5 ms·

Look at reward signals. Elementary through high school is a little sliver of what a collapsed marxist society looks like - no positive rewards signals just neg

• EliRivers 9y ago
  I was programming at 8 but apparently to be "well rounded" I had to do all this other stuff I think restricting education from the age of 8 onwards based on what a given 8-year-old likes at that point is just asking for trouble.
  • adamnemecek 9y ago
    Not what OP said. You can totally give them freedom while providing some guidance. Instead of siting in class, let them read things they are interested in.
    • barsonme 9y ago
      When I was 8 I'd have only read books on dinosaurs, baseball, and the Legend of Zelda. It took me until halfway or more through college to realize I really liked programming, way more than I did my other majors I'd invested considerable time and money in (medicine, politics). Kids, especially 8-year-olds, need a lot of guidance and need to learn the fundamentals. I'm very glad my parents and teachers worked hard to make me learn things I had no intention of learning, like math.
      • adamnemecek 9y ago
        Perfect! Now design the math curriculum so that it steers you towards game development (this would be individual) and you have a good educational system.
        • yoz-y 9y ago
          How would you determine which kid to steer towards what? Nobody will like all of the fundamentals but that is just how things are. For me the biggest determinant factor for whether I liked a subject or not was the quality of the teacher. However "make teachers better at teaching" is not really a scalable solution.
          • adamnemecek 9y ago
            They pick themselves? You don’t really need teachers.
            • yoz-y 9y ago
              I believe that much of the unemployment problem for people with higher education diplomas is because people have to choose their career around 14-18 years old and fail to do the right choice. I do not think that pushing this to an earlier age is a good idea. I have also worked with people who came from the modern "sans-teachers" schools. They were terrible. My impression is that such education reinforces pre-concieved notions of the students, and if they are bad they will just turn worse.
              • adamnemecek 9y ago
                > I believe that much of the unemployment problem for people with higher education diplomas is because people have to choose their career around 14-18 years old and fail to do the right choice. ...and also the fact that school is very inefficient. Like out of each 45 minute block, I would say that only like maybe 20 minutes is spent productively. Like I think that during one school day, you waste over 50% of the time. > I have also worked with people who came from the modern "sans-teachers" schools. They were terrible. The same can be said about people who came from with-teachers school.
    • l9k 9y ago
      Let them read things they are interested in? Yes But kids don't know much about the world. Their interests will change. They need to be introduced to many (basic) subjects even if they fail to see the long-term benefits of the tools they learn.
      • adamnemecek 9y ago
        The alternative is ineffectively shoving shit down their throat?
        • j2bax 9y ago
          I'd say its more of a broad taste-test of various shit varieties. From my recollection, grade school didn't go too deep on any one subject.
• andrepd 9y ago
  > I was programming at 8 but apparently to be "well rounded" Well so was I (Turbo Pascal on DOS ftw), and thanks god responsible adults didn't let me sit in front of the PC all day, and made me learn languages, history, literature, philosophy, mathematics, science, etc. I'm also straining to see how the adjective "Marxist" found its way on your rant. I fail to see the applicability.
  • whataretensors 9y ago
    In regards to reward signals it seems similar when collapsed. No ownership. No way to succeed through creativity. No way to escape a degraded too-large-to-fail system. Maybe there's a better word for it?
    • mercer 9y ago
      Hyperbole? Incoherence?
    • boomboomsubban 9y ago
      >No ownership. No way to succeed through creativity. No way to escape a degraded too-large-to-fail system Sounds like the kind of soul crushing job school is preparing most children for.
      • probablymaybe 9y ago
        High school did a great job of preparing me to work in an office. I had four bosses who all insisted that their pointless busywork was the most important, and they all demanded that I complete said work with no outside resources on an unrealistic schedule.
  • nickysielicki 9y ago
    I think it's far more likely that your interest in language, history, philosophy, mathematics, science, etc., stem from the same intellect, motivation, and curiosity that also lead you to program at a young age. Famous Renaissance polymaths did not go through compulsory Prussian-style liberal arts education systems, yet they contributed massively to multiple fields that had relatively little overlap. Were they just exceptionally exceptional; moreso than any exceptionally intelligent and curious person born today? I've met plenty of one-dimensional people who have gone through a liberal arts education. More importantly, I rarely meet a "well-rounded" person who honestly attributes their entire base of knowledge to their education. At most, they'll say that they were first exposed to the idea through a course, but any sort of depth in any topic comes from intrinsically-motivated learning. That type of learning is undoubtedly held back when you make kids do stupid mind-numbing busy work at the pace of the lowest common denominator for 7 hours a day, 5 days a week, 9 months out of the year, 12 years straight. Did you go to private or public schooling?
