10 ms·

Do Adults Really Not Remember School Sucked?

• watwut 6y ago
  > One of the constant refrains which has bemused me during the pandemic is all the people saying how much kids want to go back to school. My kid do want to go back to school. They were happy when they heard the school will start again and disappointed when it did not. To large extend, they want to be with friends again. To the rest of it, teacher is actually better teacher then us, they enjoy learning part in school more then in home. It has nothing to do with what I remember about my school. It has to do with what they say to me now and what situation makes them happy. From my point of view, the time home did taught them some things that were not present in school. But overall they were learning much less then when they went to school every day.
  • sanxiyn 6y ago
    I think your kids are pretty atypical.
    • gsich 6y ago
      I think not. Kids want social interaction.
      • hntrader 6y ago
        Probably depends on personality. As an introvert with a little above average neuroticism I viscerally despised returning to school after a long holiday break from K to 12 without exception. Zero excitement or longing to return. I had good friends, too. I would have much preferred just staying at home and playing video games, getting my social interaction online and keeping in touch with a select few people of my choosing rather than forced interactions with 300 people. Whether this would've been better for my health is another question.
    • aivisol 6y ago
      Then my kid is also atypical
    • Dma54rhs 6y ago
      Why would they be? Kids go insane from the lack of movement and social life, of course now suddenly school is not that bad.
    • watwut 6y ago
      Based on what other parents tell me, no they are not.
    • swebs 6y ago
      The kids are atypical because they want to be back with their friends again? That sounds pretty normal to me.
  • dvfjsdhgfv 6y ago
    Same here. Kids want to spend time with their friends. Also we'lucky to have excellent teachers, no byllying at school and so on. A few days ago the school organized a poll and around 70% says they prefer normal school whereas the rest prefers online classes.
• EugeneOZ 6y ago
  Maybe your school sucked. Not mine - it was the only place where I could use a PC, write some programs. Also, math - I miss so much the times when I could study math and solve complicated math exercises... Ahh... It was a magnificent time. Also, most of my teachers were interesting people. And in just in case: 0 sarcasm in this whole comment.
  • ThePadawan 6y ago
    > And in just in case: 0 sarcasm in this whole comment. That sentence reads very sarcastic. Could you clarify?
    • EugeneOZ 6y ago
      If you are trying to make a joke, then it wasn't funny. I meant what I wrote. I wrote it for those who might think that my comment is a form of sarcasm.
      • ThePadawan 6y ago
        I'm not trying to make a joke. I simply read the sentence and read it in a very honest voice and then in a very sarcastic voice. The very sarcastic voice sounded more approriate, so I asked you to clarify.
        • EugeneOZ 6y ago
          My comment about how I love my school and math was downvoted, so all comments in this branch I'm taking hostile. Sorry.
  • andai 6y ago
    I moved schools several times growing up. Some of them were wonderful. Others were terrible. It mostly came down to the relationship between the teachers and the students (or, dare I say, between the teachers and their inner demons?).
• kristofferR 6y ago
  There's a pretty big difference between having a few days off school and having months away from it. I loved the long summer breaks, but I also loved going back to meet all my classmates afterwards.
  • exyi 6y ago
    Summer breaks are great if you are going to visit cool places, make new friends on summer camps, ... Not if you are locked home with your parents and doing so many annoying homeworks + attending online lectures
• bratbag 6y ago
  My kid wants to go back to school. He tells me most weeks that he misses it. He is currently doing all the work he would be doing but on our kitchen counter with his mother or I. He gets all the hard bits of school without the fun bits. Perhaps the writer of the article should try asking the people he is talking about?
  • blue_box 6y ago
    Did you ask your kid if he misses because of the school itself or because he wants to see his friends?
  • marianov 6y ago
    I asked mine. School sucks, friends not. And it's too long. We switched to 2 hours work, outside activities and you can meet with as many friends as you want. I'll tell you te outcome in one year, but TBH they see it as the same as last year, plus the outside activity and without the dreaded Google Hangouts classes, which were frustrating. They got to grades last year and we have the time to devote to home schooling
  • threatofrain 6y ago
    The author's very point is that the fun bits of school is just social time — and that school is many things, including learning, and that the learning time often sucks the joy out of learning for too many kids. Presumably the author believes it's possible to structure more fun outside of school if the community were into it. It's too bad nobody is really on that discussion atm. As a tangent, here is a photo of a German kindergarten. https://i.redd.it/l9ghxqjqhdh61.jpg https://i.redd.it/l9ghxqjqhdh61.jpg
• polote 6y ago
  > Most kids prefer not being at school to being at school. OK let's listen to them, and just delete school and see what these kids say in 20 years? Maybe kids don't like school, but school doesn't exist because kids like it, it exists for different reasons such as : - parents can work in the mean time - kids can be taught things Kids not liking school is not a point in the "school should be open" debate. It is one in the "how to make kids pleased to go to school" debate though
  • XorNot 6y ago
    This is an assisine statement. As though school exactly as it is now is the only way to do things (parenting too for that matter).
  • paulpauper 6y ago
    and the author's point is that this is convenient for parents and bad for kids. how about a solution is not as skewed
  • dvfjsdhgfv 6y ago
    Actually there is some middle ground called democratic schools. I believe in most parts of the world their legal status is that of homeschooling. In theory, these schools shoudl optimize for the aspects of schools children like and stimulate interest rather than boring drill. In practice, however, I doubt it works well for everybody.
  • dlkmp 6y ago
    The first point is almost exactly stated by the author. For the second point, he does not question why schools exists, he merely claims them to be inefficient at this target. Which is supported by his personal anecdotes and he does not offer an alternative, so always an easy claim to be made.
  • bluecalm 6y ago
    Most kids love to learn naturally. It's the current schooling system that if the problem, not the kids.
