought my time spent on mandatory humanities courses like music took time away from more practical subjects, and I wish I took a programming course (though I did love my English classes). Perhaps this remains true for many students, but I personally took an interest in music performance as a hobby years later in life, and the years-old lessons in music theory came back to me. My English classes also introduced me to literature, which has remained a very important part of my life that has guided me through highly consequential life decisions for the better. It is unlikely that I would have taken an interest in literary works without my exposure to English in school.

In 2024 you are not getting into Waterloo CS with anything less than a 99% in your top6. And that's the entry level. If you really want to get in, you have to grind math competitions, clubs, etc.

I go to a mid-tier university (Toronto Metropolitan University) and the admissions average for CS was 97% last year.

The admissions process for universities in Ontario is a joke at this point. Imagine if students going to Harvard instead of SUNY Plattsburgh differed by 2 percentage points in their high school averages.

This means you must be absolutely perfect to have a shot of getting into a good school. In reality, teachers overlook mistakes and just give you the marks needed to get into top school if they think you deserve it. But because everyone does that, you also need to farm extracurriculars.

Maybe I'll write a blog post about this since it sounds like people are interested.

This is the same reason why STEM admission became so competitive in UCs in California.

UCs historically admitted using a mix of class rank, GPA, and test scores, but the number of seats at UCs didn't really increase in the past decade+ despite a small baby boom in the 2000s, and the growing prominence of STEM in the 2010s, so the average GPAs and SAT scores for UC admissions skyrocketed.

Plenty of Californians have anecdotes of getting rejected from mid-tier UCs but getting into MIT or Stanford. It's had a downstream impact out-of-state as well, as plenty of Californians now attend out-of-state STEM programs for that reason (played a major role in upleveling UT Austin/UW/UIUC/GT/UW Madison's reputations among STEM-targeting HSers ime) and make STEM admissions harder in out-of-state colleges as well.

That said, education quality for STEM majors is consistent across all UCs so the UC you go to doesn't matter as much academic quality wise.

I'm convinced good students don't need good universities as much as good universities need good students. I get the same internships and job opportunities as someone that went to UofT and I'm studying much of the same curriculum.

A degree from a good university signifies a smart and dedicated student primarily because the school selects the best students for graduation. That occurs during acceptance and by making the program difficult, causing bad students to leave.

The higher level of competitiveness is hurting the best universities during that acceptance phase. Ontario universities are no longer able to differentiate between the best and average. Waterloo is an exception because it has introduced math competitions across the province as a way to identify "A+++" students, but only Waterloo benefits from that.

I'm noticing that many Ontario schools are now ignoring the acceptance phase and focusing on the weed-out phase. UofT accepts students into a common math/CS program, then only accepts the best students into CS for second year onwards. Queen's University has a common first year for all engineering majors.

Even so, because the acceptance phase no longer differentiates, a lot of good students that would beat the second phase are caught in the first filter.

> I'm convinced good students don't need good universities as much as good universities need good students. I get the same internships and job opportunities as someone that went to UofT and I'm studying much of the same curriculum.

In Engineering+Accounting+Actuary+Nursing I agree.

> The higher level of competitiveness is hurting the best universities during that acceptance phase. Ontario universities are no longer able to differentiate between the best and average.

Same thing in California, and that's largely because faculty hiring and infrastructure just didn't keep pace with the amount of students declaring Engineering+Accounting+Actuary+Nursing majors (Accounting+Actuary+Nursing face the same problems as STEM fields), which meant admissions need to be much more competitive because you can only teach so many students.

I assume it's a similar story in Ontario due to decades of austerity in the province.

> Even so, because the acceptance phase no longer differentiates, a lot of good students that would beat the second phase are caught in the first filter.

Yep. Because infrastructure didn't scale.

> Waterloo is an exception because it has introduced math competitions across the province as a way to identify "A+++" students, but only Waterloo benefits from that

Yep, the Euclid is basically a soft requirement now for Waterloo CS admissions.

Honestly, Ontario should just ditch "autonomous" universities and merge them under a single "University of Ontario" system and simplifying cross-system course transfers.

Ontario should also force Colleges to stop giving Bachelors degrees and convert them either into Community Colleges to transfer to a University or convert larger Colleges into Universities.

This is what Quebec does, and most state systems in the US (California, Texas, New York, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Massachusetts, etc).

There is no reason for UWaterloo or Wilfrid Laurier to be two different universities despite being a couple blocks away from each other.

Same for UT, UT Scarborough, York, TMU/Ryerson, etc all in GTA

To add on, I’ve worked with a lot of current and past Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU) students at an aerospace industry non-profit. I do not see a difference with their quality of work and dedication between them and University of Toronto (UofT) students. Several of these students went on to land engineering and research internships at the Canadian Space Agency or work at a well-known aerospace company.