• vanderZwan 9y ago
  > Elementary through high school is a little sliver of what a collapsed marxist society looks like Wait, what? How the heck does Marx come into this? Do you have any idea what the history of education is? Assembly-line education is a product of the Prussian military, Marx has nothing to do with that.
  • joshuamcginnis 9y ago
    I don't want to speak for OP, but I think his point in referencing Marx is that our education system revolves around the collective and that the values and needs of the individual have been lost.
    • vanderZwan 9y ago
      Well then the educational system certainly has failed OP when it comes to history lessons.
    • dragonwriter 9y ago
      It's stupid to reference Marx in that context; institutions focussed on common centralized interest predate Marx by approximately the entire age of civilization on Earth.
      • padobson 9y ago
        But neo-Marxist class warfare (most commonly referred to as identity politics in the zeitgeist) is absolutely about diminishing the value of the individual in favor of elevating historically oppressed groups. Better to recognize that subjection to evil and suffering are universal, and the best way to combat them is through individual growth and responsibility - something modern education is severely lacking.
        • dragonwriter 9y ago
          > neo-Marxist class warfare (most commonly referred to as identity politics in the zeitgeist) Identity politics is basically a distraction (sometimes intentional, sometimes not) from development of proletarian class identity, a prerequisite for Marxist (neo- or otherwise) class warfare. Now, it is clearly, when engaged in by the pro-capitalist neoliberal wing of the Democratic Party (and, also, in the White/Christian identity politics form frequently practiced by the Republican Party, though the people practicing that often rail against identity politics and would never acknowledge engaging in it), an element of class warfare, but by the bourgeoisie against the proletariat; that's more anti-Marxist than neo-Marxist, though, so it still doesn't jibe with your description.
• JamesLeonis 9y ago
  I'll bite. The Western paradigm of education has nothing to do with Marxism and everything to do with Industrialization. Education is an industrial process that mass produces a literate workforce. In the US, our Industrial Education takes raw materials (uneducated kids), refines them on an assembly line (K-12) by a workforce (teachers), bound to various Quality Assurance processes (SATs, ACTs, etc) that affect their pay, supervised by a central management bureaucracy (the school board) that results in a yearly harvest (Graduation) of brand new workers. This supply of undifferentiated but educated laborers met the demands of manufacturing. inb4 Education is failing blah, blah, blah... Previously the large amount of manufacturing demanded a large homogenized manual workforce. As manufacturing moved elsewhere, the market demand for this labor diminished. Like any other large corporation, Industrialized Education is going through a slow decline as demand continues to drop off for it's primary product. As this general market declines, the market for specialized and refined labor increased. Higher Education is the industrialized refinement for specialization. The end result is a specialized worker commodity. The Industrialization metaphor is even stronger as many of these universities are actual corporations competing to deliver a product for their markets. > I was programming at 8 but apparently to be "well rounded" I had to do all this other stuff that non-coders deemed important. That's because you were a raw commodity being transformed into a finished product. You don't ask a car whether it wants to be red. Management didn't ask if you wanted to be well-rounded. To put it more generally, this is the experience of a sapient being in the process of commodification. > Forcing all the kids into assembly lines and scalping their autonomy is breaking people. It's taking away their ability to think. That's the whole point. It's refining a raw product into a finished good.
  • fsloth 9y ago
    That's one cynical tour de force of western education in nutshell. Well done sir. Perhaps - the whole truth is a bit more nuanced? Could it be, that the tenents of professional management have seeped through society because people believe they must know what they are doing since they are professionals. Leading to overgrowth of industrial processes. Thus it is not the intent of the system design but merely the end result of looking it through the industrialists cold calculating lense (i.e. professional management) and using their toolkit? If all you have is a hammer -, etc.
• lisper 9y ago
  > every company doesn't know the exact amount of money they will make this year, but every employee has a good idea Do I understand you correctly that you consider this to be Marxism? It's not. It's the free market re-allocating risk and reward. Maybe you should consider the possibility that there are worthwhile things to be learned in disciplines other than programming. You should maybe ask yourself: if your scam detector is producing false positives, how would you know?
• fsloth 9y ago
  Respectively - merely coding is not very value adding. Knowing what to code, and why, and how, are. That well rounding is trying to set you up for success. "Just coding" does provide capital sustenance but does not enable one alone to develop into the best version of themselves. Also - knowing stuff that you don't like is still knowing stuff. Some people are natural autodidacts, but the school system does not start from the root constraint that everyone can learn by themselves.
• dang 9y ago
  Just the word Marxist is flamebait enough to make the downstream discussion about that. Could you please be more careful about not dropping lit matches in HN comments? We're all responsible for not setting this place on fire. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html