12 ms·

If you're a kid and do the cost/benefit analysis, going to school looks like a dumb decision and a huge opportunity cost for time that could otherwise be used f

by oddity 7y ago

If you're a kid and do the cost/benefit analysis, going to school looks like a dumb decision and a huge opportunity cost for time that could otherwise be used for things with known reward (playing). Bullying, exams, homework, sleep disruption, etc is all cost. What does the student believe they get they out of it? The pathway from school to job is nebulous to young kids who don't yet need money to live. As kids get older and gain knowledge but not respect or autonomy, the school to job pathway looks more and more arbitrary and unnecessary (the common question of "But when am I actually going to use this?" I remember hearing often in school). Maybe there's the benefit of finding friends, but now they have the internet from a young age, and I think the social justification has evaporated. Why bother forming friend circles with people you must talk to, when you can find friend circles from a larger pool with people you want to talk to? For many (most?) kids, it doesn't seem like they, individually, have a reason to go to school. Instead, their parents have a reason and the kids' only reason is to not anger their parents.

dblohm7 7y ago
Your post accurately describes how I felt from grades 4 through 12. The only thing that got me through it was knowing that the better I did, the farther away I could get from it. Even then, I spent my final year gaming the system to earn the highest grades from the least amount of work.
- anon9001 7y ago
  I've been out of school for over a decade and I'm still gaming the system to earn the highest for the least amount of work. Pretty excited for retirement tho...
S3an12 7y ago
But why did Japan's snap first? North American (NA) schools have bullying, exams, homework, and sleep disruption but our system is still relatively intact. Children aren't much happier here either. Teen depression and teen suicide is rising at a rapid pace as well. The first reason that comes to mind is that there is less of a stigma of leaving these public schools in Japan than in NA. It seems such a common occurrence that everyone has just accepted it. Here everyone is so anti non-traditional that even home-schooling is seen as an archaic form of education.
- whatshisface 7y ago
  Japan also has several decades worth of a stagnant economy in order to instill a sense of financial nihilism in its culture that doesn't exist yet in America.
  - austhrow743 7y ago
    Also salaryman culture. I could see the whole "do it to get a job" thing being not only largely ineffective, but achieve the opposite effect. When the person with a job that you know is a depressed alcohol who never has time for fun, why would becoming that be motivating?
- oddity 7y ago
  A good question. My best guess is that NA school systems are much less taxing than Japan's, and Japan's long history of economic stagnation has clamped down on the benefit equation even for those who do buy in to the school = job argument. I hadn't thought of the reason you gave, and I'm sure there's more here that I don't understand about Japan's culture. My comment was primarily in response to the article talking a lot about why kids don't want to go to school, but not why they would want to go to school. imo, you could reduce the cost of school as much as you'd like and it would still be hard to get kids to learn unless you've convinced them to want to learn.
- skokage 7y ago
  >North American (NA) schools have bullying, exams, homework, and sleep disruption but our system is still relatively intact. My impression from living here in Japan for a bit over a year, and having friends with children in the Japanese school system, is that Japanese students have way more pressure put on them. Kids spend way longer each day out of the house; Study sessions before school, stronger peer pressure to assimilate and not stick out, more after school activities, more homework to do in the evenings, school six days a week. Also keep in mind that the middle school you get into will have a huge effect on which high school you get to attend, which has a very strong influence on which college you get into, and thus effect your pipeline into the best companies. The pressure to succeed starts way younger than it does in the US, and not getting into the primary school of choice can ruin your chances for success later on in adult hood. A couple of anecdotal stories I've seen during my time here; Bullying here seems to be much more pronounced, and given the cultural hesitation to involve yourself in other's affairs, often goes unchecked. I've seen many instances of large groups of 10+ kids ganging up on a single kid on the streets, in full view of adults and even public safety volunteers, and no one will ever step in and tell the kids to stop. On another occasion I was outside of a combini having a drink, and near by a young girl (maybe 8 years old or so), was crying trying to do her homework. The mother was nearby and when she would write down answers that were wrong, the mother would scream at the child and call her stupid, which would cause the child to cry harder (but still trying to complete her work), and the entire thing just kind of created this negative feedback loop - child would cry harder and probably do worse on the work, which would anger the mother and make the screaming more intense, which caused the crying to become more intense. It was a really depressing and disturbing thing to witness, especially given the young age of the child. I know bullying exists in the west (myself being a victim of some pretty intense bullying as a child), and there is strong pressure to do well in high school to get into the best colleges as well, but from what I've seen in Japan it seems to be much more pronounced. At least in the west most times an adult will step in to stop bullying when it's seen, but here it seems no one cares or will do anything to stop it.
satori99 7y ago
> "But when am I actually going to use this?" I was as guilty of this as anyone in my school days, and yet not a single teacher ever pointed out to me that I was at school to learn how to learn, so in a sense the subject matter was irrelevant.
- abecedarius 7y ago
  > to learn how to learn Is spaced repetition still almost never taught in school?
- barry-cotter 7y ago
  That means school was irrelevant. The evidence for transfer of learning is weak to the point of non-existence[1]. Even if transfer learning did exist that’s not the reason for school that any substantial portion of people believe in. If we look at the institutional history of school teaching nationalism is a much easier sell as to the purpose of school. [1] “Besides just plain forgetting, people commonly fail to marshal what they know effectively in situations outside the classroom or in other classes in different disciplines. The bridge from school to beyond or from this subject to that other is a bridge too far.” “Salomon, Gavriel, and David Perkins. 1989. “Rocky Roads to Transfer: Rethinking Mechanism of a Neglected Phenomenon.” Educational Psychologist 24 (2): 113–42.
  - etaioinshrdlu 7y ago
    For those who don't know, transfer learning is a term from ML where you train a model on one task, then train it more on other tasks...
    - SamReidHughes 7y ago
      The keyword you’re looking for is “transfer of learning”, especially “far transfer.”
    - barry-cotter 7y ago
