5 ms·

Half an hour is fine, it’s really the cumulative volume. If a kid has 7 classes and each gives half an hour of homework, that’s 3.5 hours of homework. Add on th

Half an hour is fine, it’s really the cumulative volume. If a kid has 7 classes and each gives half an hour of homework, that’s 3.5 hours of homework. Add on the classes and they’re “working” 11.5 hours a day or 57.5 hours per week, every week. That would be concerning for adults, it’s well into burnout territory. Then we want to act surprised when kids don’t want to read on their own and only want to play video games, as if all us adults are working 60 hour weeks and then excited to keep doing our job in our free time. My novel approach would be to cut out a bunch of shit that kids don’t strictly need and hope that gives them the time and freedom to explore those things on their own. We do not need 12 years of history classes. They’re nice to know, but widely forgotten anyways. That could probably be cut to like 4; I do not and will never need to know about Sumerian burial rites. We do not need most of the flowery English classes. Reading comprehension is important, identifying symbolism is not. No one has ever asked me to check if an email contains a motif. Much of our science classes are generally useless; chemistry comes to mind. I have never, even once, used anything I learned in chemistry. I know too little to do anything practical with it, and yet it was a year long class. The other option would be to just kill summer break and use that time for teaching instead of homework. I don’t care for that, though. In a decade we’ll be back to having homework and summer break isn’t going to come back.