The main advantage that UofT has for its undergraduates is related to funding. UofT’s engineering design teams tend to be better-funded than TMU’s, though TMU’s engineering design teams still perform very well—proudly outperforming UofT’s teams in certain years despite the funding gaps. In addition, some TMU students I’ve spoken with mentioned that UofT has more research opportunities. The name of the university also has a positive impact on admissions for students applying to graduate school. These advantages are not a reflection of the students who attend, but rather UofT’s ability to raise funds.

There is also a disadvantage I’ve seen at UofT. The TMU engineering students I’ve known have mentioned getting extensions approved easily for assignments and homework, to pursue professional opportunities such as hackathons and conferences. That is generally unheard of, from my experience in a STEM program at UofT. Policies are strictly outlined (with some leniency in many courses, such as dropping the lowest assignment mark), and I generally have not seen professors grant exceptions to these.

But the main difference I’ve seen between TMU people and UofT people is university pride. I’ve met several people who were proud to go to TMU and succeed, whereas I haven’t seen that at UofT (with the exception of UofT’s engineering department). I’m satisfied with the opportunities I’ve gotten due to attending UofT—especially as I was involved with its on-campus work program and an engineering design team there—but I haven’t met many UofT people fiercely proud of their school, in contrast to the TMU people I’ve met.

In any case, I am happy to work with people from either school. Work experience and personality has mattered more to me than the name of the university that a person went to, and both TMU and UofT offer great opportunities for students to gain relevant experience—though these are up to the students to pursue, outside of their required classes.

Imo school grades should be disregarded entirely. We should bring back standardized testing, but make the ceiling much higher. Most people should score fairly low on it. This way, you can really see how good people are. At this point, people just get weeded out in university.

This would also help the case of people like Ramanujan, he might score perfectly on the math portion of the standardized tests, and despite poor scores on everything else, he'd be distinguished.

I am from country which has these standardized tests for all engineering, medicine, management and other competitive fields. The result is there is sprawling industry of "coaching institutes" which train kids for college admission exams. Those who are getting in through this system now are people whose parents can afford this increasingly expensive coaching.

So all mediocre kids with money have better chance than a brighter kid who couldn't afford coaching. Of course genius could still make it through this system but genius can also make it thru school grading system. There are enough programs to help out them.

Problem here is that barely above average students who wouldn't want to study all subjects per curriculum start to think of themselves as ignored geniuses crushed by the system.

We have no standardized tests in Ontario. You just pay for expensive sports, extracurricular competitions, or private schools that provide the two.

Realistically, it's much easier for a person of average means to study for a standardized test than it is to buy the transport necessary to an international math/science/business/water polo competition.

It's fundamentally impossible for a person to do well in ice hockey if they cannot afford the hundreds of dollars in skates and protective equipment needed to play the game. Taking a standardized test is usually free. Does money give an advantage in both scenarios? Yes, but at least it's not an absolute barrier in the second.

That's always going to be true regardless of whether there's standardized testing or not. Also, it still gives poor children a better chance. Do you think poor kids can afford to "polish" their application with a bunch of extra curricular activities that's typically required for top-tier schools? I think a truly difficult standardized test is still more fair than any other alternative.

The fact that there are a bunch of asian kids from poor socioeconomic backgrounds who make it into stuyvesant https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2019/05/233354/stuyvesant-a... is one example of how standardized testing can make it so that hard work can make the difference. I'm not saying that rich kids don't have an automatic leg up, but that's always going to be true regardless. Standardized testing (if anything) gives everyone a shot.

He might also fail the standardized test entirely.

Perhaps, though imo standardized testing is the lesser of two evils.

There's major inequity with the lack of standardized testing.

Are there not standardized exams in Ontario high school? When I grew up in Alberta standardized exams took up half your grade and those could not be fudged by your teacher.

The exams were made by a small panel of teachers and nobody else knew the exam contents until the day of the exam. Everyone across the province takes the exam on the same day and time. Exams were proctored by people external to the school. Exams are again marked by a panel of teachers outside of your school.

Cheating is nearly impossible outside of someone leaking the exam early.

Nope.

This is basically what Waterloo math competitions are, though. Except only Waterloo can see the results.

That seems like the real failing of the Ontario education system. Standardized testing is needed otherwise there is nothing stopping teachers from gaming the system. It also gives a good way to determine underserved/underperforming schools in order to direct improvement there.

Although I agree with the sentiment, the Ontario university system doesn't actually work that way. For example for Software Engineering at Waterloo, the admission average is calculated using the five required courses plus whatever your highest course is excluding the former[0].

In practice, I believe every single Ontario university program lists English one of the required courses so it will always be included in your top six average.

[0]: https://uwaterloo.ca/undergraduate-admissions/admissions/adm...

And it should always be included as one of the important courses in Canada. If you can't communicate your thoughts clearly then your thoughts never really translate into the real world.

From what I remember, the later years of English class (in Ontario) are more focused on literary criticism than effective communication. This was a frustration for me personally, and my lowest mark in High School. The high 80 dragged my average down enough that I didn't make the cut for Waterloo.

