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I want to get on a tangent inspired from your comment. Myself included, many Hacker News readers would probably be in the BS-detecting, questioning, critical ca
by fastfinner 15y ago
I want to get on a tangent inspired from your comment. Myself included, many Hacker News readers would probably be in the BS-detecting, questioning, critical category of students. However, I personally really think that every school child can become great at something, regardless of whether they are the little questioners in the classroom or not. And I personally think that an education system that labels children into "regular" and "advanced" is not a good idea, because it really hurts the self-esteem of the "regular" students.
My point is: different flavors, different emphasis, different difficulty in homework among the essentially same-subject classes is fine. However, we should phrase education as an experience with choices, especially for pre-college (because their personalities are very malleable, imo), instead of making kids feel like they are laggards.
- FilterJoe 15y agoI see your point. But segregation can also occur by entire schools. In CA (where I live), budget constrains and therefore class sizes makes it very difficult for public schools to cater to the individual needs of students. For this reason, our son is going to a private school (partly an economic decision for us - the cost of a house in a town with great public schools was $500,000-$600,000 greater than the house we actually purchased). We checked out many public and private schools to find the best fit for him. Given the kinds of math he was doing before entering Kindergarten and his inquisitive nature, we could see that he would be bored and not challenged going through any of the public schools we checked out. His private school does a great job of exactly what you say - different flavors, different emphasis, different difficultly in homework among essentially same-subject classes.