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Comment by Finnucane | Hacker News Reader

8th-grade me would probably score better than today-me.

Exactly. It seems like so many people fall into the logical trap that school is about getting you to permanently memorize facts that, in a typical adult life, end up being largely trivia.

School is about teaching your brain how to retain information in general, so you can retain what you need to use.

My brain is pudding. Also, 8th-grade me learned stuff that wasn't even known in 1912. What needs to be learned changes over time.

Exactly. How well would a 1912 student do on an 8th-grade test today for comparison?

They would lack any info about world wars, decolonization, computers, space race, internet, climate change, just to pick some topics taught today.

That only strengthens the argument that they were better educated.

The people who built all those things and won two world wars were educated with this curriculum. They took us from horse and buggy to space travel, clearly they were doing something right with education.

Not correct. This test would have impaired Linus Pauling, who was in eighth grade in 1912. He lacked two credits in American history and was never allowed to make them up. He won two Nobel prizes in chemistry.

More broadly, home schooling seems to be more effective in 19th century America. Edison likely never took any test and definitely never attended a college that depended on it. He was home-schooled because his hearing was so bad.

Were they better educated? In some states, it would have still been against the law to teach evolution. When I was in grade school we had court-ordered desegregation of the schools; they had Jim Crow. Schools represented very different values in those days.

You're fixating on the highest achievers of the highest achievers. Most people couldn't even read or write. Education was much less of a priority then, because you didn't require an education to have a decent life for the time period. In fact, often getting an education was a huge disadvantage - because you weren't working earlier. Skills are acquired with hands then. The sooner you put them to use, the better for your career as a factory man.

I think it's more of a filtering mechanism for people who are smart but also obedient. these people are economically valuable

Perhaps previously, but as long as there is some minimum effort schools will rarely ever fail you. High scores are rewarded but genuine intelligence (which is a variant of the norm) is stamped out as the school system fears variance.

I don't think this is true. Modern schools give many different opportunities to express intelligence in novel ways. I took music theory in high school, we wrote chorales. We had robotics too, for those that wanted it.

It's true though that if you're learning math the focus is on learning math, not theorizing new branches of mathematics. The reason being that most topics are cumulative. You can't study abstract algebra if you didn't pay attention in high school algebra. In that way, they force conformance. But largely I think this is a good thing.

This sort of thing also applies to English/Language Arts. In order to comprehend more complex media, you have to be able to comprehend simple media. Often, I hear people lament about how school didn't teach them about real life. Typically, the reason why is because they didn't pay attention in English class. There's a lot there.

Also, intelligence is virtually worthless without knowledge. Intelligence just describes potential. If you don't use that potential, it's no different than if you had no intelligence at all.

Not really. Or if I take that as face value, schools fail at it.

School mainly serves as day care and social programming: obey authority, believe what we tell you, remember what will appear on the test. Some people get more out of it than others.

Believe me, politicians also want citizens to get higher paying jobs, so they can pay more taxes.

If you've got a system that can reliably take a citizen earning $40,000/year and turn them into a citizen earning $140,000/year, governments from all over the world will beat down a path to your door. Over a 40 year career that's an extra $4 million in taxable income.

Nothing about government policies in my lifetime tells me either party or any administration makes increasing individual incomes a priority. Instead they created a system that puts young people in debt to pay for devalued degrees, then don't allow discharging that debt in bankruptcy. Telling everyone to go to college to get a degree just led to an example of Goodhart's Law -- people optimized for getting a piece of paper rather than optimizing for learning anything or at least graduating with some career skills.

I can think of many other examples of the government fleecing citizens into poverty (medical care, just to give one), enriching a few corporations and wealthy individuals at the expense of the general welfare. A government that cared about its citizens making more money wouldn't have hundreds of thousands of them living on the streets. If the government actually prioritized increasing tax revenues I can point them to some very rich companies and individuals not paying their share.

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