      Sorry, meant transfer of learning, edited. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transfer_of_learning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transfer_of_learning > Today, transfer of learning is usually described as the process and the effective extent to which past experiences (also referred to as the transfer source) affect learning and performance in a new situation (the transfer target).[2] However, there remains controversy as to how transfer of learning should be conceptualized and explained, what its prevalence is, what its relation is to learning in general, and whether it exists at all.[3]
glandium 7y ago
Add to that that according to polls, the most popular aspiration of a job for Japanese kids these days is... Youtuber.
- 9nGQluzmnq3M 7y ago
  I doubt Japan is the only country where that's the case, especially after the recent news about an 8-year-old raking in $26 million for toy reviews.
jolmg 7y ago
> Maybe there's the benefit of finding friends, but now they have the internet from a young age, and I think the social justification has evaporated. Why bother forming friend circles with people you must talk to, when you can find friend circles from a larger pool with people you want to talk to? I don't know... Aren't relationships with people you see face-to-face generally stronger than those with people you mainly interact with through the internet? I mean, here we are, and I can only remember like 3 usernames in this community. It's not like I'm friends with them either or anything. I think like 99% of us don't really know anybody else here. We use terms like OP and GP to refer to one another based on the positions of our comments... I haven't seen folks from any of my schools in a long time, but I think I do care more about them than about the strangers from this community that I've visited everyday for the last few years. Do others here have experience having somewhat deep relationships with people you've only interacted with online?
- the8472 7y ago
  It's easier to get to know people in smaller communities where their common communication channel also allows chitchat. E.g. hobbyist forums, game guilds
- sametmax 7y ago
  As a kid, it's very easy to make friends. You don't need school for that. Three of my child hood best friends were not in my schools. I sill visit one regularly, 20 years later. In fact, I'll argue that school distort the child ability to socialize, not improve it. Because it's an artificial setup were the crazy values and rules only exist and make sense in the school. And worst, adults sell you values and rules from the real world while you are stuck in this alternate dimension.
  - steve1977 7y ago
    And it's an arbitrary cohort of same-age kids. Whereas for example my friends in the neighborhood all were of different ages. Not very different, but still.
    - 7y ago
AmericanChopper 7y ago
The problems described in this article seem to relate to the rigidity of Japanese culture more than anything else. You’d be wandering into pretty fringe territory if you were to question that value of compulsory education in general. Children are immature and cannot be relied upon to make responsible decisions, which is why they have legal custodians up to a certain age. Any particular education system will have its own set of problems though, like the ones discussed in this article. > Why bother forming friend circles with people you must talk to, when you can find friend circles from a larger pool with people you want to talk to? Because this is how the real world works. Being able to get along well with people you didn’t select, or perhaps don’t even like very much, is an essential part of a functional society. Perhaps children aren’t likely to understand this, but shielding them from exposure to it isn’t really setting them up for success later in life.
EGreg 7y ago
That’s because school is just a glorified daycare for parents who both work for corporations. The school in turn trains kids to work for corporations someday — and in the meantime stay out of trouble until the parents can finish their workday. Many schools are unable to teach kids anything and try to just contain the troublemakers long enough for their parents to pick them up.
- watwut 7y ago
  In Japan, mothers are expected to stay at home and their careers are pretty much impossible after kids are born. American school system does not exactly make it super easy for working parents either. I know schools that basically assume that one parent works part time maximum.
cheez 7y ago
I'm a parent and I think school is a dumb decision and a huge opportunity cost. So I spend a lot of time and money to find a school environment that gives them more than I can alone. If at some point I can no longer afford it, I would homeschool.
- plutonorm 7y ago
  I would love to do this for my kids, but it's just not possible due to location and cost. I'm in the UK and there are a couple of free school like establishments and that's it. And they are really expensive. For kids like me school was an utter waste of time, with such a strong drive to learn, and an independent streak a mile wide... Let's just say it was a deeply unpleasant experience. Perhaps even traumatising. My two little ones seem to be cut from the same cloth, sensitive to noise and other kinds of stimulation, independent. It's a little too early to say as the oldest is only 4, but I think there might be problems ahead. Although Charlotte has her mum's competitive streak, so she might be ok. I'm worried for them, but I'm not sure there is much I can do but watch them closely and try to catch any problems really early.
  - cheez 7y ago
    The idea is to keep you trapped. Move.
sdrothrock 7y ago
> If you're a kid and do the cost/benefit analysis, going to school looks like a dumb decision and a huge opportunity cost for time that could otherwise be used for things with known reward (playing). Bullying, exams, homework, sleep disruption, etc is all cost. The benefit of going to school for kids in the US at least is that you get to move a year closer to getting out. A cost is that if you don't go, you get held back (and get the according social stigma). Another poster below asked > But why did Japan's snap first? I think one of the reasons here is perhaps that kids automatically advance through the public schools system for the first nine grades regardless of whether they actually attend school or not. So people can stay even with their friend groups. I've known/worked with a few kids who didn't go to school, and while some of them had personal issues of some kind or another, others simply just didn't see any cost to not going to school and hung out with their friends when their friends were out of school and otherwise enjoyed life. Another difference, I think, is that with bullying in US schools, you can usually escape it to a certain extent through different classes/activities, but in Japanese schools, you tend to stay with your homeroom class for every subject, so there's no chance to get away/make a different friend group except for club activities and the next academic year.
- loopz 7y ago
  Very very few people are sociopaths (~2%), but these strong people mirror and magnify what they've been exposed to at home or in peer groups. Often the problem is really with some parents and sometimes a particular teacher, misbehaving and not being corrected. When do adults correct eachother? Exactly! And of course the "glad that's not my child being treated that way..." And why not? The culture is about microaggression. Eventually, your peers become competition. A competition to break down the environment as hard and fast as time permits, and then wonder why nothing changes.. If this reflects company culture, the kids will need to learn to survive, either by skipping school legally, or learning to survive and maybe become a bit psychopathic themselves. Just to be a little ahead of the system. Those skipping school are those who could turn the situation around, if not orchastrized by the community, the teachers and closest family. It is sort of a culture strangling itself. You get what you deserve in the end. So look people in the eye and get to know them, even if they're a bit strange looking, they're much more fun to be with in the longer run. That other reward will still be dangling there, teasingly. I appreciate the efforts put in HN and the people who make this a platform for eachother. Such platforms people can stand on and make a difference.