As a (lapsed) English teacher, I must point out that critically examining how others communicate is essential to improving one's own ability.

(Mind you, your teachers might not have approached your classes in that way, and high-end literary criticism tends towards performative nonsense°, so I can understand and sympathize if they were a waste of time, but they didn't have to be.)

°It's exactly analogous to Brain Fuck: huge fun if you have the background, intellectual ability, and are in on the joke. Both are mostly pursued for the opportunities they provide to show off How Smart™ you are.

6 courses in your senior year doesn't seem like a great solution. If you figure you take Math, Science, History, English in your senior year, Then take 2 electives, that is basically a full schedule already. Short of replacing one of the poor grades with a freebie like Gym, I am not seeing where that solves the issue. This might be a difference in US and Canadian education, so maybe 6 courses means something different.

A mathematics-focused student in Ontario could take Calculus & Vectors, Advanced Functions [1], Computer Science, and Physics—the first two courses should be straightforward for this student.

Though Computer Science and Physics are distinctly different from the mathematics courses, these are still directly useful for a mathematics student to learn—the problem-solving skills should also carry over. Key mathematical discoveries have been inspired by problems in computer science and physics, and many rigorous university-level mathematics books still draw from problems in these fields to motivate certain problems. At the least, they are less laboratory-heavy than Biology and Chemistry (the student could still attempt these subjects, though, and choose to omit the grades for university admissions).

That leaves a couple of other classes—or just one if English is required, as noted by another commenter. My school offered subjects like Grade 12 Drama, Visual Arts, and Music, where much of the grading was effort-based. In my school, most students in my classes saw these courses as a break from other intensive courses, with grades not being as much of a concern. This would allow the student to avoid using a grade for History, Economics, French (or another foreign language), or another subject.

The English requirement would then be a difficult challenge for the mathematics-focused student. I wish I could speak more about what it was like for most of my classmates who went on to study engineering, as many of them took the standard English course (I took a more demanding version of the course, due to personal interest). My classmates at the time did not seem to have an issue with university admissions to competitive programs despite not enjoying the subject at the time, but the other commenter makes a good point that minimum grades for admission standards have increased greatly since then.

[1] As an aside: a past classmate—who was brilliant at mathematics and also great with people—later poked fun some years later about the Ontario government's naming for math courses. He said, "there's Grade 11 Functions... and then in Grade 12, there's Advanced (!) Functions." The last I heard, he went on to work as an investment banker at a top hedge fund by profitability in the United States.

> then in Grade 12, there's Advanced (!) Functions."

Then in university, there’s Elementary Functional Analysis!

The first math course as math major in university involved proving that a+b=b+a and that a+(b+c)=(a+b)+c. It's quite fun to go from 'advanced' calculus during the final classes of high school, to "OK, let's consider the expression 1+1=2. What does it actually mean and why is it true?"

> The first math course as math major in university involved proving that a+b=b+a and that a+(b+c)=(a+b)+c.

Really? What were the axioms?

Basically the Peano axioms

How did that proof work for rational numbers?

It's been 20+ years, and I don't remember the exact steps the course went thought. But basically we started with defining N using the Peano axioms (although I don't recall the name 'Peano' being mentioned) and proving some basic rules of addition and equality. Then we defined subtraction, multiplication and inverse elements, and constructed Z and Q. From there you get to algebraic groups, and from there you can hand wave a lot of details.

As I said it was literally one of the first math courses we did, so it wasn't super rigorous with all the technical and logical details.

Interesting. So it seems that from reading this, Canada, or at least Ontario, has a lot more electives at grade 12 than the US. So this might be more like the UK with their A-levels. In the US a highly motivated student might take say 4-5 AP courses, which would essentially count as their freshman year at university. But they would be unlikely (short of going to a few dedicate highschools) of having more than maybe 2 math courses in a single year.

You can get tested into qualification, by most colleges. Colleges (which includes Universities, State schools, etc) aren't robotic. This is part of the responsibility of the administration. You may get delayed a semester or a year, with a little community college gatekeeping. Dedicated students can always get into a University.

I like the first reply immediately try to scoff you :) Maybe oop is right, but the real problem is people always try to do this.

Note here, in the current years, grades / competition has exploded so for the more competitive programs it is nearly impossible to get in without high 90s in all the required courses (English is required for all programs).

So responding to OP, you indeed must be an expert in all subjects to have a chance to study in your field of expertise.

To add to this I feel the need to point out that the writing skill demonstrated by the average mid-length Hacker News comment is above the level you’d need to pass grade 12 English in Ontario. It’s an extremely low bar!

Of course, if English is not your first language then you’re not required to take this course. You have an alternate path which may be a lot more work for an English-language-learner but it doesn’t demand the critical reading and writing skills you would need for grade 12 English.