  • sanxiyn 6y ago
• username90 6y ago
  If you get to choose between 8 hours of homework and 8 hours of school then I'm pretty sure most kids would pick school.
  • teeray 6y ago
    More like 8 hours of homework vs 12-14 hours of school+homework
• pfortuny 6y ago
  Does he not remember that being all day with your parents sucked?
  • ignoramous 6y ago
    That feeling is mostly mutual, too? I don't think parents would want to be with their kids all-day all-year either.
    • arkitaip 6y ago
      Most couldn't even if they wanted because of their finances. But generally, it takes tons of hard work and patience to educate and entertain you kids for 12 hours every day.
• dcminter 6y ago
  This line does not reflect well on the author: > I used to amuse myself by asking recent university grads what they had learned, most of them could barely remember anything. Since I was widely read, often I knew enough to ask basic questions about their discipline, and they wouldn’t know the answers. One has to wonder if the author's perspective on school might have been tinted by this kind of arrogance.
• lookalike74 6y ago
  Do adults really not remember that not all kids are the same? I think most of them do, and that as they read the original post they know exactly who caused the 'social horror show.'
• 27182818284 6y ago
  This thread is going to be full of personal experiences. I suspect that this follows an Anna-Karenina curve: "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." So using that, "All happy students are alike; each unhappy student is unhappy in their own way" I hated school. I was a good student taking "challenge" courses in elementary, then honors courses in middle school then AP courses, but the overall experience of k-12 was horrible for me. When I think about it, I cannot imagine having to go through it all again. It was horrible for me in my own way.
  • exyi 6y ago
    I think we were both unhappy the same way and I think there is going to be quite a lot of people with the same experience. While I love[d] learning new things I just hated high school, homeworks, ... as all of that was so boring.
• exyi 6y ago
  I think that children want back to school as they miss their friends. Also, at least here, the online education not much less painful than going to school - there is more annoying homeworks, lectures are still super boring and attendance is still enforced.
• mindwok 6y ago
  The author seems like they're trying to disprove one subjective experience with their own, and act like it's an obvious fact - despite the author almost certainly never having months of school due to a pandemic. To continue this trend, I certainly enjoyed school. Again though, anecdotes. I look forward to seeing the actual data that comes out of this period and how it's affected childrens schooling. Personally I suspect it will be a net negative.
• theodric 6y ago
  I was home-schooled from 3rd grade onward, and I didn't miss public school one whit. Fuck that noise.
• thih9 6y ago
  A lot of comments here make a point that kids do miss school because they miss friends. This is addressed in the Twitter thread [1] linked from the article: > Some, yes, are lonely and miss their friends. But the vast majority expressed that that they don’t feel that disconnected, because their after school habits of texting, Discord, and video chats remain intact. [1]: https://twitter.com/kingsleymalo/status/1354129303919800323 https://twitter.com/kingsleymalo/status/1354129303919800323
  • watwut 6y ago
    We have put in effort to make kids connected in lockdowns. They are not completely lonely. (Video chat is useless to them, messaging is useful and playing games together is useful. ) But, their social circles shrinked - they were in contact with more kids before. After first lockdown, some good friends had really hard time to adjust to more social way of living. Examples of issues: a kid got very jealous whenever friend paid attention to other kids. That escalated to bullying of the "if you play with him I wont play with you anymore" kind. This worked well, because other kids were generally more needy then usual, so it was harder for them to say "so what". Then there was reduced ability to solve conflicts or deal with them. They escalated much more quickly over much smaller things. Other kids having different opinions was sudden new shocking unpleasant experience. Finally, reduced ability to deal with frustration. At home, you are not confronted with interpersonal issues nor new situations. Mostly, you get your routine and that is it.
• that_guy_iain 6y ago
  I went to a brutal school not brutal as in you got yelled at by teachers brutal but left for dead in corridors after 10 on 1 fights that the staff allowed to happen brutal. And honestly, when I got suspended from school I normally would rather have had been at school. Even with all the stuff going on it was normally less boring that being at home. True boredom seems to be one of the things people want to avoid the most. Kids wanting to go to school to learn rather than sit in the house with their parents doing the same ole thing makes sense.
• sigmaprimus 6y ago
  I can't stop grinning after reading this, school did suck but not as much as work does. In recognition of Valentines Day, I will make the analogy: Remembering that school was good is like romantic couples who break up only to later in life get back together but just long enough to remember why they broke up the first time. Or School is the "cruel mistress" of childhood memories. Happy VD everyone :P
• lordnacho 6y ago
  Even though I recognize all the things he says about school, I mostly liked it. Yes, they teach stuff slowly, but you are free to move ahead yourself, right? And yes you need to be babysat, but it was mostly socializing with peers. One thing that struck me while reading this was the influence of American culture. You often see school depicted as a sort of weird jungle with jocks-vs-nerds dynamics coming from America. Some of the kids at my international school emulated that and it wasn't pleasant, but I got over that eventually as well. In general, most people I know across cultures think back fondly to their school days, minus Americans. My American friends are the ones most likely to point out the things Ian mentions. The jumping through hoops, wastes of time, the production of wage slaves.
  • nottorp 6y ago
    > In general, most people I know across cultures think back fondly to their school days, minus Americans. Yep. I don't remember jocks vs nerds or any other gang warfare forms when I was in school. Neither does my kid and she only finished high school recently. Must be an American thing, or an american movie thing?
    • gipp 6y ago
      "Jocks vs nerds" pretty much just existed in the 80s. That really hasn't been a thing for a long time.
    • lordnacho 6y ago
      > Must be an American thing, or an american movie thing? Very much, and the American kids made it seem more real. Otherwise we'd have just ignored it. But a bunch of them decided they had to have popularity cliques with in-and-out people, just like in the movies. Luckily our sports teams were so terrible it didn't create a second substrate for this.
      • npsimons 6y ago
        I'm still very happy with the fact I went to a university with no sports teams and no frats or sororities.
