7 ms·

I grew up in a small town with an "above average" public school: nice buildings, all classes were ~20 students or less, etc. Yet my experience has led me to be

I grew up in a small town with an "above average" public school: nice buildings, all classes were ~20 students or less, etc. Yet my experience has led me to believe that K-12 didn't matter. I learned to read at home, so they didn't give me that. I was constantly stifled; from my perspective as a child, I saw that my own interests were almost systematically kept out of reach (as an adult, I can see far further as to why and how this situation came to be - but at the time, all I could do is to see their chains and rebel). I was routinely in trouble from sixth grade on up. Remember those end-of-year class trips you went on? They never let me go because I was such trouble! I graduated high school with a D average. The one thing they did do is to set back my educational development by about three or four years. Once I was finally free, I had time to grow unhampered. I discovered that learning was actually the opposite of prison, and that it had everything to do with the things I was interested in. I studied all kinds of things independently, and when I was ready, I took a couple of calculus courses at a community college to prove that I was serious. On that basis, I was able to gain acceptance at a well-respected university, where I majored in molecular biology and graduated with distinction. If proponents of public education really cared about what was best for me, they would have left me alone. My experience shows that a K-12 education wasn't necessary to prepare me for college, or for life. Edit: I'm not saying that no child benefits from their K-12 education - it is clear that some do. But why must it be involuntary? What justifies the laws that compelled my parents to send me to a place they knew (at some level) was hurting me?

