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Comment by ken47 | Hacker News Reader

I question the emphasis on averages. Moving the average of a country as big as the USA is very hard, with questionable ROI.

The top N% in any given subject is going to drive a nation's progress. We aren't going to be putting tens of millions of Americans into jobs where their output is highly dependent on e.g. their mathematical knowledge and ability.

Isn't it time to do away with the outdated goal of training everyone to be a well-rounded unicorn, and let students meaningfully specialize before ~20-30% of their life has expired?

For a sample size of 1, I'm confident I'd be significantly more valuable economically in adulthood if I could have specialized in e.g. math at an early age, rather than spending countless hours on subjects that I had little interest in and barely use today.

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Who gets to pick and choose the kids' specialization ?

I don't agree with the premise (that early specialization is good), but setting that aside deciding what a 4th grader should focus on for the rest of their life feels like an impossible task.

You can't account for whether they'll like the more advanced subjects (i.e. they like 4th grade literature class but will bail at languistic analysis) and have no idea how they'll change even 3 years later as they hit puberty.

The child and their mentors could surely decide. If a kid doesn’t want to specialize, then they can defer until they’re ready.

At 4th grade I totally and definitely wanted to be a military jet fighter, and stayed in that phase for a solid 3 or 4 years. I'm pretty glad I learned other things as well.

Sure, making a decision is possible, and parents have the authority to deal with the aftermath. The same way some decide their kid will be an elite pianist and commit 100% to it as soon as they can.

But I don't see it as a sane path in general.

IDK what you're talking about. Clearly you haven't read: The Giver Divergent The Maze Runner

And all other sci-fi young-adult distopian novels where they clearly determine what 4th graders will be for the rest of their lives based on genetics. There are also some movies (practically documentaries, really) of the same books.

a friend and former neighbor of mine was a college physics professor. He is vehemently against education tracking and early bucketing of students into potential career tracks. His early scores would have led him to a life of manual labor, yet his true love and gift was mathematics, and he shared that with the world for a whole career.

I don’t disagree. I need to point out that I used the word “let,” not “force.”

How early? And what kind of scores?

The 11+ in the UK was extremely reliable -- and it was possible to get an education later if one really wanted to (and could find the time). The 11+ was basically an IQ test that didn't depend (much) on the curriculum.

School grades and tests are much less reliable.

He was in secondary when he into math

What subject did you learn in school that you perceive to be useless today? Honestly, I think the baseline learning in math, english, history, and science are all great and should still remain.

That's not to say there aren't useless classes and I think the second language course shouldn't be a hard requirement but otherwise I'm not sure what to the cut. Even PE is key for health.

The issue is that specializations can be obsoleted by changes in technology and that teaching a citizenry how to think is the surest way to collapse your society.

As they say: If there are 9 women in a room and one is pregnant, then each woman is 1 month pregnant on average!

Only an elite sliver[1] of students get the "well rounded unicorn" training experience. The vast majority attend slightly to severely underfunded public universities where they aren't allowed to take more than a cursory set of electives.

Of course there's a tremendous amount of value in more clear and more beautiful communication, but it's hard to measure directly so when the state wants to cut your operating costs, they're the first to go. Never mind that humanities classes are cheap as hell to run, and thus give a fantastic ROI.

Very good programmers aren't able to read prose well enough to identify the absolute dreck that AI tools generate. They aren't able to think critically about media well enough to identify the bullshit that they're surrounded by. I'm all for improved math education, but a few hours per week with a great teacher and a cart won't patch those gaps.

1) Ivy Plus institutions have about 100k undergraduate students. There are 15 million undergraduate students in the US. More than 99% of undergraduate students are not at an Ivy League or similar institution.

tl;dr: “You will read it for the same reason your parents waste their money on your piano lessons. So you won’t be a boring little shite the rest of your life.” -Frank McCourt

sounds like chapter 1 of brave new world

Aren't you good at math? Counting those hours should be easy.

Which obviously isn't a productive comment, but the small demands of K-12 aren't holding back math superstars, nor are the small demands required for an undergraduate degree.

I mean, I have an engineering degree from University of Michigan and I am only fairly good at math (but not particularly high achieving), so maybe my experience isn't instructive.

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