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Comment by fchollet | Hacker News Reader

The fundamental problem with the elementary school system in the west is that kids are given no room for self-direction whatsoever; school for them is de facto a part-time prison or "labor" camp. As a result they are trained by association to dread to that which the system purports to champion: learning, culture, reading, knowledge, even any demonstration of intelligence.

It takes a combination of luck, will and positive external influences (good parents, a mentor) to overcome that. But most kids don't.

Which is why it seems to me that "setting kids free", in the sense of giving them significant latitude for self-direction in their activities and education, is a great principle. The key problem of education is motivation. Most kids are smart and fast learners, the only difficulty in getting them to learn is to get them interested (even better: passionate). The only way that can happen is by giving them choice, freedom. The opportunity to exercise free will. Let's guide kids, not force them to sit and listen passively (they won't).

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Perhaps I am clouded by my own positive experiences with school, but I disagree on two levels.

Firstly, your use of the phrase 'in the west' implies that outside of the 'west' there is some different, better elementary education system. This has not been my experience in India, where capacity for rote memorization is regarded as equivalent to intelligence from an early age. What countries fit your boundaries of 'the west'?

Secondly, school serves as a valuable social and educational center to most children. Even though elementary education is imperfect, it does not mean that a viable solution is to simply do away with it. In fact, I think the social interaction with other children of similar age is extremely important to developing social skills and friendships.

I did not imply anything about school systems outside the western world, I used the term simply because I know close to nothing about education outside the west and therefore did not want to include it in my description.

I also certainly did not imply that children should be educated in isolation. I agree that social interaction with other children is fundamental to kids' development throughout elementary education. In fact, if you followed my suggestion and let kids do, to a certain extent, what they were interested in, I assume you would see most of them gravitate towards social learning, because that's how most humans are wired.

> I did not imply anything about school systems outside the western world,

You obviously don't know anything about the plethora of different systems inside the Western world, either.

Hey, thank you for this sharp and insightful one-liner.

I am keenly aware of my own ignorance, and always looking for opportunities to learn. Care to enlighten me?

Start with Beeby in New Zealand.

In fact, I think the social interaction with other children of similar age is extremely important to developing social skills and friendships.

And unfortunately social interaction is severely restricted and punished in K-12 education (in the US, which is the extent of my familiarity).

I volunteered at an elementary school for a year, and the kids there had little opportunity to socialize freely. Recess and lunch were limited to a combined 40 minutes, including transition periods to and from the classroom. Gym/physical education was a "unit", only attended one week out of every three, and much like I remembered from my own schooling, more than half of that time is spent explaining the rules to some highly-structured, barely-constitutes-exercise activity.

You'd still get far more social interaction than what unschooling would get you.

I was home educated. I had far more time for out of schooltime activities than my friends in schools did. I was part of the town band, the church band, the local drama school (learning, and then helping to teach the younger kids, and touring with the team and performing in schools), Karate, etc. Some of my friends had no social life outside of school at all, really. They had school, homework, TV, and sleep.

I had far more time hanging out with adults who were interested in the same kinds of things as me. Wonderful, lovely people who were interested in mechanics, drama, etc. and spent time mentoring, teaching and helping me.

I feel like I had a really good social experience, as I didn't feel any kind of peer pressure, or pressure to conform or like things (like football) that I found pointless, or to do drugs, or whatever. When I was older, I felt secure enough in who I was, and the acceptance I found in likeminded (and differently minded, but good) people, to not feel like I had to conform, or that I had to judge or conform others. We're all different, and all totally valuable.

>Secondly, school serves as a valuable social and educational center to most children. Even though elementary education is imperfect, it does not mean that a viable solution is to simply do away with it. In fact, I think the social interaction with other children of similar age is extremely important to developing social skills and friendships.

Great, let's make primary school a place to park children so their parents can go to work where children can do whatever the hell they want. These exist. They are called Sudbury or democratic schools.

While I have your attention, some links.