scarmig 15y ago
One thing I really like as a developer is that I have the ability to work part-time and from home if I choose to. If I ever have children, I'll definitely do this so I can home school my kid. Public education is efficient at what it does, but not optimal compared to an alternative world that allows all children to have a specially tailored and flexible curriculum.
patio11 15y ago
* What justifies the laws that compelled my parents to send me to a place they knew (at some level) was hurting me?* Benign paternalism which says "X% of students really dislike the experience of attending school. The average case for dropouts is 'totally $&$#ed.' We'll institutionalize them now because it is a darn sight cheaper than institutionalizing them later, permanently."
- maxharris 15y ago
  But isn't it a mistake to call it "benign paternalism"? It wasn't benign to me. Children, even though they aren't capable of fending for themselves apart from their parents, are still people. Isn't the entire point to do what's best for each child? Isn't it commonly understood that we're all different in positive ways, and that this is something to celebrate, rather than to blithely crush?
  - patio11 15y ago
    Benign paternalism means "we're not acting of malice", not that every well-off kid with great options and social support networks will have their heart sing hymns of praise at the notion of being forced to attend class every day. It was an imposition on you to go to school. At the time, it may even have felt like a major imposition. You'll get over it. We imposed upon your time because e.g. a poor kid in your local inner city who prefers hanging to all that books n' shit would, with about 100% certainty, durably ruin their life given the option not to attend school. It is very hard to "get over" being poor, illiterate, with a criminal record, etc.
    - maxharris 15y ago
      I didn't become the person I am today as a result of anyone else's effort but my own. No one took my exams for me, nor did they read my textbooks and do the mental work of integrating facts and diagrams and the like. No one made me love my wife, or decide to get married. No one else decided that I would learn or do anything that did me any good. Why do you assume I was a well-off kid, or that I had great a social support network? There were a couple of times (early on) when my parents were flat-out broke. I didn't wear new clothes to school until I was thirteen. Even the poor inner city kid has free choice. It is simply not true that all people will deterministically fail given the same adverse circumstances. Why did Michael Faraday rise to become a prominent physicist and chemist, despite his poor background and total lack of social support? At adulthood, despite whatever adverse conditions endured previously, all people are responsible for their own lives (excepting people who truly cannot help it, i.e., those with grave mental illnesses).
Alex3917 15y ago
"Yet my experience has led me to believe that K-12 didn't matter." The reason for this is that the more wealthy and highly educated your parents are, the less you learn in school as a kid, even though you likely go to a better school. (Or, to be more precise, you learn roughly the same amount as low-SES kids in absolute terms, but it's a much smaller percentage of your total learning.)
logjam 15y ago
You are consistently drawing questionable conclusions from N=1 samples here, and in your follow up comments.
- maxharris 15y ago
  If you haven't met anyone with an experience somewhat like mine, ask around. My story isn't the common case, but I'm not the only one. At any rate, what does that matter? Why should the interests of one child (or adult) necessarily conflict with that of any other, or group of them? Is the goal that everyone should flourish the most from wherever they start, or is it that they should end up with the most identical result possible, regardless of the individuals? Edit: remember that a statistical approach is only valid in a certain context. For example, you only need evidence that a judge has taken bribes from the Mafia once to know that he's corrupt. There are other contexts where statistics are vital (in the special sciences, for example - I think of quantum probability, or statistical thermodynamics), but I don't believe that statistics properly enter into the fundamental science of philosophy and its branches (Plato, so far as I am aware, did not rely on statistical concepts to discover that there's such a thing as metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and then politics). If statistics were a fundamental science (intellectually speaking), on what basis could we justify its correct uses vs. incorrect ones?
silverbax88 15y ago
In many ways my scholastic experience mirrored yours, and it wasn't until years later that I learned our entire method of school education for k-12 is based on creating industrial factory workers. Sit still, quietly do your work (which means memorization) and do your time (x hours per day for x days per week for x years), and you will get your degree, which would lead to a job working in a factory where you can do the same until retirement. Our economy has changed, our culture has changed, and the schools are changing (I see that with my own daughter's experience), but for many people my age, we suffered through the change without support. Now, the really big elephant in the room is the collegiate education system, which has become a system of paying exorbitant sums of money for a degree that will never pay for itself, for most students.
- rimantas 15y ago
  which means memorization I wonder, why do people have problem with this. The trend seems to be a desire to learn without puttint any effort into that. I doubt that's possible at all.
  - ams6110 15y ago
    I agree. Memorization of basic facts creates the foundation upon which more abstract concepts can be understood and developed.
    - joshAg 15y ago
