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Comment by obscurette | Hacker News Reader

As someone old (60+) who was a teacher in school and thinking a lot about it:

- It's mostly a cultural shift in the western world – we don't value personal responsibility any more. When I was in school in seventies, it was my responsibility to study no matter what since grade 1. It didn't matter whether I liked a teacher, topic or whatever. It's not the case any more.

- Since nineties there has been a shift in educational sciences and practices from "old school" memorizing as "rote learning" and explicit instruction toward "critical thinking skills". Sounds nice for many, but in practice it doesn't work. Barb Oakley has a wonderful paper about it "The Memory Paradox: Why Our Brains Need Knowledge in an Age of AI"[1].

- Smartphones, social media etc certainly contribute and the rise of LLMs will make it even worse.

[1] - https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5250447

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I've related this story here before. I was a first year in physics grad school, and my professor told me he heard rumours of students telling each other memorising formulae was a waste of time, and that as a physicist one should just be good at deriving results. The professor scoffed at that and sardonically surmised that may be the person who said that was intentionally trying to stiffle their competition in the class. Memorisation while limited in some ways is a part of the whole in addition to creative and critical thinking. Without facts and ideas in your mind, you have nothing to think criticall about.

I grew up being told by my peers in school that memorising things was a waste of time and critical thinking was all that mattered. Now I use Anki to literally memorize programming language syntax and ideas and facts that are relevant to my job (like data structures and algorithms). I wish I'd valued memorization when I was in school, because it's such a foundational thing to have knowledge upon which to build everything else.

I find that very interesting and also thought of using Anki for that but decided it wouldn't be useful for me now.

Could you give me an example and how it helped you? Thank you :)

- memorising names and birthdates of relevant people - private life and work life - anything I’m looking up more than ~5 times can go in Anki - spelling of words I often misspell (eg bureaucracy) - when reading anything technical I need for my work or study I have Anki open and type in what I learn in QnA format, and I will never forget it but have it easy within reach for an investment of only a few minutes per QnA over its (and my) life time - just for fun, the cantons of Switzerland, landskap of Sweden, provinces of Canada, and states and capitals of the USA - NATO phonetic alphabet which comes in useful more often that you’d think

Life-changingly useful program for every aspect of my life, when I can finish it every day

My top tips:

- put all decks in a master “daily” deck using the :: syntax in the deck names. Otherwise you feel “done” when having finished one deck, and feel like not starting the next. Have only one goal - finishing today’s Anki - for that master deck (and every other deck) go Study Options > Display Order > New/review order > Show after reviews. Otherwise it’s hard to ever catch up when slipping behind. With this setting, the system becomes somewhat self correcting

My only regret is not being able to pay more than $25 to the developers

And creativity is often putting seemingly unrelated things together. If you don't have the required things floating around in your mind at the same time, it is not possible.

The way of getting those facts and ideas into your head can be very different, though.

You can either mechanically memorize them, which is a boring and mindless activity, or you can be challenged, participate in discussions, projects, and activities that engage the parts of your brain involved with critical thinking.

Both will technically get you to pass a test, but the latter will be better for retaining information, while developing skills and neural pathways that make future learning easier.

The problem is that most academia is based on the memorization approach. Here are a bunch of ideas and facts we think are important; get them into your head, and regurgitate them back at us later. This is not a system that creates knowledgeable people. It doesn't inspire or reward curiosity, creativity, or critical thinking. It's an on-rails pipeline that can get you a piece of paper that says you've been through it, which is enough to make you a tax-paying citizen employed by companies who expect the bare minimum as well.

I get that the alternative approach is more difficult to scale, and requires a more nuanced, qualitative, and personal process. But that's how learning works. It's unique for everyone, and can't be specified as a fixed set of steps.

After all, what is the point of teaching people to be idea and fact storing machines, if machines can do a far better job at that than us? Everyone today can tell you a random fact about the world in an instant by looking it up in a computer. That's great, but we should be training and rewarding people for things computers can't do.

Exactly. I'm not able to memorize multiplication tables or even listen to math lectures - I can't hold more than one or two numbers in my head before they start disappearing. However, I am capable of learning and using math to an advanced level, at least temporarily.

How? The way I think of numbers is actually quite similar to what is currently known as "new math". It's not taught well because almost no teacher was raised with it (and thus lack the ability to think in new math "natively"), but it is based on something real.

Personal responsibility, or lack thereof always seemed to me like one of these memes that are used to explain phenomena in a handwavy fashion.

Does anyone have any data points that could help me update my world model here?

I certainly feel personally responsible for things and so do many people that I know.

Additionally, it feels like people like to blame systemic issues on lack of personal responsibility in the general public, while ideally, elected officials should take personal responsibility for fixing the system.

No jard data, but from talking to teachers there was a shift sometime in the last few decades were parents got really aggressive towards teachers when they should have been aggressive towards their children. This idea that their kids were no longer accountable and that poor performance or discipline had to be the fault of the teachers.

Your first point is a favorite of a lot of people, but doesn’t make a lot of sense to me: how is your generation with the ostensibly correct culture producing a generation with the wrong culture?