I don't know how things work across the ocean, but here in Greece essay grading is a veritable mystery. The highest grade I ever got in a school essay was 16/20 and I had thought that was my masterpiece. Feedback always seemed cryptic (your essay contains platitudes, you are not developing your point enough etc.) and when I tried asking for specifics I got shrugs and you-still-don't-get-it groans. There are people who get 20/20 on essays consistently, so there must be some method to the grading madness; but I could not crack that method in my school years :(

The usual method to scoring top grades on an essay/paper is to flatter the professor. Not with literal platitudes but with a paper you think they’ll agree with, incorporating arguments similar to the ones they made in class, etc.

However, what I found is that even if the professor disagrees with your paper you’ll usually get an 80% if it’s well-written, well-researched, and well-argued. To get above that on something they disagree with requires both a highly open-minded professor and an argument they can’t find fault with.

A few points on this:

- How and when would you know a subject doesn't click? In my case German (my first language) and English sucked for roughly 8 years. I ended school with A in both and was the only student in my school without a single mistake in my exam.

- School gives you good grades if you managed to learn the topics at hand. Being able to learn what is needed or what you are bad at — not what you want and are good at is a skill in itself that can be important in life. I'd argue unless you are an exceptional genius (unlike 99,999% of pupils) you gain more from pulling through than you would if you called yourself a genius and focused on a single topic. Schools goal is to educate the majority

- pupils (and often also their parents) are utterly unable to judge which bits of school will be essential to their later life. I had many collegues who utterly hated every second of a multitude of subjects, only to years later tell me how glad they are now to have had been subjected to it (which brings me back to my first point)

We could (and should!) argue on how school works as a system of grades, teachers and pupils — ideally teachers would motivate students to become curious about and proficient in subjects without the motivation of good or the threat of bad grades. But if my experience as an educator at the university levels (without grades in mh case) shows one thing it is that those first semester students who are really able to judge what will be useful to them later on are not many. Many of them are more like the dog in the meme: "Only stick, no take" — they want to be able to do the cool thing without knowing what is needed to do the cool thing.

I mean, just as a counter-note: I utterly hated every second of a multitude of subjects, and indeed now I am 37 and I never needed them and was entirely correct about what I would require later.

This is also part of my point, e.g. having learned Italian for years was exhausting and mostly pointless when I did it, and nowadays I can somewhat understand it whenever I am in Italy, which is maybe every two years. Was that worth it for the level of skill I gained: probably not.

But I wouldn't be able to tell if some of the mental agility I have today (beyond languages) could be attributed to the fact that I was exposed to this language which differs from my first languages in multiple ways. The lessons you may take away from any given subject is not necessarily limited to its raw content.

This is a quite known topic in educational sciences, e.g. when answering the question why it still makes sense to teach kids how to do maths without a calculator in an age where you have it always in your pocket — that is because it (A) forms an intuition about mathematical correctness and (B) logical and numerical thinking gets trained as an side effect.

Ofc all of that doesn't happen when you are unlucky enough to have had bad teachers, but that wasn't the argument.

Personally I loved history, social science and geography, but none of that has been useful in working life. Being good at mathematics is prerequisite for nearly all well-paying jobs, humanities are not of much use except for being able to write and read well.

Remember that school isn't only about acquiring skills to leverage your lifetime earnings. Education is about understanding and learning the world as a whole. So understanding humanities history the land that we live in and everything else under the sun is important.

Imagine that all we were was measured by the salary that we make and not humans and human civilization. Might as well just hand over our lives to the robots now.

Hindsight bias?

In my very limited experience as an educator (I worked as a teacher for two years at the trade school level), I completely agree with your excellent comment.

I would argue that sometimes students are right when they complaint about a subject being useless or obsolete (e.g. our network professor told us everything about the OSI protocol stack in great detail, and barely touched TCP/IP), but most of the time they don't know what will be useful later in life.

Yeah I mean, I can come up with 1000 lessons that would be utterly usless to 999 out of 1000 students in practise — but that wouldn't stop me from teaching those 1000 lessons in a way that really hooks those students to the topics discussed.

On the flipside you can take the most essential, practical and important topic and deliver it with such dullness that everybody falls asleep.

The first step in teaching (IMO) is to make people interested to hear what is being said. If your subject is useless and boring to most people you have to find a way to make it useful and interesting to them. This requires rethorical and social skills, good presentation skills and a deep understandingnand interest for the subjects to be thought.

In reality most subjects have interesting bits, but is the task of the teacher to make them relate to the world. If your prof thougth you about the OSI protocol stack so long everybody forgot its practical applications and how it binds together with higher level stuff, that is certainly knowledge, but it doesn't help you making it part of your understanding of the world.

Yeah, these are definitely points worth noting. Especially as in many cases, the way something is taught can have a huge effect on how well you do in it/understand it, and students will end up not liking subjects that they could have liked in university or the workplace.

So you also have to wonder how many potential math prodigies we've missed out on, simply because they had a bad maths education at school.