sametmax 7y ago
+1. Even as an adult, If I could do it all again, I would avoid school as much as possible. School is an upgrade from child labor, but I now have enough experience to know it's a downgrade from what I can learn of my own. Not saying every kid should do the same of course. But personnally, after being in 11 schools, including fancy private ones and ones in poor neighbourhoods, I found extremly few decent teachers, a very violent and boring environment, and a culture that killed the best things in young minds while promoting unfairness. And while I was often top of my class, I didn't learn much. Took me 3 months to learn to read, a bit more to write and count, and after that, everything was just more fun to learn alone than in the depressive and repressive jail of school. Also, I don't miss having to fight for social acceptance, the bullying, the stress and pressure nor the hypocrisy of the ones in charge. All at an age I didn't have yet the skill and knowldge to deal with it.
- newnewpdro 7y ago
  Couldn't have said it better myself Something you didn't mention though which always drove me crazy with school was how often it robbed me of the discovery and exploration portions of the learning experience. Those portions form the substance of life, for me anyways, and every time a teacher would explain things I was on the cusp of understanding on my own anyways it drove me absolutely nuts. Like someone telling you the spoilers to a book or movie you're deeply engaged in. And when I had already understood concepts the curriculum hadn't yet reached, and had my own perfectly correct and effective methods which happened to differ from whatever they taught when we arrived there, I'd be in trouble for using my familiar and preferred methods. Despite the fact that I actually had a deeper understanding of the problem than someone only having memorized whatever method was being taught, since it was something I had actually encountered in life and figured out independently. This happened so many times in math classes, my teachers started accusing me of cheating on tests because I would ace them while not doing any of the homework. Later on after switching to a non-religious school it became even worse, because we were rehashing stuff all over again like it was a year behind my previous school. If I had to do it all again I'd have fought harder against school and religion from an earlier age, it was all an awful tar-pit that burned so much time and caused a lot of suffering.
steve1977 7y ago
Add to the opportunity cost that you often actually learn pretty much nothing in school.
dkersten 7y ago
> Maybe there's the benefit of finding friends Maybe at the time it was beneficial, but I didn’t stay friends with anybody I was friends with in school for long after leaving school and now I’m not in contact with any of my school friends. When I was a child, I was friends with people based on proximity (eg we were in the same class therefore we were friends), but nowadays I choose my friends based on shared ideals or passions. I also found a many (not all) of my school friends ended up being incredibly mentally draining unambitious people and that hanging out with them held me back from my own ambitions and values and they ended up being quite negative relationships. Life is too short to deal with that so now I choose friends who enable me to be who I want instead of holding me back and I try to be a positive enabler to my friends in return. > when you can find friend circles from a larger pool with people you want to talk to? Exactly this.
jesusthatsgreat 7y ago
Not angering parents should be reason enough to go to school. If they don't like school, they can get to like it. That would be my philosophy. Certain decisions parents make for the benefit of their kids even if the kids don't like it or initially agree with it. All you need to do is turn off the electricity and remove all toys & food from the house. Then tell the kid that this is what life would be like if mommy & daddy didn't go to work. Everyone would be hungry, cold, there'd be no entertainment and this is what will happen you when you're older if you don't go to school. Because in order to find work you need to learn skills.
- kmlx 7y ago
  somehow you're conflating school with work. school has absolutely nothing to do with work. at least in my native country school is there for the teachers not to strike and vote for the other guys. over there a kid spends more time at school than a parent at work. and this is by design. so while knowledge is required for work, schools providing that knowledge is by no means a universal concept.
sanmon3186 7y ago
> Bullying, exams, homework, sleep disruption, etc is all cost. Aren't these fact of adult life too, that children need to learn?
- DreamScatter 7y ago
  You are proposing that children should learn to accept bullying and sleep deprivation because adults experience it. This would create a perpetual cycle of each generation passing on the bullying and sleep deprivation to the next. That vicius cycle exists, but it is not necessarily the only possible life cycle.
swiley 7y ago
I thought when I got older I’d look back at homeschool and think it was a mistake. The older I get and the more I hear about public school the more I’m convinced my parents knew what they were doing.
jpalomaki 7y ago
Maybe school for kids should not be so serious business, like: ”Many schools in Japan control every aspect of their pupils' appearance, forcing pupils to dye their brown hair black, or not allowing pupils to wear tights or coats, even in cold weather. In some cases they even decide on the colour of pupils' underwear.” Why not just keep it fun? More playing, less homework.
- claudeganon 7y ago
  Social order in modern Japan is ruthlessly maintained through group pressure, extreme enforcement of hierarchy, and deference to various forms of authority. While many will try to tell you in some Orientalist fiction that this is inherent to the Japanese people, it’s actually more the byproduct of the postwar, American-designed order that rehabilitated the former fascists as a “conservative” parliamentary party and invested them with near unilateral power (including over schooling). Prior to this period and through various forms of popular resistance (up until about the 1970s), Japan was a hotbed of radicalism, producing some of the greatest artists and thinkers about the problems of modernity.
  - Pigo 7y ago
    There are other Oriental countries with a similar focus on putting the group before the individual. America has had a lot of influence on a lot of places, and certainly not all for the best, but how could America have influenced a place into a behaving a way that is completely foreign to America?
    - claudeganon 7y ago