• tonyjstark 6y ago
  The article leaves out the cases where the parents at home are maybe disfunctional in parenting and school is maybe really the better place for the children. Other than that I have the same experience, besides friends school time sucked. My English teacher told me I never will learn a foreign language since I’m interested in music (I still don’t understand this reasoning). One of my music teachers didn’t think everything outside classical music is worth studying. My physics teacher made me memorize formulas instead of understanding relationships. At university I barely remembered linear algebra from school and had to learn it again. And since I’m from Germany my Computer Science at school was optional and ended with the blink Tag and marquee in JS. I had to learn programming from books from the library which had a lot of outdated books on basic...
  • ignoramous 6y ago
    > The article leaves out the cases where the parents at home are maybe disfunctional in parenting and school is maybe really the better place for the children. Not really. TFA does say that for some (or most?) parents, school is a babysitting service. The author says, despite that, school isn't a terribly good place for a child to be growing up either.
    • tonyjstark 6y ago
      The babysitting service argument is a bit too general for me. I’m talking more about the situation where parents don’t care at all or are just not able to cope with their own life. The authors argument sounds more like lazy parents. I agree that school is not an ideal solution though.
  • tonyjstark 6y ago
    Reading through that again: School had also a lot of nice things besides the time with friends. I really wanted to learn, every book we read I went through in 1-2 days, I read books about biology,... so in hindsight I wished we would have gotten better stimulation for the brain, less Latin and quality control for the teachers.
• scandox 6y ago
  I hated most of my schooling and I have no illusions about that. But the OP has a kind of reverse nostalgia which is just as deceiving as it's positive counterpart. Many people enjoyed school. Some people had better or worse school cultures. My kids school is like a Hippy paradise compared to what I experienced and of course they like it and miss it.
  • loopz 6y ago
    The kinds of things that sucked to me (sit still and listen for hours), there might be additional things or other stuff that sucked to others (slow to learn reading, math, etc.). The format didn't suit me, and another format would be beneficial. Learning is personal, and school having just one format aside private/experimental schools, absolutely sucks. What would suck more would be no school, or weed-school (get high on weed). Work is a bit different. Sometimes there are interesting projects and you get engrossed in work, which also shouldn't take over too much of your life. Other times, the politics and fakery absolutely sucks. I don't think we can expect things to not suck at all, ever.
• moksly 6y ago
  I think the pandemic has shown us just how much school sucks, and how ineffective and incompetent the political system behind it truly is. I’m Danish, and our school system is run largely by the public sector, so keep that in mind. When the pandemic struck, and we closed down from April to late may, our schools actually reacted decently. It was a stressful situation, everything was new and has to happen here and now. So the lower quality and chaos was to be expected, but I think our teachers and school administrations pulled through and did really well given the circumstances. What troubles me is that when the second lockdown hit in November, nothing had changed. We knew it was coming because it was happening in other countries before it hit us, and still, we were as unrelated as the first time? Why didn’t we have videos of the curriculum prepared nationally instead of still relying of thousands of individual teachers to teach classes as though students were in a class room? Why weren’t we prepared to let students go through material on their own, and then have “classes” with teachers in smaller groups of 4-6 with the teacher preforming a mentor role, which is what worked best during the first lockdown? I mean, it’s really just silly that we’re still pretending the online class room is similar to the real physical class room, and it’s leaving weaker or challenged students behind. I do think children are wanting to go back to school though. Not because of school, but because of the social life going back to school brings them.
  • lordnacho 6y ago
    > Why didn’t we have videos of the curriculum prepared nationally instead of still relying of thousands of individual teachers to teach classes as though students were in a class room? We're talking about school, not university, right? Kids don't do lectures, it's all interactive. Plus what do you reckon the teaching unions would think about that plan? You want them to just put all of education on YouTube, and then be done? Have you ever met a teacher in school who was better at using a computer than you? (Assume you're a dev). How could you expect them to have everything done between April and November when they're as lost as the kids?
    • bmn__ 6y ago
      Lectures are a straw-man in your argument which largely invalidates it. Please find out about the inverted classroom concept.
• helen___keller 6y ago
  There's some truth here but I feel like it's lacking nuance.
• oxfordmale 6y ago
  This author brushes over the importance of social peer interactions at school. Even if kids would be allowed to hang out with their friends, it would still deprive them of social interactions with non-friends. Ignoring the academic element, school prepares children for a live as an adult.
  • benibela 6y ago
    They learn to interact with other kids at school. But as adults people need to interact with adults. Nothing one learns at school has any relevance for that
    • oxfordmale 6y ago
      At school they learn to interact with their peers, who will grow up to be adults. Adults interaction with adults is mostly picked up during their formative years at school and university.
• vagrantJin 6y ago
  They do. School sucked hard but seeing your friends and goofing off in certain classes was the real reason to enjoy it. Sometime, a good teacher would show up and teach you about the world in how their subject fits in it.
• Barrin92 6y ago
  This take is so common on HN but I dislike it so much. First off, comparing not having to go to school with the pandemic situation is wrong because kids can't physically meet outside of school either, so that sucks in an entirely different way and is a bad comparison. Secondly though, school is not terrible for everyone. I didn't have a great household. My parents didn't read me books. I made a lot of friends in school, and I had good teachers who helped me chosing an education and career path my parents wouldn't have offered me. So getting out of my home environment into a different social one was vital. I'd call the authors attitude the 'nerdy privileged kid' experience, who most likely had bad social interactions as well as a household educated and affluent enough to get a rich education outside of the education system. It's not how it works for many, probably most kids. There's also an important aspect implicitly ignored in the article. That a lot of parents who cannot work from home, like say cashiers or construction workers who still have to go out, do not even really know right now how to manage their kids. People like that rely on having a school system that works.
