6 ms·

<rant> ok, for all you school-haters out there on HN, one thing that i think is often overlooked in the 'discussion' of how public schooling is such a mind-num

<rant> ok, for all you school-haters out there on HN, one thing that i think is often overlooked in the 'discussion' of how public schooling is such a mind-numbing rote memorization grind is the fact that it is a way of developing grit, discipline, whatever you call it ... the ability to endure through boring or tedious tasks to achieve some measurable goal. i think that for most people, the biggest determiner of 'success' or 'happiness' in adult life isn't raw intelligence or inspiring creativity, but rather the ability to just finish something! even the most anti-establishment f*-the-man entrepreneurs here on HN would never have succeeded in their businesses without GRIT. how many friends do you know who say "oh i'm so much smarter than all these tools who got good grades" but then they can never actually finish any one of their 'divinely-inspired' projects because they quit as soon as some part gets tedious or boring? in short, yes, public schooling can be improved in many ways (so can the registration process at the DMV or other bureaucracies), but i hope people out there realize the value of developing grit through doing seemingly boring rote work. </rant>

phjohnst 16y ago
But why? You can develop grit by doing things that really suck, but ultimately get you somewhere you want to go, or that leads to some sort of innovation down the line. But to force people to do things that are completely unrelated to what they want to do in life, just for the sake of doing it, is a huge waste of time. You gain grit by doing things that need to be done, hopefully in pursuit of some greater goal (more than likely, just getting paid). Not by for-the-hell-of-it forced work. That just turns you off everything.
- cturner 16y ago
  Interesting to consider the zen statement. What if you ignore the goal and focussing just on the path?
  - yason 16y ago
    You'll find yourself in some place beautiful.
- ErrantX 16y ago
  By my observation of the vast majority of people at school I would say... most people would just procrastinate and get nowhere if you just leave them to find something to work towards. School sucks; but I think it is a bit of a dirty hack to keep kids minds on something for a few years. It needs a major revamp and broadening of the curriculum (so that those who do want to think independently can do their own thing). But otherwise we risk a next-generation of total dropouts with no education and no life skills (it's bad enough anyway). Yep; that's what society has come to. The fix is going to take more than just a few years.
  - kiba 16y ago
    When your stomach is not filled with food, you tend to work for what you need.
  - DavidSJ 16y ago
    Try observing people not at school, e.g. pre-school (literally) children, or unschoolers, Sudbury school students, etc. People are naturally curious. School kills curiosity.
etherael 16y ago
Developing grit and discipline in the pursuit of the asinine is as just as harmful if not more, than not developing grit and discipline in the pursuit of the sublime. Much of what passes for education much more closely matches the former than the latter. - A 9th grade dropout.
- izendejas 16y ago
  An education is what you make of it. Those of us that "survived" the pursuit of the "asinine" found a way to take advantage of the many resources a schooling system offers to compensate for any deficiencies and learned a great deal. Those resources are your fellow classmates, your teachers (imagine that), clubs, sports, and I can go on and on.
  - etherael 16y ago
    Not to engage in the no true scotsman fallacy, but then by definition, your subjective experience was not the pursuit of the asinine. That doesn't mean other people's subjective experiences do not fall squarely within that realm.
    - izendejas 16y ago
      Correct. Subjectivity is key--and thus, my point was regarding your second statement. My point is, while you may have dropped out because you thought going to school is a pursuit of the asinine (or parts of it maybe?), some of us didn't see it that way.
      - etherael 16y ago
        Which is why I used the word "much" rather than "all". I may be a ninth grade dropout, but I have been a prolific and voracious consumer of all things educational, sourced ridiculously large amounts of recorded lecture content online on even larger amounts of subjects in general. I know there's a lot of good information and a lot of that information comes from educational institutions, at the same time I know there is much pointless rote droning by people far more interested in a by the book approach than one that works.
abecedarius 16y ago
Someone makes that point every single time, more like. It strikes me as a rationalization: would you design schools the way they are, to teach grit? They seem better adapted to produce submission: showing up for the job every day and doing what you're told. This is related to the discipline to finish your own projects, but like with a sign change along important dimensions.
- izendejas 16y ago
  I beg to differ. People that develop a grit are the ones telling those that didn't what to do. If they couldn't get the work done, how else do you expect them to lead? You can't define a submissive person as simply as above. A submissive person is also one that didn't have the grit to develop his communication skills, his people skills, his critical thinking skills, and his creativity, etc.
  - shadowsun7 16y ago
    Let's put that grit argument another way: Surviving prison develops grit. Therefore it is beneficial to go to prison. Counting the grains of sand on the beach develops grit. Therefore, it is beneficial to count the grains of sand on a beach. Point: not all activities that develop grit are beneficial. The implication of the grit argument is that any tedious activity has some benefit - if not for anything else, then at least for the development of 'grit' itself. Which is a ridiculous argument; some tedious activities are tedious because they are pointless. A better lesson to learn is to spend your time wisely - on activities that are tedious for a reason. So is school tedious for a reason? The answer is no, not really - but to prove that to you would likely take some time. I recommend you read up on John Taylor Gatto, which the speaker references above. See: http://www.cantrip.org/againstschool.html http://www.cantrip.org/againstschool.html and http://www.cantrip.org/gatto.html http://www.cantrip.org/gatto.html
    - chacha102 16y ago
      I bet reading those will develop grit... :)
physdida 16y ago