      Group vs. individual biases are culturally and historically determined, but the politics or ideology they manifest in modernity are not. Anarchism, socialism, and communism all had mass appeal in prewar Japan and the Japanese Communist Party (JCP) was a powerful political force in the early postwar period, being one of the few groups that rightfully opposed the fascist war that led to so much death and devastation. So powerful in fact was the JCP, that the American occupation force used the threat of its rising power to coerce the defeated fascists into alliance with them and constitute what is now know as the Liberal Democratic Party. From here, it was a mere matter of providing them with massive subsidies and intelligence gathered on their opponents on the left- https://www.nytimes.com/1994/10/09/world/cia-spent-millions-to-support-japanese-right-in-50-s-and-60-s.html https://www.nytimes.com/1994/10/09/world/cia-spent-millions-... -and use the resulting power to produce a social, political, and economic order that was conducive to US interests. I’m not certain what you’re getting at with regard to being “foreign” to American ideology, but authoritarianism is certainly not, if evidenced only by its long history and support of right-wing, authoritarian regimes.
brightball 7y ago
What you’re describing is the main driver for people pushing more innovation in school structure.
VLM 7y ago
"The pathway from school to job is nebulous to" everyone, now a days. This has been decoupling in western civ over the last couple generations. People, including kids, will put up with all kinds of ridiculous behaviors and treatment for a long term reward. Slowly take away the reward over a couple generations and people WILL stop responding in a Pavlovian fashion and the game is over. The kids are right. In the old days abusive school system lead to a materially successful career. But with an economy holding more people than productive jobs, why put up with the abuse if you're not going to get anything out of it anyway? In the old days, hazing led to automatic full membership in the cool kids club. Not any more. Unsurprisingly, hazing isn't too popular anymore other than some vague traditional "when I was a kid they abused me too" sense.
danfang 7y ago
The community here on HN seems to have a very negative opinion of school. PG seems to talk about it quite frequently. Here's a different viewpoint. I personally really enjoyed school. I enjoyed the social structure of school. I wasn't popular by any means, but I had my group of nerdy, academic friends who shared a passion for learning and building things. Learning how to deal with social conflicts, when they inevitably arose, turned out to be super useful. It was interesting just to observe all the different types of people. I learned a lot about myself by learning about others. The relationships I made through school are much stronger than ones made later on. Maybe it's that I found like-minded people early on. But being put in a high-stress environment and going through shared struggles brought us closer together. I also enjoyed the academic structure of school. It exposed me to a breadth of knowledge that I know I wouldn't have explored otherwise. I found it to be a great stepping stone to learn more on my own. FWIW I went to a public school with decent academic rigor. I had mostly good teachers, a few great, and a few bad. Maybe my experience was "lucky" compared to most others here?
- malvosenior 7y ago
  > Maybe my experience was "lucky" compared to most others here? I can't speak for anyone else, but this is definitely the polar opposite of the experience I had. School was a huge opportunity cost for me. When I think about the skills that make me successful today, 90% of them were self taught or I picked them up in the industry (programming, sales, marketing, management). I was always a prolific reader and learned so much more in my independent studies during my school years than through the education system. Socially, it was even more dire. I was fairly popular, but I've since had to cut off contact with everyone I went to school with. A lot of them are toxic but most are just very different from me in a way that doesn't make sense for them to be part of my life. People I've met through shared interests are the ones that become a part of my life in a significant way. For me, school was a prison like environment that I'd wish on no one. I'm really happy to see students standing and questioning the fundamental necessity of our antiquated school system. 12 years is a lot of time to waste and I'm excited to see a shift toward actually taking advantage of that time instead of just "keeping kids off the streets" and "training cogs".
- watwut 7y ago
Spooky23 7y ago
I definitely had some times in school that were less than ideal socially, especially after my family moved to an entirely new place. My family moved from NYC to a small rural town, and adjusting to a new way of life was interesting. I didn't help that I had a thick accent and hardly anyone could understand wth I was saying! But overall, for me, school wasn't so bad at all, and I look back fondly at my experience. Perhaps I'm a duller knife than the others in this thread, but high school in particular was incredibly useful for me. I enjoyed it. In my life, I've found self-learning works for specific tasks, but I find it difficult to self-learn for general educational purposes or without a specific goal. In high school, I found my voice from a writing perspective, discovered drama, and a dozen other things. Looking back on my career, the experience of doing literary analysis in American Literature (Grade 11) or writing long-form essays based on primary sources in a limited time-box for AP History, or speaking in front of a crowd (Drama Grades 10-12) and getting over my shyness was arguably more valuable for me than the specific domain knowledge that I studied in college.
ThrowawayR2 7y ago
> "As kids get older and gain knowledge but not respect or autonomy, the school to job pathway looks more and more arbitrary and unnecessary (the common question of "But when am I actually going to use this?" I remember hearing often in school)." SMBC has the answer to this: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/why-i-couldn39t-be-a-math-teacher https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/why-i-couldn39t-be-a-math-... Sounds like very pointed snark but IMO it isn't, just a basic truth. The average population may not ever need to use what they learned but the percentage of people who go on to STEM and other professional careers are "going to use this" and that's enough to make it worthwhile.
sytelus 7y ago
I would not recommend home schooling unless you are trained, certified and experienced as teacher. For one thing, kids will miss out on social interactions that I feel are the 50% of the learning experience. When you have 20 kids class you start to develop notions of how different people are, how they think, behave and share. Learning to deal with all these is major part of the school system. Other important thing is how to teach. On surface it might feel trivial to teach division to 7 years old but in reality different kids understand in different ways. An experienced teacher has came in contact with all idiosyncrasies and knows different approaches to make student successful. Person doing something professionally all day long is often way ahead of the game than parents who are busy doing chores or make a leaving.
- rusabd 7y ago
  Are you a professional educator? Because you sound like one. Teaching 7 years old divisions is the simplest thing ever. I've done it in the car driving to hockey practice using sharing scenarios. You just need to know what kids interested in and the parents know that the best.
eeZah7Ux 7y ago
> If you're a kid and do the cost/benefit analysis Either you are a kid or you think like an emotionless automaton. No, people are way more complex that a "cost/benefit analysis"