> Exposure is good, but success in school requires you to be successful in these subjects as well.

Being specific, it's not school, it's what school grants you i.e. a paying job. The higher paying, thusly more coveted jobs, generally filter against good grades which then the requirement pushes downwards into schools because, at scale, it's a decent system; leveraging the schools to help decide who is good.

> Being _really_ good in one thing should allow you to make up for being subpar in other areas, but it doesn't.

I counter with, if you are "_really_" good, it shows because you truly are a genius and you get fast tracked on that subject, but I think your "_really_" is actually just "_pretty_" and you're trying to include more than the 1 in 100 million.

To directly answer your point, for the "slightly smarter than everyone else" my middle school allowed kids to attend highschool in specific subjects and then highschool into the nearby community college and considered "harder/more prestigious" than the AP programs - admittedly only in math for this latter part. The school was in a more affluent neighborhood so I recognize the privilege.

> but I think your "_really_" is actually just "_pretty_" and you're trying to include more than the 1 in 100 million.

I don't quite understand your point. Pretty good still puts you far ahead of the average. I could easily handle second year college maths and computer science while in high school. And I couldn't hold a candle to Ramanujan.

I still needed to do well in my other courses in order to be able to get into my chosen college.

I think that's the point - "pretty good" isn't good enough for a top school to want to admit you. Second year college/CS is pretty good but I went to a great high school where there were 50+ kids at that level. That's not enough to stand out in a meaningful way.

Whereas if someone was Ramanujan-level, their raw talent would be so apparent they wouldn't have this issue and would clearly stand out.

Maybe, but TFA says at least in Ramanujan's case:

But he ignored all subjects besides math and lost his scholarship within a year. He later enrolled in another university, this time in Madras (now Chennai), the provincial capital some 250 kilometers north. Again he flunked out.

Maybe it would be different now?

If you get into the IMO team you'll be accepted anywhere good for maths. Probably a high position in the local competition would be enough. (YMMV as my understanding is coloured by a little knowledge of the system in the UK)

> Second year college/CS is pretty good but I went to a great high school where there were 50+ kids at that level. That's not enough to stand out in a meaningful way.

It is not enough to stand out in the current system.

The parent was saying selecting the 50 kids who can handle it is a much better approach than just taking the highest overall grades.

The average A's across the board high school student can't handle second year college maths. Yet they will be placed ahead of the observably better at math kids.

Imagine if jobs worked like this - "Yes, we know you are a great developer but you don't really understand economics. Sorry".

Being well-rounded and having exposure to a bunch of topics is valuable to an extent. However, in my experience most of the people making a real difference in the workplace and academia are not particularly well rounded.

Thankfully in tech there are alternative pathways. However, for many professions there aren't and these high performers are simply excluded to societies detriment.

You can only progress so much in a field of expertise before hitting diminishing return.

At some point it makes sense to broaden your knowledge and skillset.

>You can only progress so much in a field of expertise before hitting diminishing return.

I suppose how long you can progress for and how far you can progress depends somewhat on the breadth and depth of the field of expertise.

Many fields of expertise are so broad and deep that they have their own sub-fields just to make them manageable.

So you would probably be in a sub-field and then broaden your knowledge and skill-set in a related sub-field of the overall field that you are well suited to.

I'm betting it's likely you can see how your own particular field, as you are on HN, replicates this pattern.

> It is not enough to stand out in the current system.

What I'm saying is in some hypothetical system which places a great emphasis on specialization, people who are a few years ahead of curriculum are a dime a dozen and will not stand out. There were 50 kids in my high school, so how many is that nationwide?

Particularly in math, it is straightforward for an exceptional talent to stand out. Competitive math is a clear pathway/credential. If someone is not able to achieve meaningful results then it's probably just the case that they aren't as talented as they believe

> Imagine if jobs worked like this - "Yes, we know you are a great developer but you don't really understand economics. Sorry".

There are plenty of software devs who are not getting hired to the potential of their raw development skills because they cannot communicate or collaborate productively. There are also plenty of software devs who are not getting hired to the potential of their raw development skills because they don't have as much domain knowledge as other devs.

> people who are a few years ahead of curriculum are a dime a dozen and will not stand out.

I'm not sure what you mean.

High school has a much lower, but broader, bar.

The number who can handle second year college math are a small fraction of those who can get straight A's at high school.

> There are plenty of software devs who are not getting hired to the potential of their raw development skills because they cannot communicate or collaborate productively.

These are behavioural issues and not knowledge issues. We do not address these kinds of issues at high school at all.

Getting an A in English doesn't prepare you in any way to be a team player.

In my ~15 year career the only people I've seen not hired because of a knowledge gap in this space have been non-native speakers.

> Imagine if jobs worked like this - "Yes, we know you are a great developer but you don't really understand economics. Sorry".

This is exactly the route to exploitation by MBA managers.

Great developer, loyal, doesn't understand the need to change companies to get paid a competitive salary. Perfect hire.

