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Comment by absconditus | Hacker News Reader

"High school works decently enough for the rest of the 95%."

Toward what end? Babysitting teenagers? Forcing people to memorize information that they forget a day after the final exam?

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The way I see it, high school doesn't really teach content, it teaches learning, which we've been learning (cout << recursive_meta_joke) for about eight years now. The second thing that high school gives is a one-year introduction to the various careers that can be taken on.

For example, I notice one thing with many of the people I talk to, to this regard: high school is where the transition from "YEAH MAN, I'm going to be a pro athlete when I grow up dude" to "I thought physiology was pretty cool in bio class, so I'm going to go and do premed."

But of course, this doesn't work for a lot of people. It doesn't work with me, because I've personally already have found my passion (and it has been for three years.) It also didn't work for Richard Branson.

Everyone complains about high school. And there's definitely a lot of rote memorization. But for some people, they might not gain this important "oh, this is actually pretty cool" moment.

If I believed that most high schools taught people how to learn I'd be very satisfied.

There are many options that we could explore if our political system allowed it. The one that makes the most sense to me is to provide two paths for students: one which leads to a university and one which is vocational. The university path could begin at 16 with the curriculum that would typically be taught to a college freshman.

You might want to have a look at CEGEPs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CEGEP

I think this is a pretty good idea! A lot of students at the colleges I went to spent their first year taking core classes or classes in a major they ended up switching out of. Might as well let students take care of that first year somewhere more affordable/accessible to everyone, and then move on to college.

But if you already know most of what they are teaching you, it doesn't teach learning.

School needs to use a pre-test, post-test methodology. Pass the pre-test and you can skip a topic, fail the post-test and you have to study it longer.

Oh, bullshit. It teaches "95% of kids" to hate learning because it turns it into a job.

Learning is a job, if it wasn't so damn hard and stressful everyone would be a quantum physicist. Teenage kids need to accept the realities of life.

Realities of life are not taught in high school. Regular High School is a joke, however, specialized optional programs like International Baccaularate or AP, I found more challenging than most college classes. Unfortunately, these are optional, IB/AP should be the norm.

Sorry, maybe I used the wrong word; learning certainly requires work, but it shouldn't be treated as a chore.

"We teach you how to learn" was repeated over and over again in my engineering department at my university. I always thought it was an excuse and justification that allowed them to save face and make it ok that what was being taught was going to be useless in the "real world"

So sure, content-wise it was useless, but now I see that I can pick up any project or subject learn it and apply it really quickly. But I am still not ok that they were not capable of providing valuable content and practical knowledge in class.

Neither in college nor in high school did I learn anything from class or teachers (except for a handful), my education was mostly Google, Wikipedia, and blogs, not textbooks or teachers. (I stopped buying books my last semesters in College after I realized I never opened them when I did)

That's a horrible argument that defines your disdain for learning.

It is an argument that defines my methods for learning, which is that I learn on my own. Not a disdain for learning. I strongly believe in learning by doing.

Those of us who went to school in old North Carolina tobacco towns did not learn how to learn in High School.

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