4 ms·

I don't think it's a binary choice. I think capitalism is great for most things, and bad at some things. Education happens to be one of those things. If I buy

by jshen 15y ago

I don't think it's a binary choice. I think capitalism is great for most things, and bad at some things. Education happens to be one of those things. If I buy a $30 bottle of pills that are supposed to make me lose weight, well I lost $30 and I learned my lesson. If I send my kid to a fucked up school it might take years for me to realize it was fucked up, and the stakes are much higher. A bit of back story. I'm the only person in my immediate family to finish high school, and I was raised by my grandmother who is not educated at all. She would have been completely unequipped to make a good decision about such things. Yet here I am, a successful software engineer, due in large part to a good public education. I can't see how I would have been better served by a private system.

grandalf 15y ago
Fair enough, but many US colleges and universities are private and are the best in the world. I think your worry about someone starting a school that is actually a sham are very much out of proportion. In today's public schools, many kids can't read or do basic math, so it's hard to imagine something worse. Also, the monopoly system is the only reason parents can't easily switch their kid to a different school. If this were an option, parents would be much more critical. Most parents today just settle for whatever is publicly available b/c it's "free" to them and they'd have to move to a different district to put their kid in a different school.
- hugh3 15y ago
  I think your worry about someone starting a school that is actually a sham are very much out of proportion. The only concern I'd have would be with religious schools which might teach BS instead of real stuff. But an appropriate level of government intervention in setting the curriculum and standard examinations would hopefully negate this problem. "Final question for one million points: roughly how old is the Earth, anyway?"
  - jshen 15y ago
    If the government sets the curriculum and standards then why have private schools? They will just cost more because they need to make their 15% margin.
    - hugh3 15y ago
      Because the standards are minimum standards, and the private schools will endeavour to teach it better. Let me explain how schools work where I come from. The final year of high school is spent largely doing a series of examinations standardized across the state, called the Higher School Certificate. (It's a bit more complicated than that, there's a school-based contribution to the exams which gets normalized with another set of exams, but let's just pretend it's one big set of exams now, which tests everything you learn in your last two years of school.) The marks are all tallied up, and every student in the state recieves a grade between 0 and 100 which ranks exactly how well they did in their exams (if you get 95.4 then you did better than 95.4% of the state, et cetera). These numbers (called Tertiary Entrance Rankings when I went through, though I think they've changed name several times since then) determine what courses and universities you can get into (none of this namby-pamby admissions essay slash extracurricular bullshit stuff like in the US)... or for those who don't go to university it will be a major line item on your CV when you start looking for work, so obviously all students are very keen on making sure they get a high TER. This provides an obvious point for competition between schools -- schools will compete between themselves to get the largest number of high TERs, and parents choosing schools for their children will look at this information when choosing schools. It's heartless, and it's cut-throat, and it's incredibly stressful for the students, and it works great.
      - jshen 15y ago
        I laid out my concern with this sort of system here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2817958 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2817958
  - grandalf 15y ago
    Rather than requiring certain standards, the government would be more effective if it provided assessments of school quality to help consumers... but stayed out of the curriculum business.
- jshen 15y ago
  "If this were an option, parents would be much more critical." I seriously doubt it. Just look at all the sham private colleges that exist right now. Also, I think the problem with our kids isn't the school system, but a culture that doesn't value hard work and education.
  - 18pfsmt 15y ago