  • kinghtown 6y ago
    Totally agree with this. My parents were good in some ways but in terms of anything related to academics they were both in the negative. They never helped me with my homework even a single time growing up.. homeschooling with them would have been.. awkward. Education definitely needs to reform, speaking here in terms of North America, but HN is not a a good sample pool for the general public. I’m so jealous of people from good families. Like when I hear so and sos parents went to Yale so they did to.. here I am like: my dad sold drugs :/ Don’t all of you go about underestimating your good luck.
    • Melting_Harps 6y ago
      > I’m so jealous of people from good families. Like when I hear so and sos parents went to Yale so they did to.. here I am like: my dad sold drugs :/ I went to private school and my best friend's dad worked as a middle level exec at Phillip Morris, other than the fact they had far more financial security and that time he gave us that 'only idiots smoke' speech with details about how his Industry worked (incidentally years before Thank you for smking came out) I don't think they had much of anything you would call a relationship. His son was more like an employee than a child, he would have new cleats every other football game but only because his father insisted that he scored the most touchdowns and 'make a name for himself for scholarship money' kind of arrangements. There wasn't anything I'd say I envied of his situation. Another colleagues father was from a poor family but an amazing mechanic with engineering and fabrication leanings, some of his patents were bough by Yamaha and even did a few years at Raytheon. Of his 3 children, 2 became an account and a physician but both tried to commit suicide as did his wife due to horrible upbringing. My childhood was marred with things more like your own than my friend's as I came from a working lower middle class so despite my parents sending me to private school to shield me from the realities at home they were still painfully real. If I'm honest I much prefer being an autodidact that grew up on the Internet as I know that anything I want to learn is within my grasp and and that its likely a community of people who are dedicated to this is out there too if I really want to learn from. I lost track of my friend when we went to separate highschools as his dad got relocated to the East Coast but I'd later find out from a mutual friend that he never really amounted to much, either. Why that was isn't clear, but I know for a fact he despised being his father's only son despite him being a well paid exec that managed 100s of people. Your pain can be your guide for success if you learn to channel it and use it in your favour, which is why I'm now seeing it a gift despite all the drawbacks it had in my past. It also probably gave you a sense of empathy for children in similar situations that you may have ignored entirely had you not grown up in such a dysfunctional situation. Sidenote: I was big fan of 'Malcolm in the Middle' in grade school but lost interest when I got to HS and forgot all about it until the pandemic and random youtube videos, so I've been watching some of the later seasons as they're new to me and I forgot how poignant that show was at highlighting some of the points of wealth inequality and the pernicious effects of wasting Human Capital and potential: particular in systems like Ivy Leagues.
• michaelt 6y ago
  > And most of what is taught in school and university is quickly forgotten. This is, of course, why parents aren't concerned with getting their children into good schools, why there aren't any universities that can command huge tuition fees, and why you will never see a job advert asking for a degree or an employer hiring from a certain school. That epidemiologist measuring the R0 rate isn't using math and knowledge they learned in school - no doubt they taught themselves because of their passion for the subject, and it's completely coincidental they were in a school studying the subject. /s
  • lordnacho 6y ago
    You write that with /s but there's easily another dynamic that explains why people want expensive schools and universities. For instance people actually don't learn all that much in school, it's all about the connections you make. Then it makes sense again to pay up for it, even though you don't learn how to do anything specific. It also means there's plenty of opportunity to read up on how R0 works if it happens to tickle your interest.
  • ozim 6y ago
    I agree author has wrong expectations when it comes to how/what people learn. I see a lot of it in such threads and by people who postulate that all schools should be shut down. School or university material is very basic and that is true. Unfortunately too many people expect that school is going to give them tools to deal with everything in life. School is giving only basic tools upon which one can build his own. Epidemiologist got his basic math in school but to be able to measure R0 he had to put in his own time, otherwise he would not become a specialist. School system has to provide set of tools to large quantity of people. Where mostly people who nag about school, look at it from "gifted child" perspective.
    • ClumsyPilot 6y ago
      There is a large body of knowledge that schools completely ignore, they absolutely should lay the groundwork for personal finance, basic understanding of law and psychology, basics of health and common medicines. Finally, basics of how things are built and repaired. A lot of people never go to uni, and the schools seem to do their damnest to avoid teaching kids anything practical.
• viach 6y ago
  > and there are dozens of movies about how awfully students treat each other This is a generalization. There are plenty of places where humans treat each other awfully - roads, corporative politics, queues in supermarkets. This all doesn't mean the solution is to don't buy a car, don't go to work or do only online shopping.
• bennyp101 6y ago
  My eldest (early teen) is missing school because he can't hang out with his friends and do the teenage social interaction thing - no more lunchtime going into town and messing about. My youngest (5) is missing school because he can't play with his friends or teachers - and he loved coming home to tell everyone what he learnt. Depending on the age of the children, they actually do really want to be back at school - primary school was super fun (as I remember it) - learning the basics and it's all new things. To be honest, I think my eldest would even like to be back - just because it's not being at home. Both are not liking doing work at home - it has basically made the place that we chill, watch tv, play in, into a pseudo school environment - which then puts a strain on family life. Neither of us are trained to deal with teaching kids stuff in a structured way, and how to respond when they don't - certainly not the same as convincing someone to do homework. A sliver lining may be that once everyone goes back, there may be opportunities to do work outside of a school setting if needed - and not have to worry about fines and falling behind.
• andyjohnson0 6y ago
  I read this twice, looking for the bit where the author talks about his own experience as a parent of school age children during the pandemic. But actually there's no such part. It's simply built around his own childhood experience of school, filtered by his recollection and adult life. Maybe he does have some lived adult experience to back-up his opinions, but there's no indication of any in this piece. It's just shallow and I'm surprised to see it at the top of HN. > Parents want their children to go back to school because it’s a babysitting service, Speaking as a parent of school age children, I want them to go back to school when it is safe to be there because I know that they miss their friends and their school community and the variety of school life. And while they're too considerate to say it, spending a year with their parents 24/7 must certainly suck for them too.