I think it's the other way around. Top pupils quit their post-school projects because they don't have teachers standing over them offering gold stars and punishments. They're so resigned to extrinsic motivation that it takes years to rediscover the creative, inner self: the guy that, without setting any goals, enjoyed lego and learning to speak english.
pavelludiq 16y ago
I can spend 8 hours programming a computer with just 1 or two 20 minute brakes for eating or a mug refill, but i found it impossible to concentrate for a 40 minutes high-school chemistry class. Could it be that school is just BORING? I can read a thick book on a hard subject(programming, philosophy, history), but could never finish a fucking chapter from a high-school text book, without falling asleep. Could it be that the textbooks are badly written? I can spend days and weeks writing an essay on something that interests me, but i fucking hated writing 3 paragraph short essays in school. Could it be the topics, the format and especially the time constrain made me write badly? If school taught me anything is that unless im working for myself on what i want, its better to just half ass everything, and not do your best, because all it takes is to not be your worst. It probably made me even less disciplined because my natural rebelliousness made me pride myself as an undisciplined misfit. I was proud of being lazy, stupid, stubborn, rebellious and all of that precisely because they wanted me to not be like that. Fuck school. It messed me up, and caused me great suffering with very little benefit, when at least in my case, there was a clearly better way of doing things.
- yason 16y ago
  If school taught me anything is that unless im working for myself on what i want, its better to just half ass everything, and not do your best, because all it takes is to not be your worst This is so true. I realized this very thing myself in the second year in high school. I thought: what the hell am I doing trying to get good grades—from every subject? I had been doing precisely that just because I could and with the eerie awareness of the fact that I would forget 95% of anything deemed uninteresting right after the course. When it came to subjects tangential to my interests, I realized that I was certainly not going to learn something in school that I couldn't learn by myself. If I ever needed to cross check which European country invaded which other European country in the 1600's, how to translate "dear girl, I want to marry you for the rest of my life" to German should the opportunity arrive, or desperately need to exercise in some molecular calculations, then I was convinced that I would still have the chance to learn that stuff. Except for the subjects of my interest, I then dropped all my effort to the very, very minimal level and as a result my grades dropped slightly. It was probably the 20% of effort, 80% of results scheme in action. In some subjects that I had decided to completely ignore, like religion courses (yes, we had those in Finland...), I let my grades drop to the minimum that was required to avoid flunking and was actually pretty proud of that result. I graduated with good grades in everything I cared about. My high school diploma then exhibited real value for the period of a mere month until it claimed its purpose and I got accepted to the university. I've never needed it after that. And, by the way, except for mathematics, 99% of what I learned in high school I have never ever needed since. I'm 32 now and I'm glad my teenage realization turned out to be correct.
lionhearted 16y ago
"There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all." -Peter Drucker
tome 16y ago
Can't you do that for much less money in the military?
Vivtek 16y ago
I think all our children should be sent to retraining camps and made to work fifteen-hour days assembling electronics. That will create true grit and allow them to value whatever small rewards later life will give them. I get your larger point, that a sour-grapes excuse of "Well, school was booooring" doesn't necessarily indicate a successful individual - but just because losers also hate the system doesn't mean the system actually works for any real purpose.
- mkramlich 16y ago
  I hear China is nice this time of year...
yummyfajitas 16y ago
how many friends do you know who say "oh i'm so much smarter than all these tools who got good grades" but then they can never actually finish any one of their 'divinely-inspired' projects because they quit as soon as some part gets tedious or boring? There certainly are lazy people claiming to be smarter than those with good grades. But in my experience, the students with perfect grades are far more likely to excel at school than at anything else. When I started teaching at NYU, I ran into a lot of these students. They typically rocked my calculus 1-2 classes; they took calculus in high school but wanted to maintain a 4.0 GPA so they took it again in college. Even in school, past a certain point, it doesn't serve them well. In Calc 3 or Linear Algebra (two more advanced classes I've taught), you must think for yourself to pass, rather than just applying the differentiation algorithm. That's when the 4.0's get pwned. It gets even worse when I interview them for a job and ask them an open ended question: "Looking at XXX data, how can you estimate YYY? What other data would be useful?" Many of them are reasonably smart. But they've spent years preparing themselves for schooling, not for actually building things. I'll take the kid with lower grades + open source project any day .
- mkr-hn 16y ago
  I don't know if it's this way at every level, but the one quarter of an MSNA (I think that's the acronym) prep course I had to take in tech school was chapter after chapter of lists of steps. If that's the way the other three quarters are, I don't know how a Windows administrator fresh out of school could handle an unexpected situation. "Go through these menus to achieve x" won't help you when some joker breaks explorer and forces you to work with the command line. Either way, I'm glad I went the Linux admin route. The instructor for the classes was about as quirky as you'd expect a Linux admin teacher to be, and all four quarters were a load of fun. If any of my grade school classes had been like that, I wouldn't have hated it so much.
DavidSJ 16y ago
Translation: life sucks, better teach that to kids early. Life doesn't suck, and we shouldn't deliberately make the lives of children boring and tedious.
DennisP 16y ago
I didn't learn grit from school. I learned that life is pretty easy, and I could do well with very little effort. Unlearning that lesson in the real world is how I learned grit.
eru 16y ago
School may teach some people grit and discipline. But for some people it's just too easy and boring, and they can just coast through. So it doesn't even teach grit and discipline to them.