by oddity 7y ago

dblohm7 7y ago

Your post accurately describes how I felt from grades 4 through 12. The only thing that got me through it was knowing that the better I did, the farther away I could get from it. Even then, I spent my final year gaming the system to earn the highest grades from the least amount of work.

anon9001 7y ago
I've been out of school for over a decade and I'm still gaming the system to earn the highest for the least amount of work. Pretty excited for retirement tho...

S3an12 7y ago

But why did Japan's snap first? North American (NA) schools have bullying, exams, homework, and sleep disruption but our system is still relatively intact. Children aren't much happier here either. Teen depression and teen suicide is rising at a rapid pace as well. The first reason that comes to mind is that there is less of a stigma of leaving these public schools in Japan than in NA. It seems such a common occurrence that everyone has just accepted it. Here everyone is so anti non-traditional that even home-schooling is seen as an archaic form of education.

whatshisface 7y ago
Japan also has several decades worth of a stagnant economy in order to instill a sense of financial nihilism in its culture that doesn't exist yet in America.
- austhrow743 7y ago
  Also salaryman culture. I could see the whole "do it to get a job" thing being not only largely ineffective, but achieve the opposite effect. When the person with a job that you know is a depressed alcohol who never has time for fun, why would becoming that be motivating?
oddity 7y ago
A good question. My best guess is that NA school systems are much less taxing than Japan's, and Japan's long history of economic stagnation has clamped down on the benefit equation even for those who do buy in to the school = job argument. I hadn't thought of the reason you gave, and I'm sure there's more here that I don't understand about Japan's culture. My comment was primarily in response to the article talking a lot about why kids don't want to go to school, but not why they would want to go to school. imo, you could reduce the cost of school as much as you'd like and it would still be hard to get kids to learn unless you've convinced them to want to learn.
skokage 7y ago
>North American (NA) schools have bullying, exams, homework, and sleep disruption but our system is still relatively intact. My impression from living here in Japan for a bit over a year, and having friends with children in the Japanese school system, is that Japanese students have way more pressure put on them. Kids spend way longer each day out of the house; Study sessions before school, stronger peer pressure to assimilate and not stick out, more after school activities, more homework to do in the evenings, school six days a week. Also keep in mind that the middle school you get into will have a huge effect on which high school you get to attend, which has a very strong influence on which college you get into, and thus effect your pipeline into the best companies. The pressure to succeed starts way younger than it does in the US, and not getting into the primary school of choice can ruin your chances for success later on in adult hood. A couple of anecdotal stories I've seen during my time here; Bullying here seems to be much more pronounced, and given the cultural hesitation to involve yourself in other's affairs, often goes unchecked. I've seen many instances of large groups of 10+ kids ganging up on a single kid on the streets, in full view of adults and even public safety volunteers, and no one will ever step in and tell the kids to stop. On another occasion I was outside of a combini having a drink, and near by a young girl (maybe 8 years old or so), was crying trying to do her homework. The mother was nearby and when she would write down answers that were wrong, the mother would scream at the child and call her stupid, which would cause the child to cry harder (but still trying to complete her work), and the entire thing just kind of created this negative feedback loop - child would cry harder and probably do worse on the work, which would anger the mother and make the screaming more intense, which caused the crying to become more intense. It was a really depressing and disturbing thing to witness, especially given the young age of the child. I know bullying exists in the west (myself being a victim of some pretty intense bullying as a child), and there is strong pressure to do well in high school to get into the best colleges as well, but from what I've seen in Japan it seems to be much more pronounced. At least in the west most times an adult will step in to stop bullying when it's seen, but here it seems no one cares or will do anything to stop it.

satori99 7y ago

> "But when am I actually going to use this?" I was as guilty of this as anyone in my school days, and yet not a single teacher ever pointed out to me that I was at school to learn how to learn, so in a sense the subject matter was irrelevant.

abecedarius 7y ago
> to learn how to learn Is spaced repetition still almost never taught in school?
barry-cotter 7y ago
That means school was irrelevant. The evidence for transfer of learning is weak to the point of non-existence[1]. Even if transfer learning did exist that’s not the reason for school that any substantial portion of people believe in. If we look at the institutional history of school teaching nationalism is a much easier sell as to the purpose of school. [1] “Besides just plain forgetting, people commonly fail to marshal what they know effectively in situations outside the classroom or in other classes in different disciplines. The bridge from school to beyond or from this subject to that other is a bridge too far.” “Salomon, Gavriel, and David Perkins. 1989. “Rocky Roads to Transfer: Rethinking Mechanism of a Neglected Phenomenon.” Educational Psychologist 24 (2): 113–42.
- etaioinshrdlu 7y ago
  For those who don't know, transfer learning is a term from ML where you train a model on one task, then train it more on other tasks...
  - SamReidHughes 7y ago
    The keyword you’re looking for is “transfer of learning”, especially “far transfer.”
  - barry-cotter 7y ago
    Sorry, meant transfer of learning, edited. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transfer_of_learning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transfer_of_learning > Today, transfer of learning is usually described as the process and the effective extent to which past experiences (also referred to as the transfer source) affect learning and performance in a new situation (the transfer target).[2] However, there remains controversy as to how transfer of learning should be conceptualized and explained, what its prevalence is, what its relation is to learning in general, and whether it exists at all.[3]

glandium 7y ago

Add to that that according to polls, the most popular aspiration of a job for Japanese kids these days is... Youtuber.