• frankzander 6y ago
  Great one. You argue that it was better or don't agree with the inner feelings that school is mostly(!) useless you becoming old and don't stay true to yourself. Thing is that most people lying about this topic to their kids and the question rises "is lying to the kids about that topic right?" I think it's better to admit that you think the same way "school sucks in many ways" and try to find ways to circumvent the negative aspects of school visit.
• powerapple 6y ago
  I never thought school was bad. I enjoyed play with classmates, and I had great teachers in high school except one major. Schools of my time were a lot simpler than schools now, we didn't have much, but probably because of that, it was more enjoyable. What I can observe from my son is that there are too many toys, in the end, his love will spread too thin on all of them, and not loving them at all.
• nanis 6y ago
  Yes, school sucked. No, life would not have been better without school. Without the ability to leave the confines of "home" where you now probably have parents who are scared to go outside.
• praptak 6y ago
  School sucked big time for me. But I thought I was in the minority because I was nerdy, not very popular and insolent towards teachers bacause I hated authority. Now I think it might be that everyone else also thought the same, only with a different set of reasons - the non-nerdy kids feared maths, the popular kids were getting involved in the struggle to be popular. Maybe parents suppress the memories so as not to face what they're doing to their children just to get them off their backs for a while.
• fendy3002 6y ago
  I changed school at senior high (private to private). My pre senior high school sucked (though not too much), due to too hard academic lessons, the time too long and activities outside school time was almost non existed. My senior high was the opposite.
• cameronh90 6y ago
  Not all of school sucked, and in many ways it sucked less than being at home. On the other hand, as an adult, there is no way I'd want to go back to school life. That "you'll miss it when you're older" never came true for me. Now I have money, freedom and a satisfying career - and I don't have to ask anyone for permission to go to the toilet. There are certain things I miss about being young though. Summer holidays, long days where everything was novel, easy friendships, death being so far away I didn't think about it and being able to fall off a tree without spending the next two weeks convalescent.
• Bostonian 6y ago
  For many children, my two high school students included, attending school in person sucks less than sitting in your bedroom all day in Zoom meetings.
• timwaagh 6y ago
  I couldn't agree more. Schools can die and the free market can take care of education for those who want to learn. Maybe give kids some cash to spend, see where they spend it, whether that's school or something else. I'm so done with people pretending school is anything but a babysitting service which keeps kids from being their parents problem. And the losers of society, people who don't have kids, need to pay for that. I don't like to make an argument based on fairness, because it's pathetic, but sometimes I feel pathetic.
  • BrianOnHN 6y ago
    You must've been economist coming out of the whom. Reading and writing must be in your genetic code. And math is just common sense, right? Have you ever met someone who didn't graduate high school? No one naturally understands how to approach a free market. Your comment is so off-base it's shocking.
    • timwaagh 6y ago
      I'm a programmer by trade. I don't need to know anything about economics and barely any maths. How to approach a free market is in my previous comment. People have different situations and different opinions. If I was a parent I would probably advocate for squeezing non parents of every last dollar for free education, child money, babysitting, vacation money for kids and whatnot. But I am not a parent and so I will argue against these unnecessary extras.
      • BrianOnHN 6y ago
        > If I was a parent Well let's be grateful your not passing on those nasty anti-societal genes of yours!
        • timwaagh 6y ago
          You want to take this outside?
  • dennis_jeeves 6y ago
• moonbug 6y ago
  "I am very clever".
• JansjoFromIkea 6y ago
  School definitely sucked for me but in retrospect it was primarily due to buses doing two routes and landing in the unfortunate position that I had to arrive in the school 60-90 minutes early every morning and wait around the school after 60 minutes most evenings. Secondary school was just 5 years of being constantly exhausted. Blows my mind that whoever was planning it thought that was better than stumping up the cash for a second bus run (this was mid-00s in a country that was supposedly booming). It's kind of impossible to gauge it beyond that. I guess the inflexibility of the structure ties in there though, like, if something about it is bad you don't necessarily have that much choice to change it and it will grind you down hugely.
• not_knuth 6y ago
  Tangent: Why are there not more part time teachers? From personal experience most teachers simply ended up in the job as a fallback plan or a day job to get by. There was the occasional passionate teacher that put in a lot of effort and I really appreciated that, but having talked to many other people about the matter it does seem that those are few and far between. I also got the impression that teachers tend to live in their own little world and tend to have very little experience outside of the educational system. Hence they often lack the need to explain to students why they are learning these things or how they may apply them in the "real world" (as we called it back then). On the other hand I have met quite some folk in the pre-retirement age ~50-65 that are in technical jobs and had 30 years of experience in explaining and understanding things and are passionate about teaching what they've learnt. Most of these folk are also privileged enough to be able to start lessening their workload. I always wonder why they do not take up to passing on their wisdom to the next generation, by maybe just teaching a single course at a school? Why is it not the norm to go into a job for, say 20 years, and after years of experience start teaching? Why would it be a good idea to have a teacher straight of college teaching kids just a couple of years younger? I know only of one person that taught at a small school in their pre-retirement years (mostly helping out with maths) and as far as I know all of his kids performed excellently.
  • BrianOnHN 6y ago
    > ended up in the job as a fallback plan or a day job to get by. There was the occasional passionate teacher Maybe you only remember middle and high school. This is categorically untrue for early childhood education, which is by far the most critical. > Why is it not the norm to go into a job for, say 20 years, and after years of experience start teaching? Because the pay is dismal, which is the last thing you want right before retirement.
    • musingsole 6y ago
      If you have a lifetime's savings, the pay isn't what keeps you from teaching at the end of your career. More likely its all the babysitting responsibilities that keep them away.
