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You're wrong. Watch the two documentaries called 'High School' and 'High School 2'. The way schools are structured absolutely do kill, in almost all cases, an

You're wrong. Watch the two documentaries called 'High School' and 'High School 2'. The way schools are structured absolutely do kill, in almost all cases, any persons desire to learn, along with their general spirit and enjoyment of living. One of the documentaries, I honestly forget which, is of a school that decided to try instead centering every single class on critical thinking. Instead of teaching by fiat, the teachers gave the students the tools to question them and encountered them as intellectual equals, two thinking human beings one of whom simply had more knowledge in an arena than another. When they didn't know the answer to a question, they'd admit it and try to figure it out with the student. It took a poor Latino neighborhood school and created the class that set the record for number of students to go on to receive a college degree - across any school in the country. But it's hard to teach if you have to treat the students like people, and teachers for the most part go into it because they were very good at manipulating the arbitrary meaningless systems of rules at schools when growing up, then got scared by the whole 'you have to have reasons' part of reality so fled back into the school system as teachers where no reason was needed. No hats indoors? Sure! It's law! No shorts? Or maybe mandatory shorts? Whatever, nothing matters, they're just kids you can restrict and regulate them all you want to make your own life easier, no one will stand up for them!

MaxfordAndSons 9y ago
I like where you were going with the first half, but disagree with your detour towards blaming teachers for the authoritarianism of the educational system. Not that I have any a priori love for authoritarian systems or individuals, but I do think there are enough good reasons to justify maintaining authoritarian control in primary/secondary educational settings, and while yes it unfortunately attracts some "bad apple" authoritarian teachers, they're not the root cause of the problem. The real problem, which you seemed to be getting at in the first half of your post, is standardized testing becoming the be all end all of educational goals and outcomes. Which is exactly why OP was not being alarmist and GP is being foolishly dismissive. Extending this faulty pedagogical regime to even earlier points in children's educations will undoubtedly have the effect of further degrading the population's desire to learn for learnings sake. I graduated high school 10 years ago. I was lucky enough to go to a good public school and learn from some great teachers who didn't only teach to the test to the exclusion of teaching critical thinking. Even so, you know what I came out of high school feeling like I was genuinely good at? Taking standardized tests. I was proud of how good I had become at gaming the testing system (even though I already understood this to be somewhat perverse, I also couldn't help it). But you know what? If I hadn't been a high percentile achiever, I'm certain it would have severely impacted my sense of self-worth and my desire and willingness to continue to higher education. Using test scores as a proxy measure for the educational attainment of a population is a similar fallacy to using GDP as a proxy for a the wellbeing of a nation's populace. Like the GDP, outsized gains at the top will cover up stagnancy in the middle and bottom, and encourage further macro level policies that continue this trend.
- otakucode 9y ago
  I graduated in 96, before standardized testing 'took over' apparently. We had standardized tests like the ACT and SAT, they were easy and I don't think the school played much of a role in preparing kids for it. I mean, those tests were the first place in my life I'd ever seen constructions like "apple is to checkerboards as zombies are to what?" and similar. The math was largely the same I suppose, no actual mathematics and just rote computation (which is not the same thing, but I didn't know that until long after leaving school). I graduated right before Columbine. I know that there have to be people who went to my high school who think "we barely got out alive". About a half dozen of my friends would wear pin-stripe suits on Fridays and people called them the 'pin-stripe mafia'. I wore a floor-length green military trenchcoat most of the time. At one point I wore an empty 9mm pistol shoulder holster on top of a loud Hawaiian shirt. I and my friends were basically the incarnation of every "warnings signs" list produced after Columbine. I've never been in a fight. Neither have most of my friends. Only 1 or 2 even tried anything illegal substance-wise. We produced 3 out of the 5 top students in our graduating class, including the Valedictorian. We were the freaks and weirdos, and utterly harmless. And one thing they ignored about Columbine when putting together their warning signs: Columbine was a new school. It had metal detectors on the doors. It had surveillance cameras inside and outside. It had police that periodically patroled. It required students to carry a badge and tracked their movements around the building. It was an authoritarians wet dream. And, as far as I am concerned, the people who built that school are responsible for all the deaths and trauma. If you build a prison, whoever you put in it will act like