9nGQluzmnq3M 7y ago
I doubt Japan is the only country where that's the case, especially after the recent news about an 8-year-old raking in $26 million for toy reviews.

jolmg 7y ago

> Maybe there's the benefit of finding friends, but now they have the internet from a young age, and I think the social justification has evaporated. Why bother forming friend circles with people you must talk to, when you can find friend circles from a larger pool with people you want to talk to? I don't know... Aren't relationships with people you see face-to-face generally stronger than those with people you mainly interact with through the internet? I mean, here we are, and I can only remember like 3 usernames in this community. It's not like I'm friends with them either or anything. I think like 99% of us don't really know anybody else here. We use terms like OP and GP to refer to one another based on the positions of our comments... I haven't seen folks from any of my schools in a long time, but I think I do care more about them than about the strangers from this community that I've visited everyday for the last few years. Do others here have experience having somewhat deep relationships with people you've only interacted with online?

the8472 7y ago
It's easier to get to know people in smaller communities where their common communication channel also allows chitchat. E.g. hobbyist forums, game guilds
sametmax 7y ago
As a kid, it's very easy to make friends. You don't need school for that. Three of my child hood best friends were not in my schools. I sill visit one regularly, 20 years later. In fact, I'll argue that school distort the child ability to socialize, not improve it. Because it's an artificial setup were the crazy values and rules only exist and make sense in the school. And worst, adults sell you values and rules from the real world while you are stuck in this alternate dimension.
- steve1977 7y ago
  And it's an arbitrary cohort of same-age kids. Whereas for example my friends in the neighborhood all were of different ages. Not very different, but still.
  - 7y ago

AmericanChopper 7y ago

The problems described in this article seem to relate to the rigidity of Japanese culture more than anything else. You’d be wandering into pretty fringe territory if you were to question that value of compulsory education in general. Children are immature and cannot be relied upon to make responsible decisions, which is why they have legal custodians up to a certain age. Any particular education system will have its own set of problems though, like the ones discussed in this article. > Why bother forming friend circles with people you must talk to, when you can find friend circles from a larger pool with people you want to talk to? Because this is how the real world works. Being able to get along well with people you didn’t select, or perhaps don’t even like very much, is an essential part of a functional society. Perhaps children aren’t likely to understand this, but shielding them from exposure to it isn’t really setting them up for success later in life.

EGreg 7y ago

That’s because school is just a glorified daycare for parents who both work for corporations. The school in turn trains kids to work for corporations someday — and in the meantime stay out of trouble until the parents can finish their workday. Many schools are unable to teach kids anything and try to just contain the troublemakers long enough for their parents to pick them up.

watwut 7y ago
In Japan, mothers are expected to stay at home and their careers are pretty much impossible after kids are born. American school system does not exactly make it super easy for working parents either. I know schools that basically assume that one parent works part time maximum.

cheez 7y ago

I'm a parent and I think school is a dumb decision and a huge opportunity cost. So I spend a lot of time and money to find a school environment that gives them more than I can alone. If at some point I can no longer afford it, I would homeschool.

plutonorm 7y ago
I would love to do this for my kids, but it's just not possible due to location and cost. I'm in the UK and there are a couple of free school like establishments and that's it. And they are really expensive. For kids like me school was an utter waste of time, with such a strong drive to learn, and an independent streak a mile wide... Let's just say it was a deeply unpleasant experience. Perhaps even traumatising. My two little ones seem to be cut from the same cloth, sensitive to noise and other kinds of stimulation, independent. It's a little too early to say as the oldest is only 4, but I think there might be problems ahead. Although Charlotte has her mum's competitive streak, so she might be ok. I'm worried for them, but I'm not sure there is much I can do but watch them closely and try to catch any problems really early.
- cheez 7y ago
  The idea is to keep you trapped. Move.

sdrothrock 7y ago

> If you're a kid and do the cost/benefit analysis, going to school looks like a dumb decision and a huge opportunity cost for time that could otherwise be used for things with known reward (playing). Bullying, exams, homework, sleep disruption, etc is all cost. The benefit of going to school for kids in the US at least is that you get to move a year closer to getting out. A cost is that if you don't go, you get held back (and get the according social stigma). Another poster below asked > But why did Japan's snap first? I think one of the reasons here is perhaps that kids automatically advance through the public schools system for the first nine grades regardless of whether they actually attend school or not. So people can stay even with their friend groups. I've known/worked with a few kids who didn't go to school, and while some of them had personal issues of some kind or another, others simply just didn't see any cost to not going to school and hung out with their friends when their friends were out of school and otherwise enjoyed life. Another difference, I think, is that with bullying in US schools, you can usually escape it to a certain extent through different classes/activities, but in Japanese schools, you tend to stay with your homeroom class for every subject, so there's no chance to get away/make a different friend group except for club activities and the next academic year.

loopz 7y ago
Very very few people are sociopaths (~2%), but these strong people mirror and magnify what they've been exposed to at home or in peer groups. Often the problem is really with some parents and sometimes a particular teacher, misbehaving and not being corrected. When do adults correct eachother? Exactly! And of course the "glad that's not my child being treated that way..." And why not? The culture is about microaggression. Eventually, your peers become competition. A competition to break down the environment as hard and fast as time permits, and then wonder why nothing changes.. If this reflects company culture, the kids will need to learn to survive, either by skipping school legally, or learning to survive and maybe become a bit psychopathic themselves. Just to be a little ahead of the system. Those skipping school are those who could turn the situation around, if not orchastrized by the community, the teachers and closest family. It is sort of a culture strangling itself. You get what you deserve in the end. So look people in the eye and get to know them, even if they're a bit strange looking, they're much more fun to be with in the longer run. That other reward will still be dangling there, teasingly. I appreciate the efforts put in HN and the people who make this a platform for eachother. Such platforms people can stand on and make a difference.

