Hacker News Reader

Comment by rvba | Hacker News Reader

"Please help, my son is bullied"

After two weeks: it solved itself, he committed suicide.

Housemasters and housemistresses have a better idea of whether pupils are being bullied than parents, because they are physically present and receive reports from classroom teachers, tutors, games coaches, and so on. The 1970s are over and boarding schools are no longer run by rum, sodomy and the lash.

The refusal of many twenty-first century parents to acknowledge that schoolteachers have at least two university degrees and consequently have expertise in their profession is the cause of the issue. If you’re not willing to trust the professional educators and administrative processes at a school, why are you spending the median income on sending your child there?

It can be simultaneously true that 5% of educators are great, 20% very good, 60% are good, 13% are adequate, and 2% should have fired 5 years or more ago.

If you’re in the first three groups, it can be hard to understand the disrespect and vitriol which is overwhelmingly directed at experiences parents have with that last group.

Prestigious boarding schools - the schools that I’ve been writing about - need not bother with teachers outside that top 25%.

Non-selective government schools, like all public services, have inevitably become largely concerned with social work; teachers in those schools, regardless of their ability, have to respond to parents immediately.

Yes nothing bad has never happened in a prestigious boarding school, just because they charge more money, especially to kids of rich people.

After all rich people and their rich kids never do anything wrong /s

I’m talking about institutions and their internal processes, not some tedious nonsense about how money is intrinsically evil.

Rich people have all sorts of problems. Part of the package in an elite education is that the school has a better capacity to sort those out by itself. Constant communication with parents undermines that.

It’s a question of values and understanding what you’re buying into. These schools don’t suit all parenting styles.

> teachers in those schools, regardless of their ability, have to respond to parents immediately.

Or else what? Their union will hold them to account? Their colleagues? Their administration?

I have two kids in such public schools and I can’t think of anything I’d ask of a teacher that would require a same-day response let alone an immediate one.

If I need an immediate response, it’s not likely a topic I should be taking to a teacher in the first place. Their job is to teach, not to monitor for inbound comms from parents.

By 'immediate', I meant same day. But you sound like a reasonable parent; you're writing in the hypothetical. It's the small minority of parents who are constantly in contact with teachers (because most legitimate concerns should be triaged by the school receptionist) and consequently cause the problems - it's no different to any other customer-facing role.

> need not bother with teachers outside that top 25%.

To simply "not bother" with lower-quality teachers sounds like you find it easy, as an institution, to determine teachers' quality. That seems far from a solved problem, for teachers and indeed most employees in general. You can pick a particular metric, of course, but then people will try to game it, and in teaching, there seems to be a lot of room for gaming metrics...

> schoolteachers have at least two university degrees and consequently have expertise in their profession

Utter fallacy. Expertise in teaching requires training, experience and/or natural talent.

I'm intrigued as to what you think one studies as part of a Postgraduate Certificate in Education or a Masters in Education.

I'm curious what you consider "training", and how this would be different than a vocation-specific university degree? Which typically also includes supervised real-world teaching experience?

"Typically" does a lot of heavy lifting here

Reply on news.ycombinator.com