BizarroLand 2y ago
I don't know if I agree with your cynicism. One thing that standardized education does is guarantee that the majority of people will be somewhere findable within the middle of the bell curve of the social status quo. You know the same things that your neighbor knows, within a reasonable margin of error. Therefore, you have social compatibility with them. You feel that if you took the money out of the equation, you could rub shoulders with Biden and Bezos, Musk, Gates and Powell and not be too far out of your own depth. That's valuable, right? To get that, you had to go through the same 12 years of history and bored idiot English teachers telling you about symbolism and metaphor and giving you terrible 5 paragraph essays to fill out with the same dumb rote formula. If you look at the overall social outcome, for the majority, this is a good thing. If, however, it turns out that you are special and of a rare breed, then for your own children you should hire private tutors or school them overseas or do something somehow to cultivate their greatness. If you can show us a better path we'll start to move towards it, but until then accept the fact that there are thousands of minor and major pleasantries provided by standardized education that you get to enjoy every day as a matter of course thanks to the social conditioning it provided.
- everforward 2y ago
  > One thing that standardized education does is guarantee that the majority of people will be somewhere findable within the middle of the bell curve of the social status quo. I’m not saying that we completely get rid of public education, just that we stop appending things to it and pretending they’re important. Nobody remembers most of this alleged common ground anyways. Go ask around what the 5th amendment says, or what a high pH means, I’d be shocked if a quarter of people remembered. > You feel that if you took the money out of the equation, you could rub shoulders with Biden and Bezos, Musk, Gates and Powell and not be too far out of your own depth. Sure, if we’re talking about something covered in high school, but for any topic I’d be realistically interested in hearing them talk about, no. Why would me or Bill Gates want to discuss symbolism in Catcher in the Rye? I’m certainly not going to talk to Musk about chemistry; I’m doubtful he’s a through and through rocket engineer, but his tangential knowledge likely trumps my very limited recollection of valence bands and I have no idea how that relates to the energy density of rocket fuel. This is just a veneer of equality we tell ourselves. Sure, we’re all equal in the sense that we’ve largely ignored our high school education and probably haven’t really advanced our biology knowledge. That doesn’t imply that we’re all going to sit around and suddenly want to talk about that instead of rockets or operating systems or investment strategies; I am not on the same part of the bell curve for the topics that make them interesting. > If you can show us a better path we'll start to move towards it, but until then accept the fact that there are thousands of minor and major pleasantries provided by standardized education that you get to enjoy every day as a matter of course thanks to the social conditioning it provided. I don’t disagree there are pleasantries, but at what cost? We’re pushing children into working near-slavery workloads, with no recourse to change that, and our means of motivating them is primarily threatening their entire future if they don’t play along. It’s like the worst job in the world; Amazons warehouses look like a vacation comparatively. Children can’t switch schools on their own like adults can switch jobs. Children’s records follow them when they do switch, so they can’t escape even if they switch schools. I’ve never had HR records follow me across companies. And any employer that tried to control their employees by threatening to ruin the entire rest of their lives would have the NLRB crawl up their ass and build a branch office. We’re trading the happiness of children for what? Me and my neighbor having equally shitty recall of the French and Indian war? I still remember being in high school, and I still remember how miserable it was. I remember kids showing up with huge bags under their eyes because they had to go into “crunch time” and work til midnight because they got a bunch of big assignments at once. I remember meeting most of my high school classmates and how bright eyed and cheery we were. I also remember senior year, and how many of those smiles had faded into blank, exhausted stares. I remember the kids who had problems in their family lives whose personalities either disappeared or curdled into sour milk as they tried to cope with 60 hour weeks and just didn’t have the spare time and energy to try to process their parents divorce. I remember the suicides and addiction the most though. The kids that had bottomed out so hard they would do anything they could to escape the loop of stress, failure, threats about their future, and back to the beginning. The only options we offer them are death or complete desperation, and some kids picked one because they just couldn’t do it anymore. There were multiple suicides while I was in high school. 3 that I can recall, and one kid that ran away from home and overdosed while sleeping in a public park. It’s awful for the kids that die, and it’s awful for the kids left behind who now have to figure out how to emotionally process a friend’s suicide while working 60 hour weeks knowing full well that college admissions won’t give 2 shits about why their GPA was low that quarter. The highschool was ranked in the top 50 public schools in the US when I attended. This wasn’t a backwater dump wrecked by phasing out coal, this was a school held up as an example for other schools. I don’t find nearly enough value in making a neat bell curve to put kids through that. I wouldn’t put adults through that, and the existence of unions tells me that others feel the same way. Unions would pitch a huge fit over the least egregious of our expectations of children.
phone8675309 2y ago
I had AP classes in high school and a 20 hour a week part time job - easily 10 hours a day on the week days including homework and ongoing projects. So at 17 I was working 70 hours a week. College was more of the same - honors classes and projects. I graduated college and was like "I only have to work 40 hours a week? What's the catch?"
smegger001 2y ago
I would dissagree on the chemistry. A working knowledge of chemistry is quiet valuable in the kitchen. Understanding of the maillard reaction, or of caramelization is useful for making better tasting food. I keep pH strips in my kitchen for use in making ferments, understanding chemistry will make it intuitive which foods to cook on cast iron or not to because the acids will eat the pans seasoning. Knowledge of polymerization lets know you can wash the cast frying pan despite the folk wisdom to the contray.

BizarroLand 2y ago

I don't know if I agree with your cynicism. One thing that standardized education does is guarantee that the majority of people will be somewhere findable within the middle of the bell curve of the social status quo. You know the same things that your neighbor knows, within a reasonable margin of error. Therefore, you have social compatibility with them. You feel that if you took the money out of the equation, you could rub shoulders with Biden and Bezos, Musk, Gates and Powell and not be too far out of your own depth. That's valuable, right? To get that, you had to go through the same 12 years of history and bored idiot English teachers telling you about symbolism and metaphor and giving you terrible 5 paragraph essays to fill out with the same dumb rote formula. If you look at the overall social outcome, for the majority, this is a good thing. If, however, it turns out that you are special and of a rare breed, then for your own children you should hire private tutors or school them overseas or do something somehow to cultivate their greatness. If you can show us a better path we'll start to move towards it, but until then accept the fact that there are thousands of minor and major pleasantries provided by standardized education that you get to enjoy every day as a matter of course thanks to the social conditioning it provided.