prisoners. Control is poison. Both for the person being controlled and also for the person made to do the controlling. It is in fundamental conflict with our nature and biology, and it harms both sides. Peoples responses to it are really predictable on a large scale. They exert control over themselves (tattoos in prisons, wearing edgy shit in high school), they form alternative power structures (cliques in high school, gangs in prison), they engage in conflict interpersonally (fights), they engage in inter-group conflict (gang fights), and eventually they will go to war against the system controlling them (prison riots, revolutions, etc). This is not because the people involved are bad. It's because the people are put in a system which MAKES them bad by making them do things that, little by little, poison them. I will eat my hat if neuroscience doesn't verify this within the next 20 years, there's already a bunch of very suggestive evidence in that direction. Prison guards really shouldn't have one of the highest suicide rates of all professions you wouldn't think. I'm sure standardized tests do not help, but the fact we know what actually WORKS and we simply aren't willing to make teachers put in the effort to DO it is stunningly sad. Everywhere that the solution is education and empowerment, whether its schooling, child abuse prevention, drug abuse prevention, wherever, nobody wants to hear it. They're comfortable with control and want it even if it is transparently ineffective.
RUG3Y 9y ago
The purpose of school seems to be to crush your spirit in anticipation of the job you'll get after school, which will crush it even further. By the time you reach the workforce, you're hopefully zombified enough to "endure" it.
- eli_gottlieb 9y ago
  Except that everyone I know suffered a major or minor depressive episode upon graduating college/university and entering the workforce.
  - pault 9y ago
    I think it's pretty common, but the good news is that it usually only lasts about 40 years.
- pizza 9y ago
  the methods of crushing the young today are so efficient that they can become zombies that wish to cannibalize their own brains rather than endure any more years of the burning hunger in their gut
soared 9y ago
I've forgotten about the HN echo chamber where traditional education is drivel. Do you honestly believe schools, in almost all cases, schools kill the desire to learn and general enjoyment of living? Is every single high-schooler in living hell? Everyone stops learning after school because they hate it? Nobody learns to code on their own, because they learned to hate learning?
- otakucode 9y ago
  >Do you honestly believe schools, in almost all cases, schools kill the desire to learn and general enjoyment of living? Yes, absolutely. They do. Teens enter high school full of life, and leave it bored and hating existence. Schools have progressively become more and more like prisons, and consequently students have begun to act more and more like prisoners. Schools were optimized to produce workers for repetitive manufacturing jobs which no longer exist. > Is every single high-schooler in living hell? Many of them are, yes. Perhaps check out the stats on how many use drugs to escape the hell? Or commit suicide? Or take to violence or shooting the place up? The harder you squeeze, the more people you will push over the edge. >Everyone stops learning after school because they hate it? Nobody learns to code on their own, because they learned to hate learning? I said almost (or was it essentially? It was some weasel word) because I knew someone would be bothered if I made an absolute statement. You're not going to get me to pretend like it is at ALL common for people to do those things because it flatly is not. The vast majority of people never read another book after leaving high school. They never sign up for an e-learning course. They don't even go Wikipedia-wandering. They limit their focus to their immediate environment, maybe taking in some sports or celebrity news on occasion, and everything else disinterests them. If high school was an enjoyable place for students where learning is emphasized, would there be metal detectors on every door, police roaming the halls, surveillance cameras everywhere, lockdown once the schoolday starts, no leaving campus for lunch, dress codes enforced arbitrarily, people prevented from receiving a diploma because they wore something too edgy? Are these things conducive to producing a question-asking authority-challenging person who feels the world is theirs to engage with? Have you ever watched TV? Like, any of it? Perhaps watched isn't enough... have you ever examined the fundamental basis it is produced against? For instance, take any sci-fi show. Who are the heroes? The researcher, the scientist, the intellectual, the one who sticks to their guns and the facts against the folks who want to just swing in with a gun and follow their hearts? No, those are the arrogant guys whose hubris drives everyone into the danger that the hero, the muscle-bound guy who isn't smart but follows his heart or 'instinct', can swoop in and save them from. See a character pick up a book in a sitcom and sound the seconds until someone makes a joke about them never getting a date. To be honest, that is all a bit of a wider topic than schooling and I don't know how much crossover there actually is between the anti-intellectual movement that's been growing since society saw science built tanks and mustard gas for WWI and horrible school environments.