Teaching arithmetic to children below sixth grade has either no effect or negative effects, seeing as the extra education makes them worse at word problems.[0][1]

Homework has no positive effects on learning in any non-mathematical subjects and no positive effects whatsoever before middle school.[3]

[0]http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/201003/whe....

[1] L. P. Benezet (1935/1936). The teaching of Arithmetic: The Story of an Experiment. Originally published in Journal of the National Education Association in three parts. Vol. 24, #8, pp 241-244; Vol. 24, #9, p 301-303; & Vol. 25, #1, pp 7-8.

[2]http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0272775711... Canadian Journal of Behavioural Science (Impact Factor: 0.46). 06/2011; 43(3):195-202. DOI: 10.1037/a0022697 ABSTRACT Although homeschooling is growing in prevalence, its educational outcomes remain unclear. The present study compared the academic achievements of homeschooled children with children attending traditional public school. When the homeschooled group was divided into those who were taught from organized lesson plans (structured homeschoolers) and those who were not (unstructured homeschoolers), the data showed that structured homeschooled children achieved higher standardized scores compared with children attending public school. Exploratory analyses also suggest that the unstructured homeschoolers are achieving the lowest standardized scores across the 3 groups.

Got a newer reference than Benezet 1936?

Got a reference where they tested it with good math teachers?

Has the study been replicated in a country with a different (better) math tradition, such as France?

[1] looks a pretty reasonable overview of the research on homework effectiveness. The meta-analysis is quite supportive of homework as an effective way of improving results:

With only rare exceptions, the relationship between the amount of homework students do and their achievement outcomes was found to be positive and statistically significant. Therefore, we think it would not be imprudent, based on the evidence in hand, to conclude that doing homework causes improved academic achievement.

[1] http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/mar0...

Not OP, but it wouldn't matter that a good math teacher would've had a more positive effect.

Most teachers are shit at what they do and that won't change.

There are too many advantages in a lot of countries for becoming a teacher (civil servant) - salary excluded.

Improving education involves improving the approaches used by teachers, whether teachers already employed or new teachers. These kinds of things don't change overnight, but they can be changed over generations. Studies are, in theory, an effective way to determine what aspiring teachers should know and apply.

I don't think driving down the advantages of becoming a teacher is an effective way to improve performance. Many people interested in making a difference would, rightfully, forgo being a teacher for their own sakes and take a different approach.

Thank you for these references, these are all good things to know.

> In fact, I think the social interaction with other children of similar age is extremely important to developing social skills and friendships.

But is putting 30 kids together in a room with one adult the right way to do it?

I question the belief that school is necessary for socialization. Obviously home school for everyone isn't an option, but there are plenty of studies that show home schooled children turn out just as well off or better. So where is the evidence that socialization in a school environment is necessary or even beneficial.

>> "So where is the evidence that socialization in a school environment is necessary"

Just anecdotal but might help. I had a younger family member who had to miss a few weeks of school and stay home. After a few days he was itching to get back for the sole reason of social interaction. If you don't go to school you see your friends for maybe 1 hour in the evening. If you go you see them for 20mins on the bus to school, in-between classes, 45 mins of recess per day, and the 20 min bus ride home. Not to mention the interaction during group activities or lulls in classes. If everyone was homeschooled there would need to be a substitute for this and suggestions I've seen like "all parents should take their kids to the park for an hour" don' suffice. I think the length of the interaction isn't important, the fact that it happens throughout the day is. Seeing someone for 5 mins an hour every hour is different than seeing them for 1 hour, even if it works out to be less time. It's a different experience and one that's hard to replicate.

>It's a different experience and one that's hard to replicate.

I agree that it's different and hard to replicate, but again where is the evidence that the school socialization model is actually beneficial--that we need to replicate it? The studies I've seen from home-schooled children seem to suggest that it isn't necessary for a successful productive adult life.

If people are going to argue that homeschooling is detrimental because it doesn't replicate institutionalized socialization, there needs to be some evidence that this kind of socialization is necessary other than "lots of kids do it".

