6 ms·

I'll preface this response with the acknowledgement that the world is not ideal, and there are some fundamental problems underlying how classes are structured (

I'll preface this response with the acknowledgement that the world is not ideal, and there are some fundamental problems underlying how classes are structured (largely due to the fact that evaluations are based on the achievement of the lowest performers) which poses institutional obstacles to efficient work assignments. That being said, given the (in practice flawed) assumption that the work being assigned is something your child needs, it's a disservice to say some other home life takes higher priority than education. This is especially true given the additive nature of many topics. Imagine, in a contrived example, you veto the addition worksheet despite your child needing practice. How is he/she supposed to keep up in the next week's topic of multiplication? In practice this falls apart if you have a high performing child, but, campaigning for funding for gifted programs or ,if you're particularly lucky, working with the teachers to get customized work is a far better investment than lobbying for the ability to just ignore the work.

vezzy-fnord 11y ago
it's a disservice to say some other home life takes higher priority than education Schooling is not education, only a facsimile of it.
- lordCarbonFiber 11y ago
  Perfect is the enemy of better. There is huge room for improvement in our education system, but that doesn't mean we'd be better off with nothing.
  - vezzy-fnord 11y ago
    There's nothing about perfection or relative improvement here. Traditional schooling is simply not an adequate model for education, but rather persists as a quasi-day care environment for occupied laborers to drop off their children to. We probably would be better off with nothing. For one, abandoning compulsory public schooling will lead to an explosion in democratic, free, Sudbury and other alternative school models, as well as decrease the regulatory capture for homeschoolers and unschoolers. We are at a far better position than ever before in history to suitably practice autodidacticism on a mass scale, potentially with decentralized study groups, apprenticeships and democratic schools existing to augment and pool one's skills. Private universities will still exist and be able to focus more on research and less on being High School 2.0. Not to mention such an arrangement would be more organic, in the sense of not constraining people to the uncanny artificial environment of public schooling, which does not mirror any other oft-seen real life institution. It's an odd syncretic chimera of its own.
  - zaphar 11y ago
    Which is not what the poster above was saying at all. Public schooling is a necessity because not everyone can afford to homeschool or hire a personal tutor for their children. That point is not under dispute. However denying parents the input of their far superior knowledge regarding the workload their child has as well as implying (intended or not) that the homework situation does not need improvement is denying the very real problem that kids are stressed and overworked. Some as early as kindergarten. One perfect valid grass roots solution to this is for parents to push back against the school. And unless schools start changing it's the only solution available to parents of those stressed and overworked children.
- JadeNB 11y ago
  Giving parents veto power over associated work will not fix the problem that schooling is not education. EDIT: I missed [lordCarbonFiber](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10459743 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10459743 )'s comment, saying the same but better.
michaelbuddy 11y ago
you're losing me with this. Parents, exhausted after work, kids already 7 hours of school, then there's this new set of chores to deal with instead of enjoying life, you know life, the finite thing that runs out. that AND this goal of "education" you seem to have is not the actual goal for most people. My goal for me or my kids is not to "be educated" Just like a goal of a society is not to "have laws"
- lordCarbonFiber 11y ago
  It's an investment sure and you're right in asserting that childhood is finite. Fortunately, the US is interesting in that they give you the freedom to home school. If knowledge isn't a priority we as a country give you the right to deny it to your child. In my personal experience (and I suspect yours given you're on this site) my entire livelihood is dependent on my knowledge. For me, this was cultivated on the lattice of the public school system (K-12 to university) but I'll freely admit I was lucky in that respect. My personal dream is that every child gets the same opportunity.
  - vezzy-fnord 11y ago
    Fortunately, the US is interesting in that they give you the freedom to home school. If knowledge isn't a priority we as a country give you the right to deny it to your child. That you equate homeschooling with "denial of knowledge" makes me strongly question your intentions. If homeschooling is the denial of knowledge, we must also concede compulsory public schooling is the institutionalized withholding thereof.
  - bweitzman 11y ago
    I know a few people who've been home schooled. You would never be able to tell unless they told you (which is how I found out in every case)
    - jinfiesto 11y ago
      I suspect the parent is referring to the nearly epidemic levels of religion driven homeschooling we have in the US. It's apparently totally acceptable to pull your child out of school and teach them dinosaurs didn't exist and that evolution is probably wrong. Source: http://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/oii/nonpublic/statistics.html http://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/oii/nonpublic/statisti...
zaphar 11y ago
You are assuming the education of a single class takes precedence over other classes, the education of extra curricular activities, and the education of chores at home. That is a large assumption that I'm pretty sure is invalid. The crux of this problem is that time spent in school is poorly spent for a host of reasons. If you child spends close to 7 hours at school and none of that time was available for the work that is expected to be done at home then that imposes an undue burden on the child and the family. Rather than insisting that the needs of a schools poor use of time should supersede the families needs perhaps the solution is to fix the poor use of time instead.
- lordCarbonFiber 11y ago
  The metaphor that resonates with me as a musician, would you expect someone to get better at piano only by attending lessons but no practice at home? Im not sure where you get the idea of poor time use from. Out of that 8 hours you need to fit lunch, recess, cumulative transition times, and at least 4 major academic topics (Math, Science, History, Language) plus hopefully a rotating time dedicated to the arts. And you want that to fit into 8 hours on top of the practice required to achieve mastery? Finally, this is me making a value judgement. Just picking one class, math, I'll go out on a limb and say mastery of basic arithmetic is going to resonate much farther in a child's life than participating an extra hour in extra curricular or chores.
  - jerf 11y ago
    "The metaphor that resonates with me as a musician, would you expect someone to get better at piano only by attending lessons but no practice at home?" If they were at lessons for 7 hours a day, five days a week... yes! Yes I in fact do.
    - lordCarbonFiber 11y ago
      Except children don't sit down at school and begin a "school lesson". Basic education is going to cover Math, Science, Language, History and hopefully Art. So in a given subject there might be 5 hours of lesson time week. When framed that way, asking for another hour or 2 of practice time for mastery doesn't sound so unreasonable.