MaxfordAndSons 9y ago

I like where you were going with the first half, but disagree with your detour towards blaming teachers for the authoritarianism of the educational system. Not that I have any a priori love for authoritarian systems or individuals, but I do think there are enough good reasons to justify maintaining authoritarian control in primary/secondary educational settings, and while yes it unfortunately attracts some "bad apple" authoritarian teachers, they're not the root cause of the problem. The real problem, which you seemed to be getting at in the first half of your post, is standardized testing becoming the be all end all of educational goals and outcomes. Which is exactly why OP was not being alarmist and GP is being foolishly dismissive. Extending this faulty pedagogical regime to even earlier points in children's educations will undoubtedly have the effect of further degrading the population's desire to learn for learnings sake. I graduated high school 10 years ago. I was lucky enough to go to a good public school and learn from some great teachers who didn't only teach to the test to the exclusion of teaching critical thinking. Even so, you know what I came out of high school feeling like I was genuinely good at? Taking standardized tests. I was proud of how good I had become at gaming the testing system (even though I already understood this to be somewhat perverse, I also couldn't help it). But you know what? If I hadn't been a high percentile achiever, I'm certain it would have severely impacted my sense of self-worth and my desire and willingness to continue to higher education. Using test scores as a proxy measure for the educational attainment of a population is a similar fallacy to using GDP as a proxy for a the wellbeing of a nation's populace. Like the GDP, outsized gains at the top will cover up stagnancy in the middle and bottom, and encourage further macro level policies that continue this trend.

otakucode 9y ago
I graduated in 96, before standardized testing 'took over' apparently. We had standardized tests like the ACT and SAT, they were easy and I don't think the school played much of a role in preparing kids for it. I mean, those tests were the first place in my life I'd ever seen constructions like "apple is to checkerboards as zombies are to what?" and similar. The math was largely the same I suppose, no actual mathematics and just rote computation (which is not the same thing, but I didn't know that until long after leaving school). I graduated right before Columbine. I know that there have to be people who went to my high school who think "we barely got out alive". About a half dozen of my friends would wear pin-stripe suits on Fridays and people called them the 'pin-stripe mafia'. I wore a floor-length green military trenchcoat most of the time. At one point I wore an empty 9mm pistol shoulder holster on top of a loud Hawaiian shirt. I and my friends were basically the incarnation of every "warnings signs" list produced after Columbine. I've never been in a fight. Neither have most of my friends. Only 1 or 2 even tried anything illegal substance-wise. We produced 3 out of the 5 top students in our graduating class, including the Valedictorian. We were the freaks and weirdos, and utterly harmless. And one thing they ignored about Columbine when putting together their warning signs: Columbine was a new school. It had metal detectors on the doors. It had surveillance cameras inside and outside. It had police that periodically patroled. It required students to carry a badge and tracked their movements around the building. It was an authoritarians wet dream. And, as far as I am concerned, the people who built that school are responsible for all the deaths and trauma. If you build a prison, whoever you put in it will act like prisoners. Control is poison. Both for the person being controlled and also for the person made to do the controlling. It is in fundamental conflict with our nature and biology, and it harms both sides. Peoples responses to it are really predictable on a large scale. They exert control over themselves (tattoos in prisons, wearing edgy shit in high school), they form alternative power structures (cliques in high school, gangs in prison), they engage in conflict interpersonally (fights), they engage in inter-group conflict (gang fights), and eventually they will go to war against the system controlling them (prison riots, revolutions, etc). This is not because the people involved are bad. It's because the people are put in a system which MAKES them bad by making them do things that, little by little, poison them. I will eat my hat if neuroscience doesn't verify this within the next 20 years, there's already a bunch of very suggestive evidence in that direction. Prison guards really shouldn't have one of the highest suicide rates of all professions you wouldn't think. I'm sure standardized tests do not help, but the fact we know what actually WORKS and we simply aren't willing to make teachers put in the effort to DO it is stunningly sad. Everywhere that the solution is education and empowerment, whether its schooling, child abuse prevention, drug abuse prevention, wherever, nobody wants to hear it. They're comfortable with control and want it even if it is transparently ineffective.