The person who doesn't understand economics pays the price themselves.

So in grade 5 you maths is A++++ (like college entry level), you're excused from English, Civics and what not, and when by the time of graduation you've fizzled out (which most prodigies do) you're just an unemployable nerd.

School education standards are the barest minimum and anyone of IQ > 85 can make them.

Personally I can’t say I learned anything professionally useful in english or civics. An actually decent math class in just one of my years of k-12 would have been much more useful.

When you're a scientist, you'd assume the calculus is the most useful thing you learn in high school, but actually its the 10 page essay on deadline for grant writing.

It's weird to say that about English when good communication is essential for success in any engineering field. Even if all English does is force you to read more, it's probably a win in this regard.

> It's weird to say that about English when good communication is essential for success in any engineering field

Some of what's taught in English classes is about clear communication, and some of it isn't.

I think learning the 5 paragraph essay structure was very useful. But that's maybe 3 months worth of learning. The rest was English major stuff. Which is fine, but please don't pretend that it has a lot to do with "good communication".

> Even if all English does is force you to read more, it's probably a win in this regard.

It's not enough to say people had to read for English classes. You have to compare it to the counterfactual. In that regard, I don't think it stood up well.

1. I was already reading a lot. I just read different things.

2. I came to hate pretty much everything I read in class. It's only decades later that I've been able to appreciate some of the classics that we read.

On this point, I think English class was a net harm, at least for me. Of course, everyone has different circumstances; I'm sure there are people for whom a similar program as what I went through would have been a benefit.

This is a very immature take.

Of course you can BELIEVE that English classes didn't help you learn how to read and write more effectively or how to better understand what was left unsaid or unwritten, but believing something doesn't make it so.

And yes, as a student reading the classics often sucks. After all, you're not reading them for pleasure - you're reading them to learn how to identify and discuss their themes. But more than that, you see how themes are repeated throughout history, and how the author's experiences changed how they illustrated those themes. English classes taught you plenty of history - not so much in rote facts, but rather by illustrating parts of the cultural zeitgeist of different eras and how authors reinforced, protested, or recorded what was happening at the time.

I doubt many children appreciate education while they're learning, but adults certainly can be thankful that they weren't left in the dark.

It's very impolite to label lived experience of another educated and probably somewhat accomplished adult as immature.

At 45 years old I can confidently say that anything I've "learned" on my native language classes through 12 years of having them was totally useless garbage and I'm using none of it in my writing, reading and culturural appreciation or understanding of the world. Everything I use was self-acquired in the time I had that was not spent in native language classes. Ideas of education are great, but the implementation is terrible to the point of being useless.

On the other hand math, physics and chemistry I learned at school has been immensely practically and culturally useful and I wouldn't know a fraction of it if I wasn't taught it in school.

40, and I concur.

Even if the goal is a cultural appreciation, Shakespeare's plays will tell you as much about England in 1585-1613 as Terry Gilliam's filmography does about the Anglosphere in 1971-present.

It's more than zero, but it's also missing the overwhelming majority of the context and the world in which it exists.

Modern readings treat Shakespeare with excessive reverence: not just "a playwright" but "The Bard".

Those plays were made to be performed with very short rehearsal time before performing, outside, with no lights (at most fire, but it was wood and thatched and burned down from a theatrical cannon), in a crowded venue where audiences would be expected to jeer and cheer, whereas today it's a finely rehearsed performance by people who take it seriously performed for an audience who consider it high culture.

Monty Python's Gumbies aren't well understood by new viewer today, as modern news treats "the man on the street" somewhat differently than in the 70s. How wrong do modern viewers comprehend Shakespeare's characters, considering that "The Taming of the Shrew" is classified as a comedy?

That said, I was also busy teaching myself a lot of maths and science ahead of the classes; what I learned from school but would not have taught myself was the basics of German and French (though only the former stuck with me), the absolute basics of music notation, some metalworking and woodworking, and PE.

Oh, and the practical experiences in the chemistry lab, though I'd have still done the theory myself without that.

> Shakespeare's plays will tell you as much about England in 1585-1613 as Terry Gilliam's filmography does about the Anglosphere in 1971-present.

Why, given the vast ocean of possible knowledge, would you assume I or most people would have any interest or benefit in that? Over something like geometric algebra, soldering or solving quadratic equations?

Human creations can be roughly divided in two categories, tools and content. Teaching content is pointless. Its selection is arbitrary and its value is roughly same and miniscule. Millions will choose Frotnite streamer over Shakespeare any day of the week. Math, physics, chemistry, foreign language are tools. Tools that the knowledge of can help you create whatever you desire, both content and whats more important and rare new tools. Native language classes, history, geography, even biology are very content heavy and very poor on tools. Thus they are mostly useless.

I was agreeing with you about these points, sorry if that didn't come across, I was rather tired while writing that.

I was also saying that even though the lens of culture, the generally mandatory Shakespeare is overrated.

