Comment by glenra | Hacker News Reader

Comment by glenra | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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