    Are you aware that the Ivy League[1] schools are all private? So are the most prestigious high schools (the latter was attended by Zuckerberg, for example): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phillips_Academy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phillips_Academy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phillips_Exeter_Academy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phillips_Exeter_Academy [1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_league http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_league
    - jshen 15y ago
      Can those private high schools deny problem kids? Are they a non random selection of students? Think about it. Edit: You are also being selective in your examples. Why not compare Berkley to the University of Phoenix? You have to consider the entire range of private schools, and the overall output. But I'm not as concerned with higher education, I think that is a different system with a different goal. Primary schools need to educate everyone, as a minimal level of what our society needs to move in a positive direction. Private schools would be incentivized to abandon problem kids that hurt their bottom line by screwing up their average scores and what not. This is even happening in public schools with some of the stupid testing schemes we've implemented, but it would be far worse imo with private schools.
      - grandalf 15y ago
        Uh, it's not like "problem kids" are necessarily getting a good deal from the public system. Special ed kids are forced to learn "academic" style knowledge rather than the practical life skills they actually need... and behavior problem kids use way more resources than they deserve and harm all the other kids in the process. Sadly, many kids in special ed programs and many behavior problem kids would not have problems in a different type of learning scenario... but the entrenched K-12 classroom, 30 students one teacher, hour long periods, boring books, exercises, silence, etc., is just a horrible fit for them.
hugh3 15y ago
If I buy a $30 bottle of pills that are supposed to make me lose weight, well I lost $30 and I learned my lesson. If I send my kid to a fucked up school it might take years for me to realize it was fucked up, and the stakes are much higher. Or you could send your kid to a public school which is also fucked up, but not have any other options because, hey, there aren't any other schools around, and nobody has any real incentive to fix it up.
Daniel_Newby 15y ago
Yet here I am, a successful software engineer, due in large part to a good public education. But were you given a good education, or were you smart enough to educate yourself given a modicum of education and a structured environment? The problem is that half of people are not smart enough. If you teach them to read using word recognition, they will not deduce phonics on their own, so their reading ability is permanently capped at a level suitable for a dull 8 year-old. The problem with zero-competition government schools is that when they get captured by a fad (word recognition, new math, no student left behind, etc.), it happens everywhere. There is no escape. And then 20 years later you get a new generation of teachers that are the product of bad teaching. The result is a 50 year cycle of mini dark ages. ... I was raised by my grandmother who is not educated at all. She would have been completely unequipped to make a good decision about such things. But would she want to make a good decision? Or to avoid a horrifically bad decision? The latter does not require education or sophistication, just the ability to ask about the relative rank of the nearby schools.
- jshen 15y ago
  "But were you given a good education, or were you smart enough to educate yourself given a modicum of education and a structured environment?" I didn't care about education until i was in my 20s. I would not have educated myself as a child or teenager. "The problem is that half of people are not smart enough" That sounds like a number you pulled out of your butt. Do you have any real statistics on that? "The problem with zero-competition government schools is that when they get captured by a fad (word recognition, new math, no student left behind, etc.), it happens everywhere. There is no escape. " I'm not sure I understand, but I'm pretty sure it's not true. Our schools are becoming more federalized, but that hasn't always been the case. States once had a lot of leeway in their education systems. "The latter does not require education or sophistication, just the ability to ask about the relative rank of the nearby schools." This isn't true. She'd have no idea what graphs mean, and even if she got it to some degree it would be very easy to mislead her. Think about it. Have you ever watched infomercials with absurd assertions that have graphs and numbers on them? You and I realize they are absurd, but most people don't. Think about it.
  - 15y ago