I wouldn't argue that home schooled children can't lead successful productive lives. It would be nice to see a study of which children are happier though. Those in school socializing all day; or those at home socializing for an hour or two in the evening. You get to interact with a wide variety of people at school from many different backgrounds. You can learn a lot from that and it can help you in many ways when you enter the real world. Homeschooling you're with your parents or a tutor all day and your social circle would likely be limited to those who live in your street. At this stage I think it's impossible to say which scenario is better, there needs to be a lot more research done. Personally though I am very happy I was not homeschooled. I would have been educated well - maybe even better - but I think I would have missed out on a lot of important experiences.

More anecdotal evidence:

When I was 0-8 years old we lived in neighborhoods full of kids. Then we moved to a place with none. I was much happier in the first place because of the socialisation. It didn't matter that the new places we lived were nicer or more convenient for certain things. I think this also hurt my social skills. I was pretty sociable at a younger age but compared with my peers my social skills have lacked since then. This can impact on interview performance, networking, etc.

Choice, but also, role models. How does a kid know they want to learn to read, except to see others reading? How does a kid know they want to learn math, except to see someone else able to solve a useful problem they had no idea could be solved?

In a thread on income inequality, someone posited that the best indicator for economic success was whether a person was read to as a child. They meant it as a holistic indicator over a number of factors, and I think one large one is that it meant the child early on had a role model for education.

I know for myself (anecdotal evidence, yeah yeah), I chafed very early on to learn to read, because my parents could and I couldn't. Similarly, early on, while I could figure out some kinds of math (the basic of multiplication by seeing arrangements of windows, "oh, three fours is twelve!", and then being given a toy that had the multiplication tables on opaque buttons that when pressed would show the answer, I recall other times when people were able to solve problems (long division, multiplication of 2 or more digit numbers) that I didn't know how to solve, and I -desperately- wanted to. For a friend, who came from a rural family whose only owned book was a Bible, largely unread, it was when I introduced him to video games (RPGs), and fantasy novels, that he really began to read, and actually to purchase books himself.

Completely agree --the fundamental problem to solve is that of motivation, and motivation will very often come from role models and mentors.

The function of a mentor is not limited to providing an example of what can be learned and why it should be learned. A mentor should also directly provide motivation reenforcement whenever the kid shows progress on the right path.

The best education will be self-direction in a culturally rich environment that rewards and celebrates learning and educative achievements.

Sure, self-directed. But then the support of a tutor is invaluable! Why let the poor kid flounder around, motivated but unskilled at learning? Show them the right path! Or at least all the options.

True, except that it's more the case in unschooling for adults to be guided by the children, being available to give help or find help when required.

It takes years for the average adult to break his school conditioning and find the courage to follow his own direction. Most never manage it, and of those that do, most don't till retirement, which is tragic.

Learning can be hard. Kids love easy things. It takes direction, monitoring, pushing to get them to try to read, or do arithmetic, or master pretty much any delayed-gratification skill.

Left on their own, kids will likely get a broad shallow education with one or two deep dives into subjects of dubious value.

This is partly attributed to 'No Child Left Behind'. The fact that public funding for schools is strictly determined by each school's performance on rigid, standardized tests is a huge issue. How can schools allow free-flowing learning, culture, exploration, and self direction when they HAVE to perform well on standardized tests?

This is bullshit. Sit down, shut up and do as you're told has been the primary and secondary school curriculum in most every mass school system everywhere. John Taylor Gatto wrote Seven Lessons long before No Child Left Behind.

http://the7lessonteacher.com/

I don't know if self-direction is really a good idea. When I was a kid I would have directed myself towards video games and cartoons. I probably would not have independently developed an interest in english grammer and math.

Video games and cartoons can be valuable learning experiences. We learn a lot through play. If you got into minecraft you'd be doing engineering. If you got into Wildstar or WoW or some other guild-based combat system you'd be learning leadership and social dynamics - how to keep a team together and happy - and also a certain amount of math. If you got into Quake-like games you might discover the modding community and get interested in learning how to be a level designer, a programmer, a visual artist, or an architect.

Or take "watching cartoons". You might discover stop-motion and start making your own. Or if you got into Anime you might get interested in learning Japanese.