• cheb 6y ago
  As a 17 year student from Germany in his last year of school, I only now realize that school was - and still kinda is- a rather positive experience. Homeschooling is downright terrible(though it's no ones fault) A lot of us like to think that the sole purpose of school is to educate kids, so they can go into society with a portfolio of knowledge and practical skills. While in reality it is just a part of it. I would argue that "kindergartening" kids, so parents can work a 9to5 job, and socialization are just as - if not more- important. The pandemic gave us no time to prepare, so education is the only thing that we are able to do. Kids are left to do homework, and nothing else. They do the shitty bits of school without the fun part stripped away. Currently some teachers VASTLY overestimate how much work can actually get done within 45-90 minutes. Do you really think that kids actually do 90 minutes of work? It mostly boils down to 15-30 minutes of truly productive time, a good chunk of time is spent with chitchat and ... _I don't even know_ . A skill school never taught very well is time-management. Any deadline you give to students WILL be procrastinated by most students to the very last second. Thanks to the wonders of modern online-platforms, such as Moodle, you can have deadlines at arbitrary times, such as 12am at night. Late deadlines are made with good intent, but are horrible in practice. Believe me that some student indeed do their homework at 11pm to turn it in at 12 am. Which undeniably is terrible for a kids mental-health. As a student who gets through school without any effort at all, I am now forced to do repetitive and _stupid_ homework for the sole purpose of being busy. Before I could simply participate in class and show that I understood the material, while others were doing their work I was tolerated to just read a book (as long as I participated in class). I truly miss just hanging around with my friend :( Discord just can't replace face-to-face interaction. The only thing positive aspect is that I have a lot of time to spend on personal projects. I finally feel comfortable with IDA and x32dbg and my C-programming (and Golang, Python) skills have improved greatly :D Although I often feel unmotivated to actually do personal projects and go through depressive phases :/ Although not entirely related, I suggest reading Paul Grahams essay on nerds: http://paulgraham.com/nerds.html http://paulgraham.com/nerds.html
• mrweasel 6y ago
  The article makes the same mistake schools make: It assumes that all children are equal. E.g. School teachs things t slow. That’s true, for some of us, yet we also knew that group of kids how won’t move beyond 5 grade math, regardless of how many years you’d spend teaching them. Schools try to teach both sets of kids, and those somewhere in between at the same time. The thing I’d like to have seen schools during Covid lockdown is to experiment with teaching at different paces. Depending on the child I believe that you could avoid some level of boredom while teaching 3+ years of math, physics, or whatever subject the kid excel at. Some kids could skip years ahead had their education been more focused during this lockdown. That still leave the weakest students, but they could perhaps benefit from more one on one time with the teachers while the strong tackle the more complex assignments on their own.
  • bmn__ 6y ago
    > thing I’d like to have seen Wishful thinking. Tʜᴇ Pʟᴀɴ is strictly reglemented at national and provincial levels, prescribing both educational material and teaching methods. Ministry of education metes out punishment for teachers who attempt to deviate from it, ensuring that the systemic goal of conformity and obedience to authority is never endangered.
• fenderbluesjr 6y ago
  For me school absolutely sucked. I liked being able to meet my peers but it was like having an unpaid job where the only benefit is your office colleagues. I like posting this Chomsky video whenever school discussions come up. It largely reflects my own feelings and experiences in school. I think for many people who say they enjoyed school, the idea that some people might look at the school system the way Chomsky does, might come as a surprise. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVqMAlgAnlo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVqMAlgAnlo I believe the school systems completely fails a segment of the student population, wasting their gifts and abilities because they have created a system where docility and subservience are a prerequisite to success. If my future kids inherit my dispositions, I won't hesitate to pull them out of the standard school system and find some alternative schooling methods. The standard school system chews up and spits out countless brilliant children simply because they won't unquestioningly do what some untrusted adult tells them to.
  • BrianOnHN 6y ago
    > they won't unquestioningly do what some untrusted adult tells them to How is this any different than the job market they're being groomed for?
    • fenderbluesjr 6y ago
      They are doing it for money. A student is told to do countless things they have absolutely no interest in, 'for their future'.
      • BrianOnHN 6y ago
        > They are doing it for money Then we should pay kids to be good students? Sounds good to me.
        • fenderbluesjr 6y ago
          That's not the conclusion I would draw
        • 6y ago
• _ZeD_ 6y ago
  Just as data point... I loved the time I spent at university, and still think that was the pinnacle of my life. And while I don't love the time at school before, I clearly remember it and it's a million times better that the adult life. The worst of my problems were if there was a "surprise oral exam" or something like that. But I had friends, and free time to spent, and energy, and loooooong summers. There is a reason most of the best sellers (books, movies) are teen/youg adult stuff... adults DO NOT HAVE THE TIME to read, or enjoy plays.
  • qznc 6y ago
    I increasingly enjoyed my education because I got increasingly more choice. During school, I was so happy once I got to remove Latin from my curriculum. Later the poetry analysis stuff disappeared. At university it got reduced to a broad field like computer science but it still contains a lot of stuff I never used afterwards. In the second half, I could mostly focus on topics which really interested me. During the PhD it was nearly complete freedom. What I did like about school was all the extra-curriculum stuff. I learned to act on stage and in a movie, produced a comic, and more. That happen inside the school building, so it was "school" and it didn't suck.
• jimmyvalmer 6y ago
  General population (GP), i.e., public teachers and pupils in aggregate, are roughly one-sigma lower in IQ relative to HN readers. So yes, school is too slow for us. While the internet can ably replace the lecture component, you still need someone smart enough to assign and grade problem sets and essays. And there's the social conditioning aspect of contending and fitting in with the GP. So like Churchill's assessment of democracy, public school remains the worst form of education except for all the others.