phjohnst 16y ago

But why? You can develop grit by doing things that really suck, but ultimately get you somewhere you want to go, or that leads to some sort of innovation down the line. But to force people to do things that are completely unrelated to what they want to do in life, just for the sake of doing it, is a huge waste of time. You gain grit by doing things that need to be done, hopefully in pursuit of some greater goal (more than likely, just getting paid). Not by for-the-hell-of-it forced work. That just turns you off everything.

cturner 16y ago
Interesting to consider the zen statement. What if you ignore the goal and focussing just on the path?
- yason 16y ago
  You'll find yourself in some place beautiful.
ErrantX 16y ago
By my observation of the vast majority of people at school I would say... most people would just procrastinate and get nowhere if you just leave them to find something to work towards. School sucks; but I think it is a bit of a dirty hack to keep kids minds on something for a few years. It needs a major revamp and broadening of the curriculum (so that those who do want to think independently can do their own thing). But otherwise we risk a next-generation of total dropouts with no education and no life skills (it's bad enough anyway). Yep; that's what society has come to. The fix is going to take more than just a few years.
- kiba 16y ago
  When your stomach is not filled with food, you tend to work for what you need.
- DavidSJ 16y ago
  Try observing people not at school, e.g. pre-school (literally) children, or unschoolers, Sudbury school students, etc. People are naturally curious. School kills curiosity.

etherael 16y ago

Developing grit and discipline in the pursuit of the asinine is as just as harmful if not more, than not developing grit and discipline in the pursuit of the sublime. Much of what passes for education much more closely matches the former than the latter. - A 9th grade dropout.