It's my fault that it didn't come across. English is not my native language. Most of it maps to my brain really well, but there are some phrases that my brain just refuses to properly assimilate. "I concur" is the one. Somehow my brain intuitively maps it rather to "I object" than "I agree" like it should.

Ah, interesting. I would never have guessed from the username. :)

I have a similar problem with a few words in German, despite being in Berlin for 6 years now — "Es war krass" sounds like it should be a bad thing.

I learned anything professionally useful in English

Even as someone who went full 'STEM' for both my education and career, English is probably among the most professionally useful courses I did in high school. A surprisingly large part of my job involves reading things, understanding them, and then writing a clear and reasoned response to them, all skills I first learned and really got to practice in English class.

Reading and writing is a huge part of software development. But I didn't learn these skills at school. If anything, school soured them for me, by making me read things I didn't want to read and writing things I didn't want to write. School should let you read what you want. Today that you read it could be checked with AI prepared quiz. And writing should be mostly focused on communication not essays. Very small fraction of people ends up getting significant utility writing their ramblings into the void.

> making me read things I didn't want to read and writing things I didn't want to write

How to do things you don't want to do is a fundamental requirement for adulthood, and probably the most important skill anyone learns in school

That may be your experience. In such case I feel for you. For me doing things I don't want to do take less than an hour a day for my whole adult life. During school it was more like 11 (including going there, homework, other related chores). I hate school system with passion and I feel it was the worst thing that happened to me. I would be better off wandering the streets and getting access to a library.

If you suddenly got a passive source of income matching your best possible salary progression on the condition that you don't work, would you forgo it and keep your work as it is?

If your answer is no, you're currently doing things you'd rather not.

I absolutely disagree. Adulthood is freedom. It's when you decide what you choose to do. Sometimes things feel like you have to do them but that's just remnants of the conditioning you were moulded by as a child. When you are pressed to the wall you are eventually forced to understand that you don't really have to do them, you just choose to, because however hard they may be it's easier for you than the available alternative. You don't have that level of agency as a child when you are constantly exposed to indoctrination from everybody more powerful than you (which at this stage is pretty much everybody).

> Adulthood is freedom.

Freedom? That has not been my experience of adulthood. To me adulthood is about making responsible choices based on their consequences for you and the people around you ... which means that the majority of my time is spent doing things that other people need rather than because I want to do them

> To me adulthood is about making responsible choices based on their consequences

What is freedom, if not the ability to make those choices?

"Freedom is the recognition of necessity"

The school should form decent individuals before than useful workers, and for that it's necessary to have a passing level of culture. For example, everyone should have a basic grasp of ethics (and know a bit of history), even those of us working in technology or science. Geniuses like Ramanunjan or John von Neumann are such a rare occurrence that the school system can not and should not optimize for them (and my very personal view is also that we'll have even less geniuses in the future, as our distraction-based society is not conducive anymore to cognitive development).

That is an advantage of the British system. You have a wide education until 16 and sit a broad range of exams at that age (GCSEs) and then specialise in a few (most often three) subjects from 16 to 18.

You usually need to pass English and maths GCSEs, but universities mostly care about the subjects you do in the last two years (except for very competitive courses).

This can be a problem for those who want to keep options open until they are 18 (like my younger daughter).

Even the system up to 16 is pretty flexible. There is a huge range of available subjects - although most schools offer only a limited selection (my kids were out of school by secondary school age so we had a huge choice and did some less usual subjects like astronomy and Latin).

As someone who did my GCSE's but then moved abroad before my A Levels and ended up taking the International Baccalaureate, I'm in hindsight really glad I didn't do A Levels. Had I stayed in England I would have studied just maths, physics and chemistry. Being forced by the IB program to also study english, philosophy and economics really expanded my horizons and has been huge boon to me in my life and I'm really happy I was afforded the opportunity to do so.

I did IGCSE's (the international version as I lived in Indonesia) and AS/A levels myself, while a lot of my friends who went to a different school did IB and I generally disagree. My most hated school years were the IGCSE times, exactly because I was forced into learning about crap I didn't care about in the slightest, like English Literature when all I wanted to do was the various sciences and especially mathematics.

I feel like the IGCSE times were more than enough exposure to those other subjects to give me a reasonably well-rounded image of those subjects. Now, a decade later, I'm definitely glad I went the STEM route rather than ever touching on any humanities subjects in any amount of detail.

IGCSEs per se are a lot more flexible about that. You can do any subjects in any combination you like. Its a decision by the school to make English literature compulsory. Home educated kids often do not do it, on the other hand there are are huge number of subjects they can pick from: https://he-exams.fandom.com/wiki/Category:Subjects

British universities do often (usually?) require English language (or an equivalent) and maths (I)GCSEs, as do British employers and further education colleges etc. so its a really bad idea to skip those.

I do think its good to give kids a broad education, and for some it would be good to continue that for longer. For others (like you) its just boring.