Parents are apparently raising their children wrong en masse, so was the parents’ generation rotten too? Which raises questions about the character of the generation that raised the parents…

I think social norms in child rearing have changed drastically, though I think, at least in my neighborhood, they are swinging back.

Growing up in the 80s, I remember having a lot of free time and autonomy. I had soccer or baseballaybe twice a week and guitar lessons once a week, but the other days, I was doing what I wanted, I was expected to get my homework done, but once that was done,I was free to roam the neighborhood or my backyard.

This parenting mindset changed, by the late 80s early 90s and kids started getting more and more scheduled activities and less free time.

Even personally, 6 years ago my wife was very apprehensive about letting our oldest who was then 8, walk to his friend's house who was a 1/4 mile away in the neighborhood. Our youngest, who is 7, walks or bikes to his friend's house the same distance away. And we have other neighborhood kids that also go between people houses. That is the childhood I remember.

I don't think HW I got in elementary school necessarily helped me learn more, but the act of being given work with expectation that I would complete it on my own was a growth activity for me, and that is something that is starting to come back in elementary school, homework for the sake of learning how to do homework.

I think this just kinda sounds like a retroactive rationalization if I’m honest. Imagine if the order was reversed: if you had filled your childhood with mandatory activities and todays kids were mostly left to do what they want.

Wouldn’t you just say “When I was young we were forced to adhere to a tight schedule which taught us to be dependable. Todays kids are allowed to do what they want, which means they never learn any responsibility.”

Unfortunately, I don't think we can every really go back.

It wasn't just that kids had autonomy, it's that they also needed to take the initiative to fight boredom and go do something.

Let's say that you give kids today all that autonomy to wander around their neighborhood and explore like they did back in the day -- would they wander and explore, or would they stare at their phones?

And to be clear -- this isn't the kids fault. We've let social media companies peddle their addictive slop and they've eradicated boredom, but it came at the expense of short attention spans, no motivation, no sense of fulfillment.

If parents could perfectly pass their culture down to their children, no religious country would ever turn secular. Gay marriage would never have been legalized. Black people would have no right to cast vote today.

All these things are not true in the real world, so the conclusion is that a generation doesn't copy the previous generation's culture like a spit image.

I don’t think you need to be able to clone yourself to raise a child with broadly similar values to yourself. My point is that I don’t think you can simultaneously argue that the older generations were raised in a way that was succesful at making them responsible individuals (in ways kids these days aren’t) and that that same generation is systematically failing at passing on responsibility to their children. Which leads me to believe these generational differences in responsibility don’t really exist

I don’t think you need to be able to clone yourself to raise a child with broadly similar values to yourself. My point is that I don’t think you can simultaneously argue that the older generations were raised in a way that was succesful at making them religious individuals (in ways kids these days aren’t) and that that same generation is systematically failing at passing on religion to their children. Which leads me to believe these generational differences in religion don’t really exist

I think this also applies in the case of religion yeah, in the sense that many people who "fail" to pass on religion to their children were mostly just not actually that religious in the first place. So you've helped me reaffirm how consistent, smart and true my beliefs are.

Personal responsibility was on the rise until 2013, after which it started to decline?

Every cultural/policy/etc change in society has huge delays. Especially in education - changes you implement have an impact 10+ years later. Culture, even if it's dying, dies slowly. Here in Estonia where I live at the moment educational systems is falling completely apart – overworked and bullied teachers escape from schools in unprecedented rate, there is 20% less teachers than there is a need etc. But Estonia is still in top of the PISA. Why? Because this culture of personal responsibility and valuing education is still alive in the generation of todays parents. But it's certainly dying here as well.

It became politicized because politicians latched onto it as a way to cutback entitlement spending which is unfortunate.

When you were younger a much larger portion of the student body dropped out to work construction or drive truck, that's less of an option now.

We still rely on rote memorization to a greater degree than Finland which is consistently far more successful in their education.

I think the biggest problem with current education is that too many people like you are looking back with rose colored glasses and resisting the kinds of changes we actually need.

We have a crappy mix of outdated 1970s style education with a bunch of enshittified technology layered on top. Google classroom, we also spend too much time and money on sports. Schools shouldn't even be in the football business. CTE is bad for kids.

Similarly there's a bunch of talk of "source criticism" in Swedish schools, but when you look closer at what is actually taught it sounds more like conspiracy theory or dogma and never anything actually useful.

Imo source criticism is only a thing if you have a well grounded model of the universe. And if you DO have that, then source criticism just falls out naturally and you don't need to discuss that at all anyway.

Gotta say it: School was easier back then, the US was less populated. There was way more opportunity. Kids these days are treated like slaves stuck in child-jail.

I don't need to go into the traditional whining, I'm sure you are aware of the changes of the structure of America.

It's not about personal responsibility. There is a reason rich kids do better than poor kids.

The thing nobody wants to say out loud: America's demographics are changing, they are aging. We are producing less wealth. Our country has less potential.

The wealthy members of the past generation have failed to invest in the American project so we are left with a weak, crumbling economy that doesn't have any industry or useful skills to export.

We, as a country, as WEAKER and POORER than EVER.

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