Hacker News Reader

Comment by constantcrying | Hacker News Reader

[flagged]

I've read the same comment from you as a response to three different comments. I will just answer here:

"There is substantial evidence to suggest that education influences intelligence.[3]" (From Wikipedia)

[3] Baltes, P., & Reinert, G. (1969). Cohort effects in cognitive development in children as revealed by cross sectional sequences. Developmental Psychology, 1, 169-177.

Why do you think I am "against learning"?

I am saying that school is terrible at teaching. If the goal of schooling is that students learn then the school system I was in was a total failure.

The moment I entered university I learned much more and much faster.

> The moment I entered university I learned much more and much faster.

Is it not possible that schooling prepared you for this and enabled you to learn much more and faster?

No. It is not possible.

Why couldn't the school have prepared me for that when I was 16? Why does preparation take precisely 12 years and only then I can really learn anything.

Maybe you're right. You're taking your own anecdotes as evidence that schooling is useless. If schooling and university didn't teach you not to do that then maybe it's not all it's cracked up to be.

The curricula for school and early university semesters are largely standardized, which allows me to generalize my observations as all other students had to learn roughly the same in school and university.

You're definitely wrong because I learned lots in school but university was completely useless.

What was taught in school over an entire semester usually was a single lecture in university. At least for the mathematics courses, where actually similar things were taught, just from drastically different perspectives.

If you're capable of university level mathematics then you're probably not the audience that school mathematics classes are most concerned about. It's unfortunate, but schools are trying to raise their average grades and your grades were likely to be good regardless.

Surely you had peers at school that found mathematics to be challenging, or even struggled?

Maybe the particular school you went to was terrible _for you_, but personally I learned a lot, both which helped me both at the (local equivalent) university I went after school and later in life.

I'd suggest not making it so black and white ("school does nothing", "total failure"), there is room for a bit of nuance.

Sure, I am guilty of being polarizing. But I honestly do believe that my 12 years of schooling were in large parts a waste of time and I would like it if people at least considered the possibility that you can have children do other things.

Are you implying we should school them the Spartan way rather then? Would that prepare them for life in a better way? Or, what do you think would be valuable then to do (purposely not saying learn) during those twelve years?

I am not implying anything.

>Or, what do you think would be valuable then to do (purposely not saying learn) during those twelve years?

I think that this is different between children.

Actually I think it could be extremely valuable to learn, but then the child's activities should actually focus on learning effectively. And sitting in a classroom with children not that interested in learning and a teacher trying to find some middle ground is not helping that.

Personally I believe that with a good school system I would have been perfectly fine doing university courses at 16 and a good school system would have encouraged me to accomplish exactly that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com