The Sudbury schools emphasize the power of boredom. When you don't play videogames that much you might FEEL like you could play them all the time if allowed to. But if you were ACTUALLY allowed to, you'd eventually get bored and want to go deeper. And then you'd inevitably be learning stuff. A repeated discovery was that most kids eventually DO decide they want to learn math, in part because it's something other people can do that seems like it might be useful. And when kids are actually interested in the subject, they can learn it in a really TINY amount of contact hours and it doesn't harm them at all to have waited a few extra years.

The reason standard schools waste so much time teaching math is that they're trying to force kids who aren't interested at all in learning it on the school's schedule rather than their own.

As for "english grammar", you can learn that just by using some of your freed-up time to read lots of books.

Here's a story that involves teaching 6 years of math in 20 hours of class time:

http://sudburyschool.com/articles/free-last

I think it might be wishful thinking to imagine that kids left to their own devices will identify and persue useful skills without adult guidance. Even if every kid who watches cartoons develops an interest in stop motion animation, how many stop motion animators do we need? How would you even understand how to start with quake modding without knowing basic math and reading comprehension?

When I was at school there were kids who would frequently "unschool" themselves by skipping class, the interests they developed were mostly related to vandalism and other petty crime.

One develops reading comprehension by reading, including texts, blogs, and videogame chat - and time spent sitting at a desk being talked at takes away from the time you could be using to do that. Realizing you want to do something that requires basic math gives you a reason to learn basic math, which makes learning that basic math easy. (Me, I learned trigonometry because it was helpful to draw cool patterns on a computer)

I think you're suffering from status-quo bias. Read the link I gave you above.

One of the biggest secret weapons of homeschoolers and unschoolers is age-mixing. Standard schools artificially segregate kids by age and force them to learn in a specific order. This guarantees that no kid in the room knows much more than the other kids. In the real world, on just about any subject at all you can find people who know a little more than you and learn from them or find people who know a bit less and teach them. Kids teach EACH OTHER how to do cool stuff like use a computer or mod a video game.

The hardest and most important thing to figure out in life is "what do I want to learn and how can I learn it?" When schools decide on a specific curriculum and spoon-feed it to kids, they destroy the intrinsic motivation to solve that question for yourself; you can just passively accept what is being force-fed to you by your teachers. But then when school is finished, what do you do THEN? Over a dozen years or more you haven't PRACTICED setting your own goals or figuring out how to fulfill them! Mightn't it be better to do that starting much earlier in life?

In order to read you need to be exposed to books and also somebody to read with you until you can do it on your own. Since there is no instinctual human drive to seek out books you need to be guided in that direction and encouraged to push through the pain barrier because it's quite boring to start with. This is basically what the job of a teacher is.

It may well be true that kids with educated parents can do well in a loosely structured environment with freedom to explore, but these kids tend to outperform whatever the education structure. Kids who grow up in deprived areas without educated role models risk being "educated" by criminal gangs.

> In order to read you need to be exposed to books and also somebody to read with you until you can do it on your own.

That's what parents do. You don't need teachers for that.

You found reading "boring to start with"? That seems sad. Me, I wanted to read almost every minute of every day - I was always in the middle of multiple books, read while walking, read books held secretly under the desk during boring class lectures, even occasionally read while riding my bike. I imagine today kids learn texting and tweeting (or whatever the next thing is) with similar vigor, even if long-form work is starting to lose out a bit to it. Do you really imagine that kids won't be able to read if not for elementary school? We live in a world that is saturated with the written word. It is an inescapable fact of our environment that we are surrounded by text and use text to communicate; it seems crazy to imagine that kids of average or better intelligence would fail to find some incentive to learn to read something. I mean, sure, a priori it seems conceivable that could happen, but it doesn't seem particularly likely and as far as I know that hasn't been the experience of anybody who has pursued unschooling.

I think you're making my point for me. Kids of above average intelligence with the right parents can do well with unschooling, but then they also do well with regular schooling. A kids educational outcome would become linked to that of their parents and other adults in their environment, even more so than is currently the case.

