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Comment by rwallace | Hacker News Reader

There comes a point when an institution becomes so badly broken that the only rational course of action is to get the hell out, and look elsewhere for a solution to your problems. It looks pretty clear from this article that the US school system is well past that point.

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Effective schooling could never occur on such a federated level. There's such a broad range of individual personalities and skills along varying axes that the idea of "let's put all the kids born within 10 months of each other in our geographic area in a classroom, and threaten force on people who don't want to cooperate" is never going to function well.

I hold the opinion that the proper training and education of one's offspring should be a foremost life goal, and that delegating it to the state because "it's easier", "I don't have the time", etc. is an abhorrent cop-out. The state likes this because it gives them an outlet which can be used to program 99% of the rising generation, but I see it as a serious and negligent discharge of fundamental parental responsibility. Please note that "education" means ensuring children learn correct principles -- it doesn't represent any specific extant construct or abstraction, like "high school" or "university graduation". For far too long these have been mechanisms of control. I say this as a successful high school dropout who has never enrolled in post-secondary courses.

The things mentioned in this article are utterly absurd, and as you noted, the fact that people allow their children to go through this for meaningless rewards is really weird. Does an "A" still hold that much sway? I long for the day when it will be recognized at its true worth, which is zero.

As a fellow high school dropout I sympathize with what you're saying, but I don't think it can be the basis for effective public policy. How many Americans have the ability to teach their children math, science, writing, history and civics at a high school level? How many American families have the time to provide children with anything close to the amount of hours of instruction available in schools? And what happens if we build an educational system that doesn't delegate education to the state, as you put it. That system might be fine for parents who have free time and/or can afford tutors, but what about everyone else? Public schools are far from perfect, but they provide vastly more equality of opportunity than existed in our society before their invention.

Having an adult constantly looking over your shoulder is neither necessary nor desirable, particularly in the twenty-first century when a vast wealth of information is at your fingertips free of charge.

Exactly. We spend, on average, over $10,000 per student per year on public education. For that, you could easily hire a private tutor to teach each child for one hour per school day, helping them with anything the parents can't handle. For everything else, there's the internet.

And on that note, just how in the hell is the teacher:student ratio as low as it is in public schools today?

> I hold the opinion that the proper training and education of one's offspring should be a foremost life goal, and that delegating it to the state because "it's easier", "I don't have the time", etc. is an abhorrent cop-out.

This is one of the main reasons why I do not (and very well may never) have children; I realized that the commitment to do it properly is just too great for me to make.

I sympathize but would urge you to reconsider. There are activities where "properly or not at all" is a good policy, but raising children isn't one of them; had such a policy been universally applied, nobody now living would be alive. Those who were never born are just as dead as those who were born and then died, and surely your children would be much better off dealing with the imperfections that are an inevitable part of life, than not being alive at all.

"Those who were never born" doesn't strike me as a concept with much logical positivist value.

Logical positivism doesn't strike me as a concept with much logical positivist value.

Yeah, sure, but that doesn't make "those who were never born" any more meaningful to argue about than, you know, the present bald King of France or whatever.

I know, I was just being facetious. It amuses me that logical positivism fails its own verification principle.

"Logical Positivism" has been roundly debunked, but I think some of its principles, and those of the movements that came before and after it, are important and applicable. I call a lot of these "logical positivism" more by habit than by way of endorsing the philosophy as such.

school isn't just about learning, it's also about meeting your peers. The last thing we need is even more social segregation because all the rich kids don't know what it's like to not be able to afford 3 homes.

There's really not any reason that socialization and academics have to be mixed though. It is just convenient and probably cheaper than the alternative.

>Effective schooling could never occur on such a federated level.

Really? You think that state run education is terrible all over the globe? I don't think the problems with the US system are universal. Certainly here in the UK, education is pretty good. The UK is smaller, but we're only talking a factor of five here.

Asking people to educate their own children is unrealistic. Teaching is not easy. Good teaching requires intelligence, skills, knowledge and understanding that most people don't have. Private tuition requires a lot of money, which most people don't have. You can claim these things are a cop-out, but I think you're being naive. You are a successful high school dropout. Which means you're probably very smart, motivated and independent. Most people are not like you. It's unrealistic to judge other people by your own standards. Most people need education while they are young in order to give them vitally important abstract thinking skills they simply wouldn't be able to figure out on their own. Most people are not capable of providing such an education for their own children. Education has always been a mechanism of control, but that's because most people need to be taught some measure of control. The people that don't need it can think for themselves anyway, so it doesn't matter.

You may find this economics paper by Lant Pritchett to be interesting. It is one of the most enlightening I've read this year. It discusses the ways that a system wherein the state provides the majority of education services at every level of education fails to support the stated goals of education from an economic perspective (although that is actually not explicitly what he's trying to prove, which is that just because a schooling system exists a certain way doesn't mean that way is optimal, i.e. basically efficient markets hypothesis doesn't apply to provided government schooling). He makes the statement that he's not talking about developed economies, only developing, but it's transparently applicable to developed economies as well. This is one of the rare papers that teaches much more than it claims to.

1: https://dipot.ulb.ac.be/dspace/bitstream/2013/11943/1/ber-02...

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