      This is entirely true, but i've found that schools also focus on rote memorization of useless or nonfoundational facts. For example, in third grade my class had to memorize the multiplication table up to 12x12, but we didn't have to memorize that multiplication is really just a shorthand for repeated addition, so by eighth grade there were kids in my class that didn't understand why I wrote 6x5 instead of 5+5+5+5+5+5 in certain cases; they were also amazed that I managed to get the right answer even though i didn't do the problem the right way. We also had to memorize the squares of every number up to 20, but we didn't have to memorize the fact that squaring is a shorthand for multiplication of some number by itself, so some kids in my class could tell you that 15 squared was 225, but had to use paper and pencil to tell you what 15*15 was. And don't even get me started on kids who knew that 9x7=63, but had to use pencil, paper, and long division to tell you that 63%9=7.
tseabrooks 15y ago
I had a very similar, if not identical, experience only I went to a fairly poor elementary / middle school and a good high school. I finished school with a D average.. and managed to still get into a private college on the strength of my test scores and writing sample. I've since excelled at college and graduate school. I spend a lot of time these days wondering if I should home school my children. I learned so much more at home than I did at school. I'd hate to give my children the type of experience I did in public school.
- tokenadult 15y ago
  I spend a lot of time these days wondering if I should home school my children. All four of my children have always been homeschooled until this week. My oldest is grown up, living on his own on his own dime while he finishes up his college degree program--or perhaps founds a start-up before finishing his degree. (He is an occasional participant here, mostly in threads different from the threads I post in.) My second son began attending our local public high school the day after United States Labor Day. So he is in his third day of classroom school as I type this. He commented last evening "I know it's only been two days, but I already notice that I can learn faster when I homeschooling than at school." He and my wife and I will continue to discuss what trade-offs are most important in making his educational plans. My third son was just driven by my wife this morning across our sprawling metropolitan area for a joint homeschoolers class on physics, taught by a Ph.D. physicist who takes time off from engineering and inventing work at a big corporation to teach the class. There are a lot of very interesting learning opportunities for homeschoolers these days. After edit: I just saw this response to the submitted article that opened the thread here http://www.parentatthehelm.com/6666/homeschooling-parent-responds-to-disneys-teacher-of-the-year/ http://www.parentatthehelm.com/6666/homeschooling-parent-res... from a homeschooling parent with even more experience than I have. Her perspective is her own.
- jff 15y ago
  I can't imagine withholding from my children the type of experience I had in public school. For 8 hours a day I was away from home, among dozens of people my age. I had access to a pretty good library, far better than my small town's public library. I played a school-owned bassoon (these would typically cost over $3000) in our concert band, learned bass drum for marching band, got to go on band trips. I learned leadership and co-operation with a variety of different types of people--ranging from straight-A Mormon girls to poor white kids to Mexican wanna-be gangsters--in class, in band (especially during band camp), and as the eventual captain of the cross country team. I took cooking courses, got to make nitrocellulose in our reasonably well-outfitted science department, dissected pigs, and build my own cluster as an independent study project. All in the public school of my little town of 2,000 people, with around 60 in my graduating class. Classes did not challenge me, but I buckled down, listened to lecture, did my homework in class, and read when there was nothing else to do. As everyone here is so fond of stating, if you're "too smart for school" you can teach yourself in the evenings or even during class--but don't rob your child of the opportunity to try new things, meet people, and for god's sake GET OUT OF THE FUCKING HOUSE FOR A WHILE.
rdouble 15y ago
In a small town the school system serves two primary purposes, neither of which are education. It's primarily a way to employ local people. The sports teams provide the main form of entertainment in the town outside of alcohol and television.
AlexandrB 15y ago
The truth is that the public school system is not designed to cater to the outliers (both above & below average) in any meaningful way. You can blame this on the schools, but it seems to me that it's at least partially the result of practical considerations. For example, how do you measure the knowledge someone possesses in a cost-effective way? Schools have settled on standardized tests; the worst method, except all the others. And this is hardly unique to schools - consider the typical software job interview questions. Once the end goal (passing tests) is in place, there is incentive for schools is to teach their students content that might show up on the test. If your interests align with this content, great, otherwise you're forced to slog through it anyways. One solution I've heard is specializing sooner, but for many kids making the decision this early might prematurely lock them into a career they don't actually like or that has poor job prospects. Sure, some will be able to make the correct decision, but how do you decide who is able to do this? Standardized maturity tests? I think the root problem is that to really make the right decision for each child there has to be constant involvement with the child's development from an individual educator. This kind of attention is not cheap and is the antithesis of the current CYA direction that educational institutions are taking.