sametmax 7y ago

+1. Even as an adult, If I could do it all again, I would avoid school as much as possible. School is an upgrade from child labor, but I now have enough experience to know it's a downgrade from what I can learn of my own. Not saying every kid should do the same of course. But personnally, after being in 11 schools, including fancy private ones and ones in poor neighbourhoods, I found extremly few decent teachers, a very violent and boring environment, and a culture that killed the best things in young minds while promoting unfairness. And while I was often top of my class, I didn't learn much. Took me 3 months to learn to read, a bit more to write and count, and after that, everything was just more fun to learn alone than in the depressive and repressive jail of school. Also, I don't miss having to fight for social acceptance, the bullying, the stress and pressure nor the hypocrisy of the ones in charge. All at an age I didn't have yet the skill and knowldge to deal with it.

newnewpdro 7y ago
Couldn't have said it better myself Something you didn't mention though which always drove me crazy with school was how often it robbed me of the discovery and exploration portions of the learning experience. Those portions form the substance of life, for me anyways, and every time a teacher would explain things I was on the cusp of understanding on my own anyways it drove me absolutely nuts. Like someone telling you the spoilers to a book or movie you're deeply engaged in. And when I had already understood concepts the curriculum hadn't yet reached, and had my own perfectly correct and effective methods which happened to differ from whatever they taught when we arrived there, I'd be in trouble for using my familiar and preferred methods. Despite the fact that I actually had a deeper understanding of the problem than someone only having memorized whatever method was being taught, since it was something I had actually encountered in life and figured out independently. This happened so many times in math classes, my teachers started accusing me of cheating on tests because I would ace them while not doing any of the homework. Later on after switching to a non-religious school it became even worse, because we were rehashing stuff all over again like it was a year behind my previous school. If I had to do it all again I'd have fought harder against school and religion from an earlier age, it was all an awful tar-pit that burned so much time and caused a lot of suffering.

steve1977 7y ago

Add to the opportunity cost that you often actually learn pretty much nothing in school.

dkersten 7y ago

> Maybe there's the benefit of finding friends Maybe at the time it was beneficial, but I didn’t stay friends with anybody I was friends with in school for long after leaving school and now I’m not in contact with any of my school friends. When I was a child, I was friends with people based on proximity (eg we were in the same class therefore we were friends), but nowadays I choose my friends based on shared ideals or passions. I also found a many (not all) of my school friends ended up being incredibly mentally draining unambitious people and that hanging out with them held me back from my own ambitions and values and they ended up being quite negative relationships. Life is too short to deal with that so now I choose friends who enable me to be who I want instead of holding me back and I try to be a positive enabler to my friends in return. > when you can find friend circles from a larger pool with people you want to talk to? Exactly this.

jesusthatsgreat 7y ago

Not angering parents should be reason enough to go to school. If they don't like school, they can get to like it. That would be my philosophy. Certain decisions parents make for the benefit of their kids even if the kids don't like it or initially agree with it. All you need to do is turn off the electricity and remove all toys & food from the house. Then tell the kid that this is what life would be like if mommy & daddy didn't go to work. Everyone would be hungry, cold, there'd be no entertainment and this is what will happen you when you're older if you don't go to school. Because in order to find work you need to learn skills.

kmlx 7y ago
somehow you're conflating school with work. school has absolutely nothing to do with work. at least in my native country school is there for the teachers not to strike and vote for the other guys. over there a kid spends more time at school than a parent at work. and this is by design. so while knowledge is required for work, schools providing that knowledge is by no means a universal concept.

sanmon3186 7y ago

> Bullying, exams, homework, sleep disruption, etc is all cost. Aren't these fact of adult life too, that children need to learn?

DreamScatter 7y ago
You are proposing that children should learn to accept bullying and sleep deprivation because adults experience it. This would create a perpetual cycle of each generation passing on the bullying and sleep deprivation to the next. That vicius cycle exists, but it is not necessarily the only possible life cycle.

swiley 7y ago

I thought when I got older I’d look back at homeschool and think it was a mistake. The older I get and the more I hear about public school the more I’m convinced my parents knew what they were doing.

jpalomaki 7y ago

Maybe school for kids should not be so serious business, like: ”Many schools in Japan control every aspect of their pupils' appearance, forcing pupils to dye their brown hair black, or not allowing pupils to wear tights or coats, even in cold weather. In some cases they even decide on the colour of pupils' underwear.” Why not just keep it fun? More playing, less homework.

claudeganon 7y ago
Social order in modern Japan is ruthlessly maintained through group pressure, extreme enforcement of hierarchy, and deference to various forms of authority. While many will try to tell you in some Orientalist fiction that this is inherent to the Japanese people, it’s actually more the byproduct of the postwar, American-designed order that rehabilitated the former fascists as a “conservative” parliamentary party and invested them with near unilateral power (including over schooling). Prior to this period and through various forms of popular resistance (up until about the 1970s), Japan was a hotbed of radicalism, producing some of the greatest artists and thinkers about the problems of modernity.
- Pigo 7y ago
  There are other Oriental countries with a similar focus on putting the group before the individual. America has had a lot of influence on a lot of places, and certainly not all for the best, but how could America have influenced a place into a behaving a way that is completely foreign to America?
  - claudeganon 7y ago
    Group vs. individual biases are culturally and historically determined, but the politics or ideology they manifest in modernity are not. Anarchism, socialism, and communism all had mass appeal in prewar Japan and the Japanese Communist Party (JCP) was a powerful political force in the early postwar period, being one of the few groups that rightfully opposed the fascist war that led to so much death and devastation. So powerful in fact was the JCP, that the American occupation force used the threat of its rising power to coerce the defeated fascists into alliance with them and constitute what is now know as the Liberal Democratic Party. From here, it was a mere matter of providing them with massive subsidies and intelligence gathered on their opponents on the left- https://www.nytimes.com/1994/10/09/world/cia-spent-millions-to-support-japanese-right-in-50-s-and-60-s.html https://www.nytimes.com/1994/10/09/world/cia-spent-millions-... -and use the resulting power to produce a social, political, and economic order that was conducive to US interests. I’m not certain what you’re getting at with regard to being “foreign” to American ideology, but authoritarianism is certainly not, if evidenced only by its long history and support of right-wing, authoritarian regimes.

brightball 7y ago

What you’re describing is the main driver for people pushing more innovation in school structure.

