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Comment by toolslive | Hacker News Reader

But, why? Now the kid will be bored at primary school. You could have diverted him toward skills you aren't going to learn in school (checkers, chess, music,...)

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This is a good point that I don't think gets enough thought. Unless he's going to an excellent public school, or a private school, the odds he's much more bored in the first few years of school goes up dramatically when he's reading the book in 5 minutes (or practically has it memorized from reading it at home so much) while everyone else is sounding out the words on the first page.

This does all sort of go away if he's going to great school with more individualized attention. The odds of that in general are pretty low, but hopefully a bit better assuming there's some correlation between having a parent that cares enough to teach a 2-year-old to read in their spare time and having the resources to be in a great public district or go to private school.

Learning to be bored will be of great value once AI takes over all our jobs.

Funny how "Bitcoin fixes this" has become "AI will break this." I wonder what the next one will be.

This is the same reason people don't take calculus in ninth grade, or organic chemistry in tenth. "What will you do if you run out of classes?" I don't know, learn on your own? And once you run out of learning, do your own reseach? You cannot simultaneously view school as a place to advance your child's learning, and also a place you need to hold off on their learning for. Pick one, and if you pick the latter, admit to yourself that they're not going to school, they're getting babysat.

I actually attended a school system which had a system in place for that --- see my post elsethread.

Unfortunately, the Mississippi State Supreme Court ruled it to be an unfair and illegal educational system which conferred undue benefits to the students able to take advantage of it and that the lack of a commensurate compensation for students who were unable to do so was manifestly inappropriate.

By "unable to take advantage of it", do you mean:

- Unable to demonstrate prequisite knowledge, or

- Unable to go to a school further away?

I can get the latter one, which is why I think we shouldn't just have magnet schools, we should have free, government-run magnet boarding schools. Or, alternatively, how much would it really cost to provide a chauffeur service to kids who have demonstrated intelligence and need? If schools can provide personal aides to 1% of their population, I'm sure they have the budget to treat another 1% equitably.

The former.

The crux of the lawsuit as I understood it from hearing about it from letters my parents received from involved parents was that a student who was unable to learn at the accelerated pace and graduated with only a high-school diploma sued to either be allowed to continue to attend the school for 4 additional years, or to be granted funds to attend a college.

The school was the only public school in the county, and was attended by all the local residents (the student who initiated the lawsuit was one of them) and the children of the personnel of the local Air Force Base --- it was the matching DoD funding which made the school system possible.

From what you say it sounds a boneheaded decision, to deprive students from a good education because other students aren't ready for it.

The UK excels at something similar, where they are trying to undermine private schools and even higher level public grammar schools. This is because it's only privileged children who can afford to go to there, and the outcomes are way better then public schools.

There is a term for this: "the politics of envy", where it's better to funnel everyone through the same mediocre system so that nobody can gain an advantage. This was very much the logic behind the recent law to tax private schools, and it's an idiotic principle.

I learned way more on most topics on my own than in school. Reading was the main skill that unlocked that, though things like PBS and (when somewhere with cable, and before these channels went to shit) Discovery & TLC played a role too.

Reading earlier means getting to start on that stuff sooner. Young kids have shitloads of free time.

What a stupid thing to say. If he's bored the teacher can advance his grade faster or at least give him personally more challenging material.

Should we never teach anyone anything, just to avoid they'll be bored when they see something they already know? Is starting to learn at 6 objectively "better" than at 2? No, that's just how our system currently works. And what you're saying is you want your kid to be mediocre. Great, but the rest of us are aiming higher.

And, in most places, your public school has the legal obligation to provide an education for all ability levels, including people who show up to their first year with the ability to read. Even in the United States of America, where the culture is only the bottom 20% of students deserve to learn, most school districts still have this in their bylaws (they just ignore it).

Yes, we should never teach anyone anything because someone raised a mild and relevant objection.

Holding your kid back because they'll be bored by the ponderous pace of public school education isn't the answer you're looking for. Continue to be an active parent and find them a different school or a program within the school where their above grade level reading is embraced. Also you don't always get to just choose what the kid gets interested in, they're going to focus on something and at that age you're just overjoyed if it's not destructive or expensive.

I had a similar problem in my elementary school in the 90s having learned reading early and pretty easily and even had a 2nd grade teacher get a little peeved because I was just reading ahead during group reading exercises and didn't know where the group was when it was my turn. The solution was getting the teacher to stop and the next year getting a better teacher and into a little group with the other good readers and tested for AIG early.

If the kid is bright they'll be bored anyway. This is something you cannot avoid, so teaching them to behave in a boring environment is more productive.

Yup. I was a "smarter than average" kid at this age and though I couldn't read when I started primary school I was still bored with the slow pace of school the vast majority of the time.

> You could have diverted him toward skills you aren't going to learn in school (checkers, chess, music,...)

I think the kid has a higher chance to excel at their hobby of choice now that they are ahead of the curriculum and can focus on the hobby?

Why would you put a much smarter than average kid in an ordinary government school in the first place? That's like making a naturally athletic and fit kid attend 6 hours/day of occupational therapy to learn to walk

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