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Comment by blhack | Hacker News Reader

The problem isn't the time spent in school, the problem is the school itself.

We teach people to be the status quo, we don't encourage them to excel.

For me, summers were spent learning about computers and all the magic spells that I could cast to get them to do whatever I wanted them to.

For some students, school is holding them back. If we want to fix things, we need to abandon this psychotic idea that all students are the same, that there are no dumb kids and that you can just dump 20 similarly aged kids into a room that has somebody standing at the front of it talking at them and that they will somehow come out of the situation better for the experience.

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The problem isn't the time spent in school, the problem is the school itself.

That's my take on the issue too.

http://learninfreedom.org/

I also tended to learn more in the summer than during the school year. Something needs to be done to make the school year more worthwhile for such students.

Something needs to be done to make the school year more worthwhile for such students

Actually, it needs to be done for ALL students. You really think the only kids poorly served by school are those that teach themselves math on the side?

Nearly every kid has an innate curiosity about the world and more importantly the people around him. Some prefer symbolic worlds, others the physical, and most the social.

Schools are currently poor places to learn about any of those. The bizarre hierarchies in place seriously warp most children - witness the daily cruelty that is normal in an average school (others on the internet have made this point better than I can).

To most people, Lockhart's lament is a very minor annoyance compared to the social retardation that goes on in these institutions. Rampant alcohol abuse and unreasonable sexual promiscuity in universities are the inevitable backlash to years of social repression, far beyond the young ages at which it might be called for.

It was not unreasonable in earlier times to consider someone a "young man" or "young woman" at 13 or 14, and as a fully functional society member at 16. Why does this seem so completely ludicrous now? Has our genetic lifecycle programming changed? Of course not - but our social lifecycle programming has.

All this to say that the kids for whom symbolic systems education is too slow are the lucky ones. For them, there is at least the library as an outlet for that spark. Consider the rest, who have no such thing.

No.

Our world is a thousand times more complex than that of even the 1800's. It used to be that your average young man/woman was in one unskilled job for their entire life. One you could learn by the time you were 15-16. This is no longer the case.

Even entry level office jobs jobs now require an understanding of calculus, statistics, excel, etc. When all that used to be required was knowing how to plow a field, recite wives tales or run a loom.

It isn't as simple as "oh our education system is too slow".

Do you know how to run a loom or plow a field? Maybe oddly, but I consider those much more a skill than knowledge of how to use excel.

Yes and yes. A loom is actually sort of neat. They're the first programable computers. A plow on the other hand is dull and difficult work.

Both are simpler than excel even for their more advanced uses.

I would say yes, the plow is much more simple than excel. However, I disagree that the loom is too. You can do amazing things with a loom if you take the time to learn the complexities of the machine.

Show me an entry level office job posting/ad where calculus is a requirement ...

"Even entry level office jobs jobs now require an understanding of calculus, statistics, excel, etc."

This is simply not true. Entry-level office jobs require a piece of paper saying "this dude knows calculus"; they don't actually require the knowledge. If you don't believe me, visit an average office, go around, and ask people to take the derivative of sin(x)*x^2; this is a fairly simple problem which any first-semester calculus student would know how to solve.

Perhaps you meant sin(x)+x^2?

No. Just use the product rule. The derivative is

x^2 cos(x) + 2 x sin(x)

Finding derivatives is actually really easy. There are just a few simple rules you have to apply deterministically to any problem, and the answer will pop out.

I think his point was to suggest a simpler question. Do you really think most "entry-level office workers" remember the product rule?

I believe the whole point of proposing a calculus question was that most entry-level office workers won't be able to answer it.

As I mention above, I bet they wouldn't be able to answer an even simpler question. Requiring application of product rule "raises the bar" a bit too high.

I'm not sure why this is modded down so far, as it raises a good point. If you ask the average entry-level office tech to differentiate x^2 with respect to x, it is likely that they will not even know that. Throw in the product rule, and all bets are off. (I am embarrassed to admit that I had to quickly look at MathWorld to make sure I hadn't misremembered it.)

You're missing the point.

Technical learning of any sort (looms or calculus) is really the least important consequence of schooling - if it takes 20 years, fine.

The fundamental error is to assume that socialization (for which nearly all humans are genetically optimized) and training in symbolic methods (for which most humans are rather ill-suited) should proceed apace.

You're the exception, not the rule.

For the other 99% of children, the benefits of longer school years are well documented. Even for the "exceptional" children (who usually aren't as exceptional as they make themselves out to be), longer school years are good -- the question of time spent in school is entirely independent of the subject matter studied, or how it is taught.

Did the study mention whether or not it mattered if it was a government school or a private school?

Well documented? Where? Links?

I'm going to guess that whichever study came to this conclusion, it took "good for students" to mean "higher grades" or some other bogus measure.

I remember seeing an interesting study somewhere (sorry, don't have the link) that found that (IIRC in elementary school) segregating the better students did not help them. It only made the poorer students perform worse.

I think that there have been similar studies which show that elementary school is a very different animal from what we think (i.e. similar nonintuitive results) and that it needs some kind of restructuring.

We teach people to be the status quo, we don't encourage them to excel.

Asians rarely value individuality. Doesn't the American system do better in teaching kids to be different from the norm?

Asians rarely value individuality.

Evidence for this? (How much time have you spent in Asia, and how recently? As a reply above said, Europe has several different countries, and so does Asia, so what specific places are you talking about?)

I'm in India right now and I've spent a total of 14 years here. The places I'm referring to are the ones the article seems to talk about: China, India, Japan and Korea.

A few months ago, there was a discussion on this right here on HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=482257

My sample consists almost entirely of engineers, so I'm disregarding most of humanity, but within that limited sample I believe the answer is a definite yes. That's one of the few saving graces of the American educational system.

Of course, our educational system still sucks at it. I can't tell you how incredibly soul-crushing all my math classes were until about the time I got to trigonometry. And English classes generally suck royally. And don't get me started on biology classes taught by young earth creationists. Or the culture that looks down on learning. Fuck.

I think maybe it's getting better?

> The problem isn't the time spent in school, the problem is the school itself.

Actually, that's not enough detail. "School" is a complex system consisting of many parts -- all of which have their issues. Parents play a big role, in so far as what they expect from their children, their local board of ed, and their superintendent.

> We teach people to be the status quo, we don't encourage them to excel.

You'd be amazed at the forces in place that so strongly coerce teachers to stick to the status quo.

You'd be amazed at the forces in place that so strongly coerce teachers to stick to the status quo.

No, I wouldn't.

It's sad. All of the teachers that are forced to teach to the status quo do so because money is on the line. If a school doesn't conform to the guidelines set down by the government, then they don't get funding. This is a classic example of a law that is meant to help failing miserably, and even making things worse.

And you can't really blame the teachers. They need to make a living, and they barely do as it is. I hate the fact that we seem to value our teachers so little.

And you can't really blame the teachers. They need to make a living, and they barely do as it is.

How does the living made by teachers compare to other employed persons with similar qualifications and ability?

Teachers make about 40k a year. http://www.payscale.com/research/US/All_K-12_Teachers/Salary

I'm of the opinion that we should value our educators more.

> It's sad. All of the teachers that are forced to teach to the status quo do so because money is on the line.

There's more to it than just that, actually. What happens when a teacher demands excellence? Well: grades drop, students (mostly the mediocre ones) complain, parents complain, teachers must do far more grading (and be forced to back it up -- every single point), other faculty members can get disgruntled, administration wants to know how this will impact standardized test scores (because they have to answer to the superintendent who insists that the scores go up every year or else you're doing something wrong).

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