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Comment by fn-mote | Hacker News Reader

> I know it's not popular to say it but my son learns anything I teach him

1. Remember that you are looking at an experiment with n=1.

2. It sounds like you think the key to education is coercion. ("His teachers don't make him do anything...".) That's a grim world, too.

Also, I hope you are looking at your home country's educational system with clear eyes.

Not to say I disagree that the US educatonal system is a mess. If you stopped at your second sentence I would entirely agree.

As you went on, I started to wonder if you had an experience teaching your child something that was difficult for them. It's not just _forgetting_ that makes learning difficult.

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> It sounds like you think the key to education is coercion. ("His teachers don't make him do anything...".) That's a grim world, too.

Of course education is coercion. Same way work is things you do for money. Education without coercion is just learning, at best.

Teachers are there because of the coercion they provide. Even in the US they coerce kids to at least sit in class, because if they didn't kids would just walk out and go learn how to properly light up a cigarette from some older kid.

if a kid is being lazy there's simply no way around "cohercion" as you put it. You know how I know he's being lazy? Because I used to do the same stuff for the same reasons, and my parents and teachers saw through it and didn't make excuses for me or any other kid.

We were expected to grow up and learn to do work even when we didn't want to.

I remember being at a point where I could read but it took effort, so I would just vibe it.

It wasn't coercion that got me to be less lazy, it was the time when I put clearly labelled sugar on my food instead of salt.

When I was in kindergarten, we were read a book called The Little Old Man Who Could Not Read. The main character was a Mr. Magoo-type character, except merely illiterate instead of functionally blind. He was always making mistakes like this, for example buying wax paper instead of spaghetti because they both came in long boxes. Eventually his wife teaches him how to read and his next grocery trip has all the correct items.

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