scarmig 15y ago

One thing I really like as a developer is that I have the ability to work part-time and from home if I choose to. If I ever have children, I'll definitely do this so I can home school my kid. Public education is efficient at what it does, but not optimal compared to an alternative world that allows all children to have a specially tailored and flexible curriculum.

patio11 15y ago

* What justifies the laws that compelled my parents to send me to a place they knew (at some level) was hurting me?* Benign paternalism which says "X% of students really dislike the experience of attending school. The average case for dropouts is 'totally $&$#ed.' We'll institutionalize them now because it is a darn sight cheaper than institutionalizing them later, permanently."

maxharris 15y ago
But isn't it a mistake to call it "benign paternalism"? It wasn't benign to me. Children, even though they aren't capable of fending for themselves apart from their parents, are still people. Isn't the entire point to do what's best for each child? Isn't it commonly understood that we're all different in positive ways, and that this is something to celebrate, rather than to blithely crush?
- patio11 15y ago
  Benign paternalism means "we're not acting of malice", not that every well-off kid with great options and social support networks will have their heart sing hymns of praise at the notion of being forced to attend class every day. It was an imposition on you to go to school. At the time, it may even have felt like a major imposition. You'll get over it. We imposed upon your time because e.g. a poor kid in your local inner city who prefers hanging to all that books n' shit would, with about 100% certainty, durably ruin their life given the option not to attend school. It is very hard to "get over" being poor, illiterate, with a criminal record, etc.
  - maxharris 15y ago
    I didn't become the person I am today as a result of anyone else's effort but my own. No one took my exams for me, nor did they read my textbooks and do the mental work of integrating facts and diagrams and the like. No one made me love my wife, or decide to get married. No one else decided that I would learn or do anything that did me any good. Why do you assume I was a well-off kid, or that I had great a social support network? There were a couple of times (early on) when my parents were flat-out broke. I didn't wear new clothes to school until I was thirteen. Even the poor inner city kid has free choice. It is simply not true that all people will deterministically fail given the same adverse circumstances. Why did Michael Faraday rise to become a prominent physicist and chemist, despite his poor background and total lack of social support? At adulthood, despite whatever adverse conditions endured previously, all people are responsible for their own lives (excepting people who truly cannot help it, i.e., those with grave mental illnesses).

Alex3917 15y ago

"Yet my experience has led me to believe that K-12 didn't matter." The reason for this is that the more wealthy and highly educated your parents are, the less you learn in school as a kid, even though you likely go to a better school. (Or, to be more precise, you learn roughly the same amount as low-SES kids in absolute terms, but it's a much smaller percentage of your total learning.)

logjam 15y ago

You are consistently drawing questionable conclusions from N=1 samples here, and in your follow up comments.

maxharris 15y ago
If you haven't met anyone with an experience somewhat like mine, ask around. My story isn't the common case, but I'm not the only one. At any rate, what does that matter? Why should the interests of one child (or adult) necessarily conflict with that of any other, or group of them? Is the goal that everyone should flourish the most from wherever they start, or is it that they should end up with the most identical result possible, regardless of the individuals? Edit: remember that a statistical approach is only valid in a certain context. For example, you only need evidence that a judge has taken bribes from the Mafia once to know that he's corrupt. There are other contexts where statistics are vital (in the special sciences, for example - I think of quantum probability, or statistical thermodynamics), but I don't believe that statistics properly enter into the fundamental science of philosophy and its branches (Plato, so far as I am aware, did not rely on statistical concepts to discover that there's such a thing as metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and then politics). If statistics were a fundamental science (intellectually speaking), on what basis could we justify its correct uses vs. incorrect ones?

silverbax88 15y ago

In many ways my scholastic experience mirrored yours, and it wasn't until years later that I learned our entire method of school education for k-12 is based on creating industrial factory workers. Sit still, quietly do your work (which means memorization) and do your time (x hours per day for x days per week for x years), and you will get your degree, which would lead to a job working in a factory where you can do the same until retirement. Our economy has changed, our culture has changed, and the schools are changing (I see that with my own daughter's experience), but for many people my age, we suffered through the change without support. Now, the really big elephant in the room is the collegiate education system, which has become a system of paying exorbitant sums of money for a degree that will never pay for itself, for most students.

rimantas 15y ago
which means memorization I wonder, why do people have problem with this. The trend seems to be a desire to learn without puttint any effort into that. I doubt that's possible at all.
- ams6110 15y ago
  I agree. Memorization of basic facts creates the foundation upon which more abstract concepts can be understood and developed.
  - joshAg 15y ago
    This is entirely true, but i've found that schools also focus on rote memorization of useless or nonfoundational facts. For example, in third grade my class had to memorize the multiplication table up to 12x12, but we didn't have to memorize that multiplication is really just a shorthand for repeated addition, so by eighth grade there were kids in my class that didn't understand why I wrote 6x5 instead of 5+5+5+5+5+5 in certain cases; they were also amazed that I managed to get the right answer even though i didn't do the problem the right way. We also had to memorize the squares of every number up to 20, but we didn't have to memorize the fact that squaring is a shorthand for multiplication of some number by itself, so some kids in my class could tell you that 15 squared was 225, but had to use paper and pencil to tell you what 15*15 was. And don't even get me started on kids who knew that 9x7=63, but had to use pencil, paper, and long division to tell you that 63%9=7.