  • npsimons 6y ago
    > So like Churchill's assessment of democracy, public school remains the worst form of education except for all the others. Is it though? We have records (sometimes questionable, due to bias) of different forms of government, dating back thousands of years. Where's the comparisons of educational systems? I'm no expert in pedagogy, but I'm also no expert in governing systems, yet I can name at least five different forms of the latter, and only one of the former.
    • bmn__ 6y ago
      > Where's the comparisons of educational systems? They exist, it just needs putting in a little bit of effort to look them up. > yet I can name […] only one of [educational systems] I am also not an expert in pedagogy, but I can name: education in the home by parental units and private teachers, Waldorf, Montessori, democratic schools, MOOC. It would be interesting to find out how you would end up in a situation where you could not.
• mosselman 6y ago
  So when people say they enjoyed school they are wrong and have forgotten it sucked just because the author’s school experience was bad? Ok then. There are so many wonderful schools and teachers. Sure you can have bad experiences in school and I am sure for many it sucked, but there are probably just as many for who school was a safe haven from the shit they had to deal with at home.
  • andai 6y ago
    There are great schools just as there are great homes. Some would prefer to stay at school, some would prefer to stay at home. For me, I would have preferred the option to escape both of them, permanently.
• Melting_Harps 6y ago
  Yes. Very much so, my sibling and I went to private school which we both held in low esteem, and I in absolute contempt for the mind prison that they are. They would then send their kids to charter schools to 'get ahead' and they even ended up teaching there, only to send their children to the same horrible HS I went to. And they knew I had started skipping class to go to University lectures by Junior year because of how bad it had gotten. This is a person I had countless conversations with about how much a determent formal schooling is to actual problem solving to Society's most pressing issues, as she wanted to teach but wasn't sure if University level made sense, and about how Society could benefit from a smaller private specialized tutor system for specific subjects. We also did our respective undergrads at the same university for a semester and we both realized how absurd it was even during the 'good times' in the bubble era how many people didn't get a job that had anything to do with their degree. Something that was always just brushed under the 'you will make more money with a degree' chart.
• BrianOnHN 6y ago
  HNs sentiment on education is that it should be designed for their unique needs. This is absurd. The education system is there to raise the lowest common denominator. Entrepreneurs, innovators never fit into the mold. But for some reason HNers want to fit education to them. So many things wrong with the comments I'm reading in this thread, from first principles on.
• helen___keller 6y ago
  Growing up, every summer vacation for me was basically like being in quarantine: the miserable florida sun was oppressive, so I'd be inside all day, and I lived so deep in the suburbs that I couldn't go anywhere without getting my parents to drive me, and with 2 working parents I mostly didn't bother. With a bit of experience in this, I can say rather easily: during the school year, getting a chance to avoid going to school is wonderful. But months of being stuck at home becomes boring and miserable.
• kwhitefoot 6y ago
  This adult doesn't remember that 'School Sucked' because for me it didn't. I realize I and the other children in the area at the time were lucky though.
• lpernille 6y ago
  I'm Homeschooling my kids because schools are inefficient and I owe most of what I use to make a living by participating in open source communities. The post-internet homeschool movement presently is a bit like the free software or homebrew computer movement of the 1980s, just getting started and accessible to the privileged, but we're all building a future where all can participate and finding the right approach. Children should be free to explore, learn, play, and be productive in things that matter to them.
  • lpernille 6y ago
    Also for reference, the model I'm using for my family: https://wonderyearsschool.com/ https://wonderyearsschool.com/
  • TaupeRanger 6y ago
    That sounds great, but when they become 8 years old I can virtually guarantee that "things that matter to them" are going to be video games, YouTube personalities, and whatever version of TikTok/Instagram exists at that time (more for teenagers). The issue isn't "letting them explore", because they will simply go to the easiest dopamine hit available (outside rare exceptions, as most of us "nerds" might've done some programming instead). You can't truly educate children by leaving them to their own devices (though it is still important for them to have significant free time in their lives). That has been true since ancient times. Humans have always known this, which is why we have never done otherwise.
• LockAndLol 6y ago
  No kids here (besides the neighbors kids) thankfully, but I don't need them to remember how much I hated school and university. They were all about knowledge with no understanding. The entire goal of school is not to "prepare you for life" but to fit you into a box, any box, with a bow for your employer. Nobody that I applied to ever asked me about my degree or university experience; it was but a qualifier on the CV. As the author said, probably the only thing my peers remembered positively from their school days was their social circles. That's probably the biggest reason school was bearable. Hopefully the pandemic will change things, but its doubtful. There are universities that still, after a whole year of covid, haven't figured out remote teaching. They can't use or agree upon software, don't know how to do the exams, can't organize schedules and keep reverting to proctoring solutions that invade privacy. How can institutions, that are supposed to prepare us for the future, be so backwards?
• kalleboo 6y ago
  Plenty of adults are desperate to go back to their offices, which I can't understand at all, so in that case it doesn't seem strange that lots of kids really want to go back to school.
• ulucs 6y ago
  Adults just want their children out from home so they can "work in peace". No-one really cares about what the want: not the parents, not the schools, and definitely not the the board of education
• IshKebab 6y ago
  Maybe it's just in America but I haven't heard anyone say that children want to go back to school. They say it's important that they go back, not that they want to. Here's a random example: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-politics-53723611 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-politics-53723611 > He said it was better for children’s health, mental well-being and educational prospects if “everyone” went back to school full-time in September, adding it was “our moral duty”.
• wilsocr88 6y ago
  My kids are desperate to go back to school and see their friends. We don't realize how much damage the desire for safety over freedom is doing long term.