izendejas 16y ago
An education is what you make of it. Those of us that "survived" the pursuit of the "asinine" found a way to take advantage of the many resources a schooling system offers to compensate for any deficiencies and learned a great deal. Those resources are your fellow classmates, your teachers (imagine that), clubs, sports, and I can go on and on.
- etherael 16y ago
  Not to engage in the no true scotsman fallacy, but then by definition, your subjective experience was not the pursuit of the asinine. That doesn't mean other people's subjective experiences do not fall squarely within that realm.
  - izendejas 16y ago
    Correct. Subjectivity is key--and thus, my point was regarding your second statement. My point is, while you may have dropped out because you thought going to school is a pursuit of the asinine (or parts of it maybe?), some of us didn't see it that way.
    - etherael 16y ago
      Which is why I used the word "much" rather than "all". I may be a ninth grade dropout, but I have been a prolific and voracious consumer of all things educational, sourced ridiculously large amounts of recorded lecture content online on even larger amounts of subjects in general. I know there's a lot of good information and a lot of that information comes from educational institutions, at the same time I know there is much pointless rote droning by people far more interested in a by the book approach than one that works.

abecedarius 16y ago

Someone makes that point every single time, more like. It strikes me as a rationalization: would you design schools the way they are, to teach grit? They seem better adapted to produce submission: showing up for the job every day and doing what you're told. This is related to the discipline to finish your own projects, but like with a sign change along important dimensions.

izendejas 16y ago
I beg to differ. People that develop a grit are the ones telling those that didn't what to do. If they couldn't get the work done, how else do you expect them to lead? You can't define a submissive person as simply as above. A submissive person is also one that didn't have the grit to develop his communication skills, his people skills, his critical thinking skills, and his creativity, etc.
- shadowsun7 16y ago
  Let's put that grit argument another way: Surviving prison develops grit. Therefore it is beneficial to go to prison. Counting the grains of sand on the beach develops grit. Therefore, it is beneficial to count the grains of sand on a beach. Point: not all activities that develop grit are beneficial. The implication of the grit argument is that any tedious activity has some benefit - if not for anything else, then at least for the development of 'grit' itself. Which is a ridiculous argument; some tedious activities are tedious because they are pointless. A better lesson to learn is to spend your time wisely - on activities that are tedious for a reason. So is school tedious for a reason? The answer is no, not really - but to prove that to you would likely take some time. I recommend you read up on John Taylor Gatto, which the speaker references above. See: http://www.cantrip.org/againstschool.html http://www.cantrip.org/againstschool.html and http://www.cantrip.org/gatto.html http://www.cantrip.org/gatto.html
  - chacha102 16y ago
    I bet reading those will develop grit... :)

physdida 16y ago

I think it's the other way around. Top pupils quit their post-school projects because they don't have teachers standing over them offering gold stars and punishments. They're so resigned to extrinsic motivation that it takes years to rediscover the creative, inner self: the guy that, without setting any goals, enjoyed lego and learning to speak english.

pavelludiq 16y ago

I can spend 8 hours programming a computer with just 1 or two 20 minute brakes for eating or a mug refill, but i found it impossible to concentrate for a 40 minutes high-school chemistry class. Could it be that school is just BORING? I can read a thick book on a hard subject(programming, philosophy, history), but could never finish a fucking chapter from a high-school text book, without falling asleep. Could it be that the textbooks are badly written? I can spend days and weeks writing an essay on something that interests me, but i fucking hated writing 3 paragraph short essays in school. Could it be the topics, the format and especially the time constrain made me write badly? If school taught me anything is that unless im working for myself on what i want, its better to just half ass everything, and not do your best, because all it takes is to not be your worst. It probably made me even less disciplined because my natural rebelliousness made me pride myself as an undisciplined misfit. I was proud of being lazy, stupid, stubborn, rebellious and all of that precisely because they wanted me to not be like that. Fuck school. It messed me up, and caused me great suffering with very little benefit, when at least in my case, there was a clearly better way of doing things.