everforward 2y ago
> One thing that standardized education does is guarantee that the majority of people will be somewhere findable within the middle of the bell curve of the social status quo. I’m not saying that we completely get rid of public education, just that we stop appending things to it and pretending they’re important. Nobody remembers most of this alleged common ground anyways. Go ask around what the 5th amendment says, or what a high pH means, I’d be shocked if a quarter of people remembered. > You feel that if you took the money out of the equation, you could rub shoulders with Biden and Bezos, Musk, Gates and Powell and not be too far out of your own depth. Sure, if we’re talking about something covered in high school, but for any topic I’d be realistically interested in hearing them talk about, no. Why would me or Bill Gates want to discuss symbolism in Catcher in the Rye? I’m certainly not going to talk to Musk about chemistry; I’m doubtful he’s a through and through rocket engineer, but his tangential knowledge likely trumps my very limited recollection of valence bands and I have no idea how that relates to the energy density of rocket fuel. This is just a veneer of equality we tell ourselves. Sure, we’re all equal in the sense that we’ve largely ignored our high school education and probably haven’t really advanced our biology knowledge. That doesn’t imply that we’re all going to sit around and suddenly want to talk about that instead of rockets or operating systems or investment strategies; I am not on the same part of the bell curve for the topics that make them interesting. > If you can show us a better path we'll start to move towards it, but until then accept the fact that there are thousands of minor and major pleasantries provided by standardized education that you get to enjoy every day as a matter of course thanks to the social conditioning it provided. I don’t disagree there are pleasantries, but at what cost? We’re pushing children into working near-slavery workloads, with no recourse to change that, and our means of motivating them is primarily threatening their entire future if they don’t play along. It’s like the worst job in the world; Amazons warehouses look like a vacation comparatively. Children can’t switch schools on their own like adults can switch jobs. Children’s records follow them when they do switch, so they can’t escape even if they switch schools. I’ve never had HR records follow me across companies. And any employer that tried to control their employees by threatening to ruin the entire rest of their lives would have the NLRB crawl up their ass and build a branch office. We’re trading the happiness of children for what? Me and my neighbor having equally shitty recall of the French and Indian war? I still remember being in high school, and I still remember how miserable it was. I remember kids showing up with huge bags under their eyes because they had to go into “crunch time” and work til midnight because they got a bunch of big assignments at once. I remember meeting most of my high school classmates and how bright eyed and cheery we were. I also remember senior year, and how many of those smiles had faded into blank, exhausted stares. I remember the kids who had problems in their family lives whose personalities either disappeared or curdled into sour milk as they tried to cope with 60 hour weeks and just didn’t have the spare time and energy to try to process their parents divorce. I remember the suicides and addiction the most though. The kids that had bottomed out so hard they would do anything they could to escape the loop of stress, failure, threats about their future, and back to the beginning. The only options we offer them are death or complete desperation, and some kids picked one because they just couldn’t do it anymore. There were multiple suicides while I was in high school. 3 that I can recall, and one kid that ran away from home and overdosed while sleeping in a public park. It’s awful for the kids that die, and it’s awful for the kids left behind who now have to figure out how to emotionally process a friend’s suicide while working 60 hour weeks knowing full well that college admissions won’t give 2 shits about why their GPA was low that quarter. The highschool was ranked in the top 50 public schools in the US when I attended. This wasn’t a backwater dump wrecked by phasing out coal, this was a school held up as an example for other schools. I don’t find nearly enough value in making a neat bell curve to put kids through that. I wouldn’t put adults through that, and the existence of unions tells me that others feel the same way. Unions would pitch a huge fit over the least egregious of our expectations of children.

phone8675309 2y ago

I had AP classes in high school and a 20 hour a week part time job - easily 10 hours a day on the week days including homework and ongoing projects. So at 17 I was working 70 hours a week. College was more of the same - honors classes and projects. I graduated college and was like "I only have to work 40 hours a week? What's the catch?"

smegger001 2y ago

I would dissagree on the chemistry. A working knowledge of chemistry is quiet valuable in the kitchen. Understanding of the maillard reaction, or of caramelization is useful for making better tasting food. I keep pH strips in my kitchen for use in making ferments, understanding chemistry will make it intuitive which foods to cook on cast iron or not to because the acids will eat the pans seasoning. Knowledge of polymerization lets know you can wash the cast frying pan despite the folk wisdom to the contray.