• greggman3 6y ago
  School didn't suck for me. I liked my friends, I liked my teachers, I was a relatively good student and not someone trying to get into trouble (didn't try to drink or smoke or cut class, etc...). Teachers were good. Got lots of freedom from my parents because they trusted I wasn't going to get in trouble. Had great friends, sleep overs, still in touch with them 38 years later. I also learned quite a bit. Of course it was pre-internet, pre-smartphones. I went to school in the Apple II era. But I learned file i/o, sorting, and a bunch of other programming related things. I didn't become an expert in biology or physics but my knowledge of those topics still mostly comes from or at least stared in school. The periodic table, the atomic weights, electron shells, basic genetics like how recessive genes propagate. A bunch of history. Famous books an authors that still have influence in our culture today.
• zerof1l 6y ago
  I had a quite bad experience with the schools in my country. I hated it and after 9th grade, I was thinking of dropping out of altogether. Eventually, I joined a distance learning high-school in the US called "American School of Correspondence". That was my last attempt at school. These were the best 4 years of school. I went from being the worst in the class (by grades) to being one of the best in the school. A big difference between that school and others was that there was no memorization or note-taking. Before, good grades meant you had to be good at memorizing and recalling exactly. There was a lot of note-taking too. In the US HS, every single subject was self-contained, meaning that you could get the best grade without prior subject knowledge. Exams were meant to be completed with an open textbook. All that was dream come true for me.
• herbst 6y ago
  I can't really sign that statement. I did not like school most of the time, i barely was able to finish it without extra loops. And i will do anything to have my kids not beeing forced to relive that experience. However, both my parents were working to pay for our live. Based on the "normal" situation most people are in they simply do not have the time to actually replace school, its unlikely my parents would have been able to provide me with all that education and social experiences next to working. There was not even Wikipedia and childrens social life still happened mostly outside. So i dont see not going to school a realistic option for the masses until we adopt universal income. And even then many parents won't be able to properly teach their children. Edit:// However i agree that our school system sucks and should be focusing on indivudual strengths much earlier these days.
• jbjbjbjb 6y ago
  It’s also a easy target for liberation types who want a laissez faire approach to the pandemic
• notacoward 6y ago
  There needs to be more of a distinction along two axes: (1) The classroom vs. the rest of school (friends, extracurriculars, etc.) (2) Experiences vs. outcomes Do children hate the experience of sitting in a classroom? Sure they do. I did. Do they hate the rest? Not so much. Many of them miss it. My daughter (HS junior) actively replicates as much as she can of that experience, mostly online, all on her own initiative. Learning is also important, and yes, most students do learn a lot in school. OP's claim that "most of them could barely remember anything" is disingenuous at best, and I suspect actually dishonest. The fact that they couldn't articulate what they had learned, on the spot, doesn't mean they hadn't actually learned anything. That's especially true if faced with an authority figure obviously hostile to the idea that they had learned. That "barely" is also doing a lot of work. How many did answer, but their answers were deemed insufficient? It hardly seems like there was a good-faith effort to gather data in a scientific way. Is school necessary to learn? That's a complex question, with answers dependent on many factors. The most we can honestly say is "sometimes". Not always. Not never. Pedagogy is a real thing. It's a skill that can be trained, and some people have more aptitude for it than others. I contend that most parents suck at teaching their children, and most children suck at teaching themselves, and most teachers might not be that great at it either but they're still better at it (on average) than the other two. And you know what works better than any of those 99% of the time? Teachers and parents and (at least older) children working together, each contributing what value they can. Which isn't going to happen as much when anti-educational diatribes like OP go unchallenged. "School sucked" is just not useful. How about ideas for making it suck less, or for other things that don't suck, or ways to combine the two? I don't care about Ian Welsh's experience, which surely owes as much to him as participant as to anything else. I care about how to ensure that present and future children have a better experience.
  • bmn__ 6y ago
    >> [FTA] most of what is taught in school and university is quickly forgotten > claim […] is disingenuous at best I am inclined to believe Welsh's theory due to the fact that school does not use any long-term memorisation techniques which is mentioned elsewhere in the comments. – If we want to make the world better, I am very much in agreement that this must be examined in a scientific way. > anti-educational diatribes like OP That's a straw-man. He does not criticise education, but school. > I care about how to ensure that present and future children have a better experience. This means participating in politics which is almost anywhere a nearly hopeless endeavour. For me this explains why Welsh became a cynic (afaict from his article) instead of being proactive like you wish him to be.
• dwild 6y ago
  The author is missing his whole point and go in a tangent about how school is inherently bad, instead of focusing on why kids may not enjoy it. No it's not because we are "put into slavery" that we don't enjoy school... I will skip that whole argument that feel more like a conspiracy theory about being slaves, and concentrate on the "kids don't like school". Kid still have school... it's just in a different form. Maybe it's a form that the author would have preferred (and I agree that this form may be better for a subset of students, just like the previous form is better for another subset), but it's still school and it still something that I would have hated. The part that we hate is the teaching, and maybe there's a form that I would have enjoyed while being kid, I never experienced that until way later in my teenage years, so I really can't know if that's even possible, but whether it's remotely or in person, I'm pretty sure I would have hated both. I don't know if the author even tried to take a full day of class remotely too. The first time I had a 3h+ meeting remotely, I understood how much worse it must be for kids that need to do it remotely right now. I had my fair share of 3h+ classes in the past, I was fine, I may not be the best student, but I was going through them, but that 3h of remote meeting was so awful. So kids may hate both form of teaching, but why would it be better for them to be able to go back to class. In a few word, to make friends. The author may have had difficulties with social situations, I'm sorry for him if that's the case and I hope he got better at it with time, but we all had recess, there's no way anyone can believe that it's the majority of people that had that much issue making friends. It's that part that they are missing. Sure there's others ways of making friend remotely, but it's not as easy as it was in school. It's a thread I see from time to time on Reddit, how to make friends now that we are no longer at school and the answers are always much harder. Sure you can be social on some video games, but again, not the same. We tried with my friend group, watching movies remotely, a bunch of games, but it get so much boring so quickly. That means that the bad part of school would have been even worse for me, and the only good part would have disappeared...