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> To believe that one can compete with the psychologists who design addictive behaviors into today's modern day entertainment is not a bet I would take.

Perhaps. But maybe it works the other way around too. Today's adults are bombarded with addictive, manipulative products all the time, and most find themselves woefully unable to resist (cf. phone-staring parties).

Isn't school the best place to get kids to develop some ability to resist this kind of addiction? External pressure stops working as soon as it's gone, but internal resilience doesn't.

    Running a 2000+ student public school within the context 
    of a community that has little expectations of academic 
    achievement? Good luck graduating students who are even 
    literate.

Totally agree. However, while there were no hard numbers in the article, it seems to me that these places may be successful because of the high "teacher" to "student" ratio.

It sounds like the adults are peers and are in sufficient numbers that the children encounter enough "mature peers" with a wealth of experience to share.

If you think about it, school is ridiculously out of place relative to pretty much every other institution in the world. Where else can you go and be surrounded by 15 to 30 people all within +1 and -1 year of the same age. To me it's crazy to expect learning to come out of an environment where you have 15-30 or more people equally ignorant on a topic expected to learn socially. Basically, you have one individual (the teacher) and if you're lucky 1-2 precocious students, that have much of value to add to any discussion.

Furthermore, such an environment doesn't really appeal well to human desires for competition and admiration since the only person with knowledge possesses oodles more knowledge than you. "I can be as good as that person at X" isn't a thought that enters your head and motivates you when the only person good at X is orders of magnitude better at X and has many many years experience at X.

I definitely see value in an environment where those n years old can also expect to learn from those n plus 1 or more years older with experience to share. Take that environment where there is peer learning and peer sharing and introduce some "seeds of knowledge" (i.e. the adults with subject matter expertise) and you've got a promising recipe for success.

The expectation that the "students" also teach each other is doubly reinforcing, since teaching is one of the best ways to better master a subject. It forces you to consider the knowledge of the pupil and find a way to express what you know in terms the pupils can understand.

I agree that the schooling system, for most schools, is optimised for many things other than learning. Organised childcare would seem to be the primary goal for many classrooms, learning a secondary goal. Grouping by age instead of ability and interest is a poor idea in my observation. I think streaming and do grouping by level should be done much earlier. The goal should be to get talented kids to work together and in competition and achieving their learning as early as possible, and only mix them with the less talented kids occasionally. The least achieving kids should be prepared for life with an education in good solid skills and common sense, rather than making them try and fail at topics they can't do, which just turns them off learning for life.

Anyway, I'd redesign the whole thing if you gave me the job. That's all.

I disagree on the addictive nature of sites like Reddit, FB, etc. Yes, they are addictive. And yes, ppl (especially young children) will get hooked - but when you're surrounded by eager peers who are exploring interesting things (perhaps one made a game on a RaspPi), the insatiable curiosity of a child will defeat the attractive nature of the soul sucking sites that you mentioned.

I think the pressures placed on someone by social norms outweigh the influences these unproductive sites have, at least in the long run.

> I disagree on the addictive nature of sites like Reddit, FB, etc. Yes, they are addictive. [..]

> the psychologists who design addictive behaviors into today's modern day entertainment

Most of them are "designed" by the market, not psychologists — addictiveness is a selectional pressure.

But yes, that part stood out to me too. "Kids will get bored and start learning". Says who? What if they don't?

  Most of them are "designed" by the market, not 
  psychologists — addictiveness is a selectional pressure.

If a car is reliable, is it because of the highly paid expert engineers who improve the design; or the multi-billion-dollar company that hires those engineers; or the free market competition that discourages unreliability?

I'd say the answer is "all of them, but in different ways"

The free market is the biggest driver in this case. We know this to be true because cars designed by companies who have lost their way and don't car anymore are typically poor. And cars designed as national projects are typically terrible. The engineers do the work, but it's the fussy and fickle customers who are their ever present, unrelenting boss.

The free market also prefers awful and addictive things like Mcdonalds, cigarettes, and Facebook. When personal profit and easy gratification are the main drivers of a system then don't solely expect good things to pop out... good AND bad things arise.

Not all kids. Not everyone is self-driven or naturally curious (although I believe anyone can practice these).

I was homeschooled until high school and I had a tremendous amount of freedom in my learning after I had gotten the harder and less interesting subjects out of the way (for me, spelling and creative writing).

I graduated nearly at the top of my class, but I hated how high school felt like prison. No free speech. Led by incompetent adults. Some of these adults went on power trips. The school system is broken, at least it was for me.

College is fine though, surprisingly. Maybe it was just my high school that was terrible...

The big ones have people with psychology major or minors on staff to help research into recurrent behavior of user interactions, and many of the smaller ones probably just copy patterns from the big ones.

Just having 100 users playing your game and watching what makes them open the app again can easily be considered a psychological experiment, though in the tech business they are probably more often referred to as just "user testing".

Say a student spends all day on HN - that's a day dedicated to reading and discussing topics related to hacker culture. I've learned so much about programming and computer science in general from HN, and even physics, biology, politics, and other topics. There's an education to be gained from everything in my opinion.

Even mundane things, time wasting games like Cookie Clicker, still have some educational value behind them. Could we get more education out of drills, homework, and regular testing? Maybe, but they certainly don't provide the same level of engagement.

> I've learned so much about programming and computer science in general from HN, and even physics, biology, politics, and other topics.

I can almost guarantee that 1) you really haven't, and 2) the time here is wasted.

With that, I'm going to close this window and go back to reading a book on math theory.

> I've learned so much about programming and computer science in general from HN, and even physics, biology, politics, and other topics.

Nope. Been here for a long time (this is not my first account) - it's mostly senseless factoids that fade. Nonsense synthesized from research paper abstracts.

Linked from another thread: https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/s/schopenhauer/arthur/essays/...

You are not building a systematic understanding of anything by reading HN, you are encountering unconnected assertions that mean nothing in isolation.

Reading about a foreign language is not learning how to speak it. Reading about programming is not learning how to code. Reading about mathematicians is not learning math.

Learning comes from doing.

> I don't get a spark of pleasure looking at pictures of people on some social network

But what else are you going to do when you're pooping? Just stare at a wall?

Obligatory SMBC link: http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2225

> Obligatory SMBC link: http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2225*
Sadly, this really works that way sometimes. Just yesterday an unexpected moment of introspection triggered a small anxiety attack in me. Thank God we have Hacker News...

The social aspects of modern technology are getting more people regularly writing to express themselves than anything else in history.
Of all the visions of the future, the one that almost nobody predicted was that the children of the 21st century would use writing as a dominant form of informal social communication.
Also, what is wrong with spending hours looking at photos?

> Also, what is wrong with spending hours looking at photos?
Because rather than get work done, learning a new skill, doing the laundry, washing the dishes, applying for a better job, one is looking at photos.

You do those when not looking at photos, or reading books, or watching films, or going to the theater, or flicking through a load of comics, or complaining in the comments section of a specialist news aggregator about people wasting their time looking at photos.