VLM 7y ago

"The pathway from school to job is nebulous to" everyone, now a days. This has been decoupling in western civ over the last couple generations. People, including kids, will put up with all kinds of ridiculous behaviors and treatment for a long term reward. Slowly take away the reward over a couple generations and people WILL stop responding in a Pavlovian fashion and the game is over. The kids are right. In the old days abusive school system lead to a materially successful career. But with an economy holding more people than productive jobs, why put up with the abuse if you're not going to get anything out of it anyway? In the old days, hazing led to automatic full membership in the cool kids club. Not any more. Unsurprisingly, hazing isn't too popular anymore other than some vague traditional "when I was a kid they abused me too" sense.

danfang 7y ago

The community here on HN seems to have a very negative opinion of school. PG seems to talk about it quite frequently. Here's a different viewpoint. I personally really enjoyed school. I enjoyed the social structure of school. I wasn't popular by any means, but I had my group of nerdy, academic friends who shared a passion for learning and building things. Learning how to deal with social conflicts, when they inevitably arose, turned out to be super useful. It was interesting just to observe all the different types of people. I learned a lot about myself by learning about others. The relationships I made through school are much stronger than ones made later on. Maybe it's that I found like-minded people early on. But being put in a high-stress environment and going through shared struggles brought us closer together. I also enjoyed the academic structure of school. It exposed me to a breadth of knowledge that I know I wouldn't have explored otherwise. I found it to be a great stepping stone to learn more on my own. FWIW I went to a public school with decent academic rigor. I had mostly good teachers, a few great, and a few bad. Maybe my experience was "lucky" compared to most others here?

malvosenior 7y ago
> Maybe my experience was "lucky" compared to most others here? I can't speak for anyone else, but this is definitely the polar opposite of the experience I had. School was a huge opportunity cost for me. When I think about the skills that make me successful today, 90% of them were self taught or I picked them up in the industry (programming, sales, marketing, management). I was always a prolific reader and learned so much more in my independent studies during my school years than through the education system. Socially, it was even more dire. I was fairly popular, but I've since had to cut off contact with everyone I went to school with. A lot of them are toxic but most are just very different from me in a way that doesn't make sense for them to be part of my life. People I've met through shared interests are the ones that become a part of my life in a significant way. For me, school was a prison like environment that I'd wish on no one. I'm really happy to see students standing and questioning the fundamental necessity of our antiquated school system. 12 years is a lot of time to waste and I'm excited to see a shift toward actually taking advantage of that time instead of just "keeping kids off the streets" and "training cogs".
watwut 7y ago

Spooky23 7y ago

I definitely had some times in school that were less than ideal socially, especially after my family moved to an entirely new place. My family moved from NYC to a small rural town, and adjusting to a new way of life was interesting. I didn't help that I had a thick accent and hardly anyone could understand wth I was saying! But overall, for me, school wasn't so bad at all, and I look back fondly at my experience. Perhaps I'm a duller knife than the others in this thread, but high school in particular was incredibly useful for me. I enjoyed it. In my life, I've found self-learning works for specific tasks, but I find it difficult to self-learn for general educational purposes or without a specific goal. In high school, I found my voice from a writing perspective, discovered drama, and a dozen other things. Looking back on my career, the experience of doing literary analysis in American Literature (Grade 11) or writing long-form essays based on primary sources in a limited time-box for AP History, or speaking in front of a crowd (Drama Grades 10-12) and getting over my shyness was arguably more valuable for me than the specific domain knowledge that I studied in college.

ThrowawayR2 7y ago

> "As kids get older and gain knowledge but not respect or autonomy, the school to job pathway looks more and more arbitrary and unnecessary (the common question of "But when am I actually going to use this?" I remember hearing often in school)." SMBC has the answer to this: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/why-i-couldn39t-be-a-math-teacher https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/why-i-couldn39t-be-a-math-... Sounds like very pointed snark but IMO it isn't, just a basic truth. The average population may not ever need to use what they learned but the percentage of people who go on to STEM and other professional careers are "going to use this" and that's enough to make it worthwhile.

sytelus 7y ago

I would not recommend home schooling unless you are trained, certified and experienced as teacher. For one thing, kids will miss out on social interactions that I feel are the 50% of the learning experience. When you have 20 kids class you start to develop notions of how different people are, how they think, behave and share. Learning to deal with all these is major part of the school system. Other important thing is how to teach. On surface it might feel trivial to teach division to 7 years old but in reality different kids understand in different ways. An experienced teacher has came in contact with all idiosyncrasies and knows different approaches to make student successful. Person doing something professionally all day long is often way ahead of the game than parents who are busy doing chores or make a leaving.

rusabd 7y ago
Are you a professional educator? Because you sound like one. Teaching 7 years old divisions is the simplest thing ever. I've done it in the car driving to hockey practice using sharing scenarios. You just need to know what kids interested in and the parents know that the best.

eeZah7Ux 7y ago

> If you're a kid and do the cost/benefit analysis Either you are a kid or you think like an emotionless automaton. No, people are way more complex that a "cost/benefit analysis"