14 ms·

IMO, you're thinking about this backwards. It's good that public school exposes children to many subjects - hopefully most of them. So that they can discover i

IMO, you're thinking about this backwards. It's good that public school exposes children to many subjects - hopefully most of them. So that they can discover if they click with one of them. The real danger is that someone never gets exposed to a subject at all. College is the place to specialize in a subject.

energy123 2y ago
The exposure to subjects isn't the problem, this is the problem: https://paulgraham.com/lesson.html https://paulgraham.com/lesson.html
Onavo 2y ago
But if their overall SAT scores aren't good enough to get into the elite colleges, won't we just be denying the eccentric geniuses?
- coliveira 2y ago
  Well, the eccentric geniuses have already left the system... Frankly, if you go through the last 30 years, how many such geniuses you can find in American universities? I only see a little bit higher than average, so it seems that the system has already eliminated the geniuses.
  - clipsy 2y ago
    > I only see a little bit higher than average Could you share your source for statistics on "eccentric geniuses"?
- theGnuMe 2y ago
  I like to look at the backgrounds of the people who win the Nobel prize. Everyone is interdisciplinary. For college and life in general, I think main skill needed is emotional regulation. Everything else flows from that.
- Spooky23 2y ago
  The eccentric geniuses at these elite schools will end up doing stupid shit for a bank.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
brutal_true_101 2y ago
Most colleges now inundate students with painful core classes that go on into senior year. It's getting ridiculous.
- Arainach 2y ago
  College is not trade school. College exists not to generate people who are masters of Framework v3.0, but to generate people who can quickly learn to use whatever tool they're given and who can connect the dots to solve generic problems. Part of that is exposure to a broad range of ideas. Part of that is showing that you can learn about and deliver results on things you're not necessarily excited about.
  - kiba 2y ago
    I don't think college teaches people how to learn, and if they do it's only by accident. There's a body of knowledge on how to teach and how to self educate and it takes a long time for systems to incorporate these knowledge.
  - esafak 2y ago
    Isn't that what high school is for? What's the difference then?
    - WgaqPdNr7PGLGVW 2y ago
      High school has been dumbed down and is mostly a waste of time.
    - BurningFrog 2y ago
      Most of school is primarily baby sitting these days, if were being really real.
    - TimTheTinker 2y ago
      That is what high school is, for families where parents want their kids to learn to learn and are well-resourced enough to teach the kids themselves or pay someone to teach.
seiferteric 2y ago
Exposure is good, but success in school requires you to be successful in these subjects as well. I have had similar thoughts recently as OP thinking about what I want for my young kids and what my experiences in school were. Being _really_ good in one thing should allow you to make up for being subpar in other areas, but it doesn't. You can only get an A (or A+) in math for example, even if your a genius. But maybe you should be able to get an A++++ that makes up for D's or F's in English for example and still get accepted into top universities. We need a system that accommodates spiky people better.
- irjustin 2y ago
  > Exposure is good, but success in school requires you to be successful in these subjects as well. Being specific, it's not school, it's what school grants you i.e. a paying job. The higher paying