In fact it's worse than that , because as soon as one generation messes up because for example a parent develops a mental health issue there is no mechanism for fixing the next generation.

> Kids of above average intelligence with the right parents can do well with unschooling, but then they also do well with regular schooling.

That is not true, and is kind of what this whole discussion is about. My impression is that there might be some sort of happy middle that isn't too damaged by regular schooling, but towards both ends of the bell curve are kids who are poorly served by it. Smart kids are often bored to tears, lose intrinsic motivation to learn, lose out on the opportunity to make good use of their youthful energy and developing brains, lose the opportunity to REALLY LEARN and GET STUFF DONE because they're wasting all their time in classes being talked at by idiots. Or at least, that's what it seems like to some of them looking back (including me).

I think you're needlessly universalizing this. Nobody is saying that EVERYONE MUST unschool. People are advocating that unschooling is a good OPTION for many kids, not that we need to dismantle the entire existing school system to make everyone switch to the new system. If we consider unschooling as merely an OPTION for kids/families that seem well suited to it, while there still ALSO exists the traditional option for everyone else, do your objections mostly go away?

Why does it bother you if kids who "can do well with unschooling" in fact do get to pick that option?

fchollet's original post in this subthread reads as a criticism of traditional schooling in general rather than in specific cases. Also, the article is light on evidence to suggest that unschooling actually does lead to superior educational outcomes in any cases. Data on this is likely hard to come by considering that unschooling parents are self selected by definition.

The problem seems to be giving sufficiently talented students a sufficiently challenging education , for this I think institutions such as grammer schools that used to be popular in the UK are a more equitable solution.

You can't compare the schools you went to with the Sudbury system. The skipping class happens exactly because you are trapped, because there is something you rather will.

But why skip class if you can do what you want?

Sure, if they were allowed to swear and fight in class they might not have skipped so much but what would that achieve besides disrupting the kids who actually wanted to learn?

It's easy to make a point when you make up your own premises. I never swore or fought in high in class but i did skip class.

Can't upvote this enough.

I owe my programming career and my English language knowledge solely to video games. I learned English because I really wanted to know what my hero and NPCs were talking about in Fallout. I learned programming because I wanted to make a StarCraft clone.

I remember taking the end exam in secondary school; there was an assignment there that basically amounted to summing up hypotenuses of right triangles, deriving them from known triangle legs beforehand. When we all left the exam room, kids were cheering, "this task was simple, you had to use Pythagorean theorem!". I was cheering, "this task was simple, you had to sum up lengths of 2D vectors! By the way, wtf is that Pyythagorean thing?".

I learned a lot of maths quickly by 15 thanks to game development - things like vectors, matrices, trigonometry. I didn't always have the right terminology (but that I acquired later on the way), but I understood what they are, how they worked, and I had a purpose for learning them.

I wish you were right. I wish my little brother's Minecraft addiction would lead to something productive. He's talked about learning to program because of it; but of course, he hasn't actually started. That's because he's a child, and lacks the force of will to do anything which is not as immediately satisfying as playing videogames. If he was forced to learn programming, he would probably like it, but he's never going to do it on his own. Because it's hard.

Cartoons are even worse. There is nothing more vegetative than watching TV.

> elementary school system in the west is that kids are given no room for self-direction

To be fair this is happening not just in the West. Japan's education system is a disaster in itself which creates kids who stop asking questions after a couple of years. I let you imagine what you end up when they reach the state of adulthood.

Japan are part of the west. I can't speak for anyone else, but when I say 'the west', I'm not talking about geography. I mean cultures that value economic success above most everything else. Besides, they're only 'west' when the US is on the left side of your projection of the globe. It's a useful and well understood colloquialism so I use it.

PS: I'm not saying economy is to blame, but the idea that there's exactly one way to be successful (make money in this case), given enough time and belief, will eventually devolve and create dysfunctional systems like those we see in schools today where individuality is quickly eroded because a 'higher' goal is being chased: pass your tests so you can progress to college (or whatever) and then become a success. Step one: learn the same stuff, in the same way as everyone else (in an environment that, by design or not, encourages conformity), step 2: ???, step 3: PROFIT.