RUG3Y 9y ago

The purpose of school seems to be to crush your spirit in anticipation of the job you'll get after school, which will crush it even further. By the time you reach the workforce, you're hopefully zombified enough to "endure" it.

eli_gottlieb 9y ago
Except that everyone I know suffered a major or minor depressive episode upon graduating college/university and entering the workforce.
- pault 9y ago
  I think it's pretty common, but the good news is that it usually only lasts about 40 years.
pizza 9y ago
the methods of crushing the young today are so efficient that they can become zombies that wish to cannibalize their own brains rather than endure any more years of the burning hunger in their gut

soared 9y ago

I've forgotten about the HN echo chamber where traditional education is drivel. Do you honestly believe schools, in almost all cases, schools kill the desire to learn and general enjoyment of living? Is every single high-schooler in living hell? Everyone stops learning after school because they hate it? Nobody learns to code on their own, because they learned to hate learning?

otakucode 9y ago
>Do you honestly believe schools, in almost all cases, schools kill the desire to learn and general enjoyment of living? Yes, absolutely. They do. Teens enter high school full of life, and leave it bored and hating existence. Schools have progressively become more and more like prisons, and consequently students have begun to act more and more like prisoners. Schools were optimized to produce workers for repetitive manufacturing jobs which no longer exist. > Is every single high-schooler in living hell? Many of them are, yes. Perhaps check out the stats on how many use drugs to escape the hell? Or commit suicide? Or take to violence or shooting the place up? The harder you squeeze, the more people you will push over the edge. >Everyone stops learning after school because they hate it? Nobody learns to code on their own, because they learned to hate learning? I said almost (or was it essentially? It was some weasel word) because I knew someone would be bothered if I made an absolute statement. You're not going to get me to pretend like it is at ALL common for people to do those things because it flatly is not. The vast majority of people never read another book after leaving high school. They never sign up for an e-learning course. They don't even go Wikipedia-wandering. They limit their focus to their immediate environment, maybe taking in some sports or celebrity news on occasion, and everything else disinterests them. If high school was an enjoyable place for students where learning is emphasized, would there be metal detectors on every door, police roaming the halls, surveillance cameras everywhere, lockdown once the schoolday starts, no leaving campus for lunch, dress codes enforced arbitrarily, people prevented from receiving a diploma because they wore something too edgy? Are these things conducive to producing a question-asking authority-challenging person who feels the world is theirs to engage with? Have you ever watched TV? Like, any of it? Perhaps watched isn't enough... have you ever examined the fundamental basis it is produced against? For instance, take any sci-fi show. Who are the heroes? The researcher, the scientist, the intellectual, the one who sticks to their guns and the facts against the folks who want to just swing in with a gun and follow their hearts? No, those are the arrogant guys whose hubris drives everyone into the danger that the hero, the muscle-bound guy who isn't smart but follows his heart or 'instinct', can swoop in and save them from. See a character pick up a book in a sitcom and sound the seconds until someone makes a joke about them never getting a date. To be honest, that is all a bit of a wider topic than schooling and I don't know how much crossover there actually is between the anti-intellectual movement that's been growing since society saw science built tanks and mustard gas for WWI and horrible school environments.