by jshen 15y ago

grandalf 15y ago

Fair enough, but many US colleges and universities are private and are the best in the world. I think your worry about someone starting a school that is actually a sham are very much out of proportion. In today's public schools, many kids can't read or do basic math, so it's hard to imagine something worse. Also, the monopoly system is the only reason parents can't easily switch their kid to a different school. If this were an option, parents would be much more critical. Most parents today just settle for whatever is publicly available b/c it's "free" to them and they'd have to move to a different district to put their kid in a different school.

hugh3 15y ago
I think your worry about someone starting a school that is actually a sham are very much out of proportion. The only concern I'd have would be with religious schools which might teach BS instead of real stuff. But an appropriate level of government intervention in setting the curriculum and standard examinations would hopefully negate this problem. "Final question for one million points: roughly how old is the Earth, anyway?"
- jshen 15y ago
  If the government sets the curriculum and standards then why have private schools? They will just cost more because they need to make their 15% margin.
  - hugh3 15y ago
    Because the standards are minimum standards, and the private schools will endeavour to teach it better. Let me explain how schools work where I come from. The final year of high school is spent largely doing a series of examinations standardized across the state, called the Higher School Certificate. (It's a bit more complicated than that, there's a school-based contribution to the exams which gets normalized with another set of exams, but let's just pretend it's one big set of exams now, which tests everything you learn in your last two years of school.) The marks are all tallied up, and every student in the state recieves a grade between 0 and 100 which ranks exactly how well they did in their exams (if you get 95.4 then you did better than 95.4% of the state, et cetera). These numbers (called Tertiary Entrance Rankings when I went through, though I think they've changed name several times since then) determine what courses and universities you can get into (none of this namby-pamby admissions essay slash extracurricular bullshit stuff like in the US)... or for those who don't go to university it will be a major line item on your CV when you start looking for work, so obviously all students are very keen on making sure they get a high TER. This provides an obvious point for competition between schools -- schools will compete between themselves to get the largest number of high TERs, and parents choosing schools for their children will look at this information when choosing schools. It's heartless, and it's cut-throat, and it's incredibly stressful for the students, and it works great.
    - jshen 15y ago
      I laid out my concern with this sort of system here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2817958 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2817958
- grandalf 15y ago
  Rather than requiring certain standards, the government would be more effective if it provided assessments of school quality to help consumers... but stayed out of the curriculum business.
jshen 15y ago
"If this were an option, parents would be much more critical." I seriously doubt it. Just look at all the sham private colleges that exist right now. Also, I think the problem with our kids isn't the school system, but a culture that doesn't value hard work and education.
- 18pfsmt 15y ago
  Are you aware that the Ivy League[1] schools are all private? So are the most prestigious high schools (the latter was attended by Zuckerberg, for example): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phillips_Academy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phillips_Academy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phillips_Exeter_Academy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phillips_Exeter_Academy [1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_league http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_league
  - jshen 15y ago
    Can those private high schools deny problem kids? Are they a non random selection of students? Think about it. Edit: You are also being selective in your examples. Why not compare Berkley to the University of Phoenix? You have to consider the entire range of private schools, and the overall output. But I'm not as concerned with higher education, I think that is a different system with a different goal. Primary schools need to educate everyone, as a minimal level of what our society needs to move in a positive direction. Private schools would be incentivized to abandon problem kids that hurt their bottom line by screwing up their average scores and what not. This is even happening in public schools with some of the stupid testing schemes we've implemented, but it would be far worse imo with private schools.
    - grandalf 15y ago
      Uh, it's not like "problem kids" are necessarily getting a good deal from the public system. Special ed kids are forced to learn "academic" style knowledge rather than the practical life skills they actually need... and behavior problem kids use way more resources than they deserve and harm all the other kids in the process. Sadly, many kids in special ed programs and many behavior problem kids would not have problems in a different type of learning scenario... but the entrenched K-12 classroom, 30 students one teacher, hour long periods, boring books, exercises, silence, etc., is just a horrible fit for them.

hugh3 15y ago

If I buy a $30 bottle of pills that are supposed to make me lose weight, well I lost $30 and I learned my lesson. If I send my kid to a fucked up school it might take years for me to realize it was fucked up, and the stakes are much higher. Or you could send your kid to a public school which is also fucked up, but not have any other options because, hey, there aren't any other schools around, and nobody has any real incentive to fix it up.

Daniel_Newby 15y ago

Yet here I am, a successful software engineer, due in large part to a good public education. But were you given a good education, or were you smart enough to educate yourself given a modicum of education and a structured environment? The problem is that half of people are not smart enough. If you teach them to read using word recognition, they will not deduce phonics on their own, so their reading ability is permanently capped at a level suitable for a dull 8 year-old. The problem with zero-competition government schools is that when they get captured by a fad (word recognition, new math, no student left behind, etc.), it happens everywhere. There is no escape. And then 20 years later you get a new generation of teachers that are the product of bad teaching. The result is a 50 year cycle of mini dark ages. ... I was raised by my grandmother who is not educated at all. She would have been completely unequipped to make a good decision about such things. But would she want to make a good decision? Or to avoid a horrifically bad decision? The latter does not require education or sophistication, just the ability to ask about the relative rank of the nearby schools.

jshen 15y ago
"But were you given a good education, or were you smart enough to educate yourself given a modicum of education and a structured environment?" I didn't care about education until i was in my 20s. I would not have educated myself as a child or teenager. "The problem is that half of people are not smart enough" That sounds like a number you pulled out of your butt. Do you have any real statistics on that? "The problem with zero-competition government schools is that when they get captured by a fad (word recognition, new math, no student left behind, etc.), it happens everywhere. There is no escape. " I'm not sure I understand, but I'm pretty sure it's not true. Our schools are becoming more federalized, but that hasn't always been the case. States once had a lot of leeway in their education systems. "The latter does not require education or sophistication, just the ability to ask about the relative rank of the nearby schools." This isn't true. She'd have no idea what graphs mean, and even if she got it to some degree it would be very easy to mislead her. Think about it. Have you ever watched infomercials with absurd assertions that have graphs and numbers on them? You and I realize they are absurd, but most people don't. Think about it.
- 15y ago