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Comment by ACCount37 | Hacker News Reader

A big part of the problem education systems are solving is not "how do we get knowledge to children", but "how do we get masses of children to learn without coercion of the ugliest kind".

Some children are innately motivated to learn. Some are motivated so strongly you could give them a smartphone and watch them learn all they need to learn in life. But those children aren't the norm - they're the freaky 1 in 1000 outliers. And education has to work with everyone.

Thus, peer pressure. That's what putting a whole bunch of students in the same room accomplishes.

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> Some children are innately motivated to learn

I don't think I've met a single child in my life that isn't excited about learning about new stuff, but it really depends on what it is, it differs a lot! And they're all different as well, someone who's really into math might hate history, or vice-versa. But they all want to learn something, in my experience.

The problem occurs when you place them all in one school, and force them to learn everything, even things they don't want to learn about, and that kind ruins the other parts they actually find fun and engaging.

> The problem occurs when you place them all in one school, and force them to learn everything, even things they don't want to learn about

A difficult part is that children aren't really in the position to know what they want to learn most of the time.

Sure, many prefer sports over math but covering a broad spectrum in pre-teen and teenager education is quite important to get them develop these preferences and themselves as a person. They are given more agency/choice (electives etc.) as they grow up.

There are also topics you need to learn that aren't fun/engaging (especially as fun/engaging is quite subjective and depends on the individual). Especially when those topics are prerequisites to other potentially fun topics (you will have to learn the fundamentals before engaging with advanced topics in most subjects)

Lest you think there’s one simple solution, my kid went to a school for one year that deliberately eliminated all that stuff - no set curriculum, no specific academic goals, and students get the majority of the vote on the rules and anything about the whole setup. They could learn about anything they want to, with no pressure.

Most of the kids spent their whole days playing Xbox, Switch, or brainrot games like Roblox on tablets. (No, they weren’t “creatively building new worlds” on Roblox, just screwing around consuming what others had made in order to manipulate them into spending Robux).

Yep. This is the human condition for the vast majority of humans.

I grew up in a place where education and hard work wasn’t valued much by the community. Those that could scam some sort of government benefits did so, and they certainly were not working on art or helping out their communities with all their spare time. At best was a consumption state - the median was actively self destructive behavior, and the worst was behaviors that ruined their surrounding community.

This whole idea that on average humans would hit some utopia of creativity and community mindedness if only they could throw off the yoke of needing to work to survive goes against every single bit of my lived experience. And recent history.

The kids who went to the local public school my nieces went to basically did the bare minimum - usually just showing up is enough these days. Zero interest in learning or putting effort in. Only when they were removed from that environment and put with self-selecting (well, parent-selecting) peers that were curated beforehand did this fact change.

The vast majority of humans are not inherently motivated to better themselves in any way.

Its so sad that humans perform best when suffering. I adopted a supper skinny worn out street cat, all she did was sleep eat and poop, she never went outside, straight from the sofa to the food and back to the sofa, really really slowly. For 4 years it did nothing but sleep, no exceptions. Then one day a different cat looked around the corner of the open door. In 0.3 seconds she launched from the sofa covering impressive distance and ran after it to the end of the street. Safe to say, if I don't move for 4 years I wouldn't be looking to pick a fight. But cats do get stupid if they don't have to work for food.

What about the minority?

There were a few kids, primarily among the handful of high school aged ones, who seemed to be doing some sort of work vaguely resembling schoolwork, doing some kind of reports on some topic, or a project writing some kind of video game mod.

I hear this often but I don't really buy it. Variety is good. If I had been routed into a field in first grade or whatever based on what I liked and was good at at the time my life would look completely different, but likely not better. I certainly never would have taken art history or design classes in college, both requirements that I wouldn't have otherwise considered, but among my favorite classes in retrospect.

>Some children are innately motivated to learn. Some are motivated so strongly you could give them a smartphone and watch them learn all they need to learn in life. But those children aren't the norm - they're the freaky 1 in 1000 outliers. And education has to work with everyone.

I worked as a teacher for a year. Children are innately motivated and curious (this is not just a cliche). If there was any laziness it usually stemmed from fear of not being good enough but they definitely all tried, even students that didn't know their 5 times table by age 10. Some students have greater self-perseverance than others though, some can't handle being wrong and fear being seen as less-then their peers. Others like to challenge themselves without such fear.

> fear of not being good enough

I believe that fear is not unwarranted. It's a learned behavior that helps one survive in their environment. I imagine many of those children were likely punished for mistakes or for not being good enough.

Don't ask me how I know...

Ricardo Semler had a hilarious take. When allowed to pick their own topics some kids chose to play only videogames. They dropped far behind. Then They hear other kids learned how to read and write! From scoring no points the gamers went to the top, catched up then continued at the same place.

That it was their own idea apparently made all the difference.

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