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Comment by dionidium | Hacker News Reader

In order to rethink Bachelor Degrees, one must first rethink high school. It is routine in the US to see schools where 1) <=5% of the student body is proficient in math; but also 2) the school has a 90% graduation rate.

If that's high school, then it's useless, both as a signal, but also just because, you know, nobody is learning anything. You pretty much have to have some other place for smart people to demonstrate that they're smart.

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We need to admit schools are babysitting kids and not teaching them anymore. A few kids can still learn, but so many others don't. Especially the one who would learn in a better environment, but whose class is disrupted by 1 or 2 students preventing their education. Once a student gets behind a year, they aren't going to ever catch up if they are only passed on to the next year instead of being identified as someone who needs to repeat the year.

Edit: I should have been clearer in "are increasingly babysitting" and not been as strong as indicating it as some universal truth. I hear horror stories from teachers about how much of their time is focused on classroom management, how little on actual education, and how much effort it put into processes so the grades stay up regardless.

I wonder if alternative forms of education (like Waldorf/Steiner) would make more sense to more kids. It's clear that the standard way of teaching doesn't resonate with many kids, and we would do well to investigate that.

A few essential skills that I feel schools ought to teach:

1. Personal knowledge management

2. Digital literacy

3. Calling bullshit in the age of big data (this is an actual course, freely available on youtube)

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