tseabrooks 15y ago

I had a very similar, if not identical, experience only I went to a fairly poor elementary / middle school and a good high school. I finished school with a D average.. and managed to still get into a private college on the strength of my test scores and writing sample. I've since excelled at college and graduate school. I spend a lot of time these days wondering if I should home school my children. I learned so much more at home than I did at school. I'd hate to give my children the type of experience I did in public school.

tokenadult 15y ago
I spend a lot of time these days wondering if I should home school my children. All four of my children have always been homeschooled until this week. My oldest is grown up, living on his own on his own dime while he finishes up his college degree program--or perhaps founds a start-up before finishing his degree. (He is an occasional participant here, mostly in threads different from the threads I post in.) My second son began attending our local public high school the day after United States Labor Day. So he is in his third day of classroom school as I type this. He commented last evening "I know it's only been two days, but I already notice that I can learn faster when I homeschooling than at school." He and my wife and I will continue to discuss what trade-offs are most important in making his educational plans. My third son was just driven by my wife this morning across our sprawling metropolitan area for a joint homeschoolers class on physics, taught by a Ph.D. physicist who takes time off from engineering and inventing work at a big corporation to teach the class. There are a lot of very interesting learning opportunities for homeschoolers these days. After edit: I just saw this response to the submitted article that opened the thread here http://www.parentatthehelm.com/6666/homeschooling-parent-responds-to-disneys-teacher-of-the-year/ http://www.parentatthehelm.com/6666/homeschooling-parent-res... from a homeschooling parent with even more experience than I have. Her perspective is her own.
jff 15y ago
I can't imagine withholding from my children the type of experience I had in public school. For 8 hours a day I was away from home, among dozens of people my age. I had access to a pretty good library, far better than my small town's public library. I played a school-owned bassoon (these would typically cost over $3000) in our concert band, learned bass drum for marching band, got to go on band trips. I learned leadership and co-operation with a variety of different types of people--ranging from straight-A Mormon girls to poor white kids to Mexican wanna-be gangsters--in class, in band (especially during band camp), and as the eventual captain of the cross country team. I took cooking courses, got to make nitrocellulose in our reasonably well-outfitted science department, dissected pigs, and build my own cluster as an independent study project. All in the public school of my little town of 2,000 people, with around 60 in my graduating class. Classes did not challenge me, but I buckled down, listened to lecture, did my homework in class, and read when there was nothing else to do. As everyone here is so fond of stating, if you're "too smart for school" you can teach yourself in the evenings or even during class--but don't rob your child of the opportunity to try new things, meet people, and for god's sake GET OUT OF THE FUCKING HOUSE FOR A WHILE.

rdouble 15y ago

In a small town the school system serves two primary purposes, neither of which are education. It's primarily a way to employ local people. The sports teams provide the main form of entertainment in the town outside of alcohol and television.

AlexandrB 15y ago

The truth is that the public school system is not designed to cater to the outliers (both above & below average) in any meaningful way. You can blame this on the schools, but it seems to me that it's at least partially the result of practical considerations. For example, how do you measure the knowledge someone possesses in a cost-effective way? Schools have settled on standardized tests; the worst method, except all the others. And this is hardly unique to schools - consider the typical software job interview questions. Once the end goal (passing tests) is in place, there is incentive for schools is to teach their students content that might show up on the test. If your interests align with this content, great, otherwise you're forced to slog through it anyways. One solution I've heard is specializing sooner, but for many kids making the decision this early might prematurely lock them into a career they don't actually like or that has poor job prospects. Sure, some will be able to make the correct decision, but how do you decide who is able to do this? Standardized maturity tests? I think the root problem is that to really make the right decision for each child there has to be constant involvement with the child's development from an individual educator. This kind of attention is not cheap and is the antithesis of the current CYA direction that educational institutions are taking.