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Comment by nickpsecurity | Hacker News Reader

I always tell people the most important lessons in life I learned started rights in public schools. We’re stuck with other people and all the games people play.

I’ve always favored we teach more on character, people skills (esp body language or motivations), critical thinking, statistics, personal finance, etc. early on. Whatever we see playing out in a big way, esp skills crucial for personal advancement and democracy, should take place over maximizing the number of facts or rules memorized.

Also, one might wonder why a school system would be designed to maximize compliance to authority figure’s seemingly meaningless rules and facts. If anything, it would produce people who were mediocre, but obedient, in authoritarian structures. Looking at the history of education, we find that might not be far from the truth.

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> Also, one might wonder why a school system would be designed to maximize compliance to authority figure’s seemingly meaningless rules and facts.

I think the explanation is a little more mundane—it’s just an easier way to teach. Compliance becomes more and more valuable as classroom sizes increase—you can have a more extreme student-teacher ratio if your students are more compliant. Meaningless rules and facts provide benchmarks so teachers can easily prove to parents and administrators that students are meeting those benchmarks. People value accountability more than excellence… something that applies broadly in the corporate world as well.

Somehow, despite this, we keep producing a steady stream of people with decent critical thinking skills, creativity, curiosity, and even rebellion. They aren’t served well by school but these people keep coming out of our school system nonetheless. Maybe it can be explained by some combination of instinctual defiance against authority figures and some individualistic cultural values; I’m not sure.

Re compliance for scaling

It could be true. They sold it to us as a way to teach them. If it’s not teaching them, then they would be wasting the money of taxpayers to do something different. If parents wanted what you describe, or just a babysitter / teacher, then they might still support it. We need honesty, though, so parents can make tradeoffs among various systems.

Also, the capitalists that originally funding and benefited from the public model also send their own kids to schools with different models. Those models consistently work better to produce future professionals, executives, and leaders.

So, the question is: “Do none of the components of those private schools scale in a public model? Or do they have different goals for students of public schools and students of elite schools like their own kids?” Maybe we’re overly paranoid, though.

Re good outcomes

Well, there’s maybe two things going on. Made in God’s image, we’re imbued with free will, emotional motivations, the ability to learn, to adapt, to dream. Even in the hood, some kids I went to school with pushed themselves to do great things. If public school is decent or good, then our own nature will produce some amount of capable people.

The real question is what percentage of people acquire fundamental abilities we want. Also, what percentage is successful? A worrying trend is how most teachers I know are pulling their hair out about how students can’t read, do math, anything. Examples from both people I know in real life and teachers I see online:

“Young people in our college classes are currently reading at a sixth grade level. They don’t understand the materials. I have to re-write or explain them so they can follow along.”

“I get my college students to do a phonics program. It doesn’t get them to a college level. It does usually increase their ability by a year or two level.” (Many seconded that online comment.)

“I hate to say it but they’re just dumb now. If they learn anything, I feel like I accomplished something.”

“My goal is to get them to focus on even one lesson for a few minutes and tell me even one word or character in the lesson. If they do that, we’re making progress.”

Whatever system (and culture) that is doing this on a large scale is not educating people. Our professors should never have to give people Hooked on Phonics on college to get them past sixth grade level. This is so disasterous that ditching it for something else entirely or trying all kinds of local experiments makes a lot of sense.

> Also, the capitalists that originally funding and benefited from the public model also send their own kids to schools with different models.

Re: “different models”—the main difference with private schools is that private schools are permitted to eject students for whatever reason they want. They can solve classroom management problems by removing problematic students from the school entirely. It would be morally wrong to let public schools do the same thing.

IMO this is difference is the only difference worth talking about between public and private schools. Other factors exist but this difference is just too big and swamps the others. Public schools which are permitted to be more selective show much better outcomes, such as Stuyvesant. Wikipedia has a dedicated page listing Stuyvesant alumni, including several Nobel prize winners, the Fields medal, musicians, actors, and politicians. It’s part of the NYC public school system.

> Whatever system (and culture) that is doing this on a large scale is not educating people.

I don’t think I can evaluate this statement—I don’t know what you actually mean by that. Surely you don’t mean it in a literal sense, but I don’t have any kind of landmark for what kind of figurative sense you mean here.

> This is so disasterous that ditching it for something else entirely or trying all kinds of local experiments makes a lot of sense.

I don’t think you’ve made a compelling argument here, or even touched on some kind of framework for evaluating the problem. There are so many contributing factors for why public schools are often terrible—underpaid teachers, underfunded programs, standardized tests, constant meddling from politicians and administrators, etc. Some things about public schools you have to accept as part of the constraints, or you have to come up with some kind of radical, outside of the box thinking for how to get around them. For example, the idea that you send kids, from morning to afternoon, to a local school where they sit in a room with 25 peers from their local neighborhood and receive instruction on some particular topic.

“Ditching it for something else entirely” is a suggestion that can be dismissed unless you can come up with some argument that “something else entirely” plausibly exists.

I think the sad truth is that we know how to improve public schools, but it takes a lot of slow work and political power. Coming up with new ideas doesn’t help us if we are already failing to implement ideas which we know work.

> We’re stuck with other people and all the games people play.

I assume you have at least heard about or may even have read “Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre” by Keith Johnstone. If not, I think you would find it interesting.

I haven’t but I’ll check it out. Thanks!

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