yason 16y ago
If school taught me anything is that unless im working for myself on what i want, its better to just half ass everything, and not do your best, because all it takes is to not be your worst This is so true. I realized this very thing myself in the second year in high school. I thought: what the hell am I doing trying to get good grades—from every subject? I had been doing precisely that just because I could and with the eerie awareness of the fact that I would forget 95% of anything deemed uninteresting right after the course. When it came to subjects tangential to my interests, I realized that I was certainly not going to learn something in school that I couldn't learn by myself. If I ever needed to cross check which European country invaded which other European country in the 1600's, how to translate "dear girl, I want to marry you for the rest of my life" to German should the opportunity arrive, or desperately need to exercise in some molecular calculations, then I was convinced that I would still have the chance to learn that stuff. Except for the subjects of my interest, I then dropped all my effort to the very, very minimal level and as a result my grades dropped slightly. It was probably the 20% of effort, 80% of results scheme in action. In some subjects that I had decided to completely ignore, like religion courses (yes, we had those in Finland...), I let my grades drop to the minimum that was required to avoid flunking and was actually pretty proud of that result. I graduated with good grades in everything I cared about. My high school diploma then exhibited real value for the period of a mere month until it claimed its purpose and I got accepted to the university. I've never needed it after that. And, by the way, except for mathematics, 99% of what I learned in high school I have never ever needed since. I'm 32 now and I'm glad my teenage realization turned out to be correct.

lionhearted 16y ago

"There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all." -Peter Drucker

tome 16y ago

Can't you do that for much less money in the military?

Vivtek 16y ago

I think all our children should be sent to retraining camps and made to work fifteen-hour days assembling electronics. That will create true grit and allow them to value whatever small rewards later life will give them. I get your larger point, that a sour-grapes excuse of "Well, school was booooring" doesn't necessarily indicate a successful individual - but just because losers also hate the system doesn't mean the system actually works for any real purpose.

mkramlich 16y ago
I hear China is nice this time of year...

yummyfajitas 16y ago

how many friends do you know who say "oh i'm so much smarter than all these tools who got good grades" but then they can never actually finish any one of their 'divinely-inspired' projects because they quit as soon as some part gets tedious or boring? There certainly are lazy people claiming to be smarter than those with good grades. But in my experience, the students with perfect grades are far more likely to excel at school than at anything else. When I started teaching at NYU, I ran into a lot of these students. They typically rocked my calculus 1-2 classes; they took calculus in high school but wanted to maintain a 4.0 GPA so they took it again in college. Even in school, past a certain point, it doesn't serve them well. In Calc 3 or Linear Algebra (two more advanced classes I've taught), you must think for yourself to pass, rather than just applying the differentiation algorithm. That's when the 4.0's get pwned. It gets even worse when I interview them for a job and ask them an open ended question: "Looking at XXX data, how can you estimate YYY? What other data would be useful?" Many of them are reasonably smart. But they've spent years preparing themselves for schooling, not for actually building things. I'll take the kid with lower grades + open source project any day .

mkr-hn 16y ago
I don't know if it's this way at every level, but the one quarter of an MSNA (I think that's the acronym) prep course I had to take in tech school was chapter after chapter of lists of steps. If that's the way the other three quarters are, I don't know how a Windows administrator fresh out of school could handle an unexpected situation. "Go through these menus to achieve x" won't help you when some joker breaks explorer and forces you to work with the command line. Either way, I'm glad I went the Linux admin route. The instructor for the classes was about as quirky as you'd expect a Linux admin teacher to be, and all four quarters were a load of fun. If any of my grade school classes had been like that, I wouldn't have hated it so much.

DavidSJ 16y ago

Translation: life sucks, better teach that to kids early. Life doesn't suck, and we shouldn't deliberately make the lives of children boring and tedious.

DennisP 16y ago

I didn't learn grit from school. I learned that life is pretty easy, and I could do well with very little effort. Unlearning that lesson in the real world is how I learned grit.

eru 16y ago

School may teach some people grit and discipline. But for some people it's just too easy and boring, and they can just coast through. So it doesn't even teach grit and discipline to them.