I also think there should be more opportunities for adult education, so if you decide later in life that you would like to learn about English literature or physics or whatever you should have a chance to do it. AT the moment in the UK things seem to be going the other way, with an over expansion of universities sucking up money, and further education colleges that used to offer adult education putting the resources into "16 to 18" courses.

Same in the Netherlands, it's become more flexible even since I went through school. It sucks until about age 16 (or 17/18 if you take a higher level education that includes e.g. Latin / Greek), then you get to go to vocational education and either do a work/school combo (1 day a week of school), or continue fulltime school for 3-10 years (3 years for most associate's degrees, 4 for bachelor's, more for a master's, and often you can go from the one to a higher level if you choose to).

But yeah, until that age it sucks and a lot of people struggle because they have to do classes they aren't at all interested in.

> but success in school requires you to be successful in these subjects as well.

It requires a very small success on a very basic level. It is not good to be a super math genius and know nothing about geography and history.

If you’re sufficiently good or accomplished at one thing then you’ll be fine. But most students aren’t. Most students who are good at math are just good at math. But if you win two golds at Math Olympiad while in high school or publish a groundbreaking result then your mediocre grades in history will be ignored.

But a 780 on the math SAT isn’t likely to put you in the company of people whose math is sufficient to ignore poor grades otherwise.

I was put into the "advanced" class in grade school, only to hate the increased homework load, and I missed my friends in the non-advanced class, so I intentionally refused to do the work so that I would be put back in the "regular" grade school classes. I was great at math, I taught myself fractions and algebra at a young age. I just didn't like spending so much time on the other subjects, they seemed too easy or too boring and took up too much school time. They wouldn't let me into the computer programming class in High School because I hadn't passed geometry, and the teacher was a total asshole - I failed his class, but I got an A in the make-up class with a different teacher. I got kicked out of electronics class because some other students stole stuff and blamed me for it - I had nothing to do with the theft, I was the teacher's favorite and had access to everything, I didn't need to steal anything, he gave me anything I wanted. God I hated High School so much.

After graduating High School, I couldn't really see myself sitting through 4 more years of basically the same subject material - history, English, social studies, etc... when all I really wanted to do is use my talent in electronics and computers that I'd been accumulating since I was 5 years old. So I went to a trade school for electronics and computers instead of a college, this was back in the late 80's.

I can't say that not going to college hurt my job prospects at all, I've been highly paid for many years for doing something I love. Jobs hired me based on experience, not because I went to a college. That may have changed a bit now, since some tech companies favor college graduates, but I've worked with some college graduates that are just dumb as shit and couldn't get anything done - not all are like that, but going to college isn't an indicator of success at all.

In my country there is a system where a kid applying to high school gets accepted based on a standard test, or can skip the line by performing well on a contest organized by the ministry of education. In my class something like 80% of kids were admitted through contests. When applying to the university there's a similar thing, except it's much harder to skip the line, but universities are free to set up their own admission rules as long as the rules are based on the national standard test. In my case, the final admission score was calculated something like "90% maths 10% everything else"

In my experience, people who are really good at something usually are at least average on many others. Thus they can do the minimum in other courses to pass, it's just a matter of working enough.

In my country, there are several students (12-18 years old) who can mix sport at high level (national championship) and a lighter school activity. They work like mad but they do it. But they have to prove there are good enough to get it, which is OK to me.

Being really good is not something you appreciate yourself, it's the others that notice.

> maybe you should be able to get an A++++

What does an A++++ mean? I guess it's equivalent of publishing a novel result/idea, solving a long standing conjecture sort of ability? If yes then I'd say the system does accommodate them. Terrance Tao for example was fast tracked and didn't get lost in the system.

Though it probably requires some effort from parents to figure out the right path for their prodigies.

>but success in school requires you to be successful in these subjects as well

It doesnt, at least in my country.

Here you have a few school leaving exams that you need to perform at

Math, native lang and english.

And one at advanced level, but its your choice when it comes to subject.

What you are talking about is GPA and GPA is meaningless tbf

That’s irrelevant to 99.99% of people. An A in math is not especially difficult to achieve.

To actually be meaningfully better at math you need to go far, far further than the coursework presented in schools, at which point it becomes an extra curricular which is already considered. If you’re a math savant proving novel theorems, they will notice that.

But nobody gives a shit if you’re just really, really good at factoring polynomials from Algebra 2 tests.

Something about this sniffs as elitist to me. A person who’s intelligent is curious and a person who’s curious should be curious about all things, not just some limited set.

Now, that’s not to say the only issue is someone’s curiosity. Traditional teaching methods make it very hard to be interested in some topics (history and language comes to mind), but barring that, I’m not sure I accept “it’s not interesting” as a reason not to explore a subject.

The only intelligence on earth capable of being equally curious about all things, of not needing to discriminate and focus only on preferred subjects, is the artificial kind of intelligence.

The rest of us don't live long enough compared to our reading speed.

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