vezzy-fnord 11y ago

it's a disservice to say some other home life takes higher priority than education Schooling is not education, only a facsimile of it.

lordCarbonFiber 11y ago
Perfect is the enemy of better. There is huge room for improvement in our education system, but that doesn't mean we'd be better off with nothing.
- vezzy-fnord 11y ago
  There's nothing about perfection or relative improvement here. Traditional schooling is simply not an adequate model for education, but rather persists as a quasi-day care environment for occupied laborers to drop off their children to. We probably would be better off with nothing. For one, abandoning compulsory public schooling will lead to an explosion in democratic, free, Sudbury and other alternative school models, as well as decrease the regulatory capture for homeschoolers and unschoolers. We are at a far better position than ever before in history to suitably practice autodidacticism on a mass scale, potentially with decentralized study groups, apprenticeships and democratic schools existing to augment and pool one's skills. Private universities will still exist and be able to focus more on research and less on being High School 2.0. Not to mention such an arrangement would be more organic, in the sense of not constraining people to the uncanny artificial environment of public schooling, which does not mirror any other oft-seen real life institution. It's an odd syncretic chimera of its own.
- zaphar 11y ago
  Which is not what the poster above was saying at all. Public schooling is a necessity because not everyone can afford to homeschool or hire a personal tutor for their children. That point is not under dispute. However denying parents the input of their far superior knowledge regarding the workload their child has as well as implying (intended or not) that the homework situation does not need improvement is denying the very real problem that kids are stressed and overworked. Some as early as kindergarten. One perfect valid grass roots solution to this is for parents to push back against the school. And unless schools start changing it's the only solution available to parents of those stressed and overworked children.
JadeNB 11y ago
Giving parents veto power over associated work will not fix the problem that schooling is not education. EDIT: I missed [lordCarbonFiber](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10459743 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10459743 )'s comment, saying the same but better.

michaelbuddy 11y ago

you're losing me with this. Parents, exhausted after work, kids already 7 hours of school, then there's this new set of chores to deal with instead of enjoying life, you know life, the finite thing that runs out. that AND this goal of "education" you seem to have is not the actual goal for most people. My goal for me or my kids is not to "be educated" Just like a goal of a society is not to "have laws"

lordCarbonFiber 11y ago
It's an investment sure and you're right in asserting that childhood is finite. Fortunately, the US is interesting in that they give you the freedom to home school. If knowledge isn't a priority we as a country give you the right to deny it to your child. In my personal experience (and I suspect yours given you're on this site) my entire livelihood is dependent on my knowledge. For me, this was cultivated on the lattice of the public school system (K-12 to university) but I'll freely admit I was lucky in that respect. My personal dream is that every child gets the same opportunity.
- vezzy-fnord 11y ago
  Fortunately, the US is interesting in that they give you the freedom to home school. If knowledge isn't a priority we as a country give you the right to deny it to your child. That you equate homeschooling with "denial of knowledge" makes me strongly question your intentions. If homeschooling is the denial of knowledge, we must also concede compulsory public schooling is the institutionalized withholding thereof.
- bweitzman 11y ago
  I know a few people who've been home schooled. You would never be able to tell unless they told you (which is how I found out in every case)
  - jinfiesto 11y ago
    I suspect the parent is referring to the nearly epidemic levels of religion driven homeschooling we have in the US. It's apparently totally acceptable to pull your child out of school and teach them dinosaurs didn't exist and that evolution is probably wrong. Source: http://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/oii/nonpublic/statistics.html http://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/oii/nonpublic/statisti...

zaphar 11y ago

You are assuming the education of a single class takes precedence over other classes, the education of extra curricular activities, and the education of chores at home. That is a large assumption that I'm pretty sure is invalid. The crux of this problem is that time spent in school is poorly spent for a host of reasons. If you child spends close to 7 hours at school and none of that time was available for the work that is expected to be done at home then that imposes an undue burden on the child and the family. Rather than insisting that the needs of a schools poor use of time should supersede the families needs perhaps the solution is to fix the poor use of time instead.

lordCarbonFiber 11y ago
The metaphor that resonates with me as a musician, would you expect someone to get better at piano only by attending lessons but no practice at home? Im not sure where you get the idea of poor time use from. Out of that 8 hours you need to fit lunch, recess, cumulative transition times, and at least 4 major academic topics (Math, Science, History, Language) plus hopefully a rotating time dedicated to the arts. And you want that to fit into 8 hours on top of the practice required to achieve mastery? Finally, this is me making a value judgement. Just picking one class, math, I'll go out on a limb and say mastery of basic arithmetic is going to resonate much farther in a child's life than participating an extra hour in extra curricular or chores.
- jerf 11y ago
  "The metaphor that resonates with me as a musician, would you expect someone to get better at piano only by attending lessons but no practice at home?" If they were at lessons for 7 hours a day, five days a week... yes! Yes I in fact do.
  - lordCarbonFiber 11y ago
    Except children don't sit down at school and begin a "school lesson". Basic education is going to cover Math, Science, Language, History and hopefully Art. So in a given subject there might be 5 hours of lesson time week. When framed that way, asking for another hour or 2 of practice time for mastery doesn't sound so unreasonable.