Japan is not really part of the West per se. There is still so much cultural legacy at work in the industry and politics, if its part of the West then its a very poor imitation of it. And lets not talk about the place of women in "westernized" Japan, lets not.

It doesn't seem to have hurt the Japanese ability to innovate in technology and culture too much though.

Maybe you missed the fact Japan s economy has been in recession for the past 20 years or so. Its not so much a hotbed of technology anymore. Or if it is, they are clearly failing at making money with it.

Do you think this is a result of the rigidity of the Japanese education system?

When times are changing it always help to have a fresh look at what you are doing instead of rehashing the same thing over and over again. Japan is not reflecting at all upon that, and yeah, I do think the education system is a huge part of the problem over here. It does not encourage forward thinking at all.

I've got too kids in primary school in the UK, and my experiences are entirely different. They've gone through schools with lovely, kind, nuturing teachers who have instilled an interest in learning. My youngest daughter delights in maths puzzled and writing bizarre and gruesome stories, for which she has been awarded and praised. My eldest daughter as just finished primary and enjoyed all of it (apart from French) and the P.E teacher recently unearthed an apparent latent talent for cricket (I couldn't catch a ball if you asked me).

Sweeping generalisations about any mode of education is bad. I was lucky in that my kids and school were well matched. But yes, we did also work hard to support the work of the school.

Taking luck out of the equation was a primary reason for not sending any of our kids to school.

You are right, you are lucky.

I'm all for making school more fun. But self-direction? Don't forget: these are children. Most (and certainly enough) of them won't have any natural inclination to learn even reading, writing and math. The whole point of having schools is to give an external sense of direction.

I think schools need to be optimized and tuned, but please, please stop these extreme experiments.

Having worked with much younger children for several years, I can assure you that most children start of with a natural inclination to learn how to read & understand math, just maybe not in the structured 'worksheet' type approach you see in some schools.

A child that enjoys baking becomes naturally motivated to learn how to understand recipes, a child that is interested in computers & games wants to learn how to recognise the symbols that start their favourite game. It is all about finding the right motivation.

For the even the most reluctant writers it can be about building up the necessary physical skills using less obvious means- lego, clay, eye droppers in the water area. Then instead of practising writing we are making road signs for our car game or writing a list of things to take on our outing.

The point is when young children are given a supportive, no pressure approach that acknowledges & responds to their interests they do have a natural inclination to learn those skills and others. They just need adults that know how to facilitate & scaffold that learning. What is more important- that a child knows how to read by 4 or a child who learns at their own pace, and is far more likely to become someone who loves reading for pleasure?

Children don't necessarily want to learn,they want to do things. And sometimes their lack of knowledge stops them from doing what they want and therefore they become motivated to learn what they need to overcome that. These are other extreme experiments, and self guided learning has been used for quite a while and quite successfully (re montessori)

I couldn't disagree more. My kids are only 2 and 3, but what they've learned has been entirely driven by their own interests. They learned to talk because not being able to communicate well is frustrating. They learned to walk because crawling everywhere is frustrating, etc. Not because I sat them down and said "OK, now it's time for our talking lesson".

Why would this suddenly change? As a parent I think it's still your job to evaluate the things that are positive and negative and try to limit the negative influences, like TV or intentionally addictive video games (farmville, wow, etc.), but I don't see how this is at all related to school. School shouldn't be exempt from being scrutinized for it's positive or negative effects.

When I finished school, I had no idea what I wanted to do. School classes bored the crap out of me for the most part, and not because I'm too smart (which I'm not), but because it just wasn't interesting. I had no practical or immediate use of the material being taught. I use to think I was deficient and had an attention deficit disorder. Occasionally a lesson would interest me and I would excel at it, but soon we'd move on to some other boring topic.

Many years later, looking at my own day to day life, I am constantly learning. The things I learn have either a practical and immediate use, or they simply interest me. Many of the lessons in school I thought were boring would have interested me at some point in my life when they were more relevant.

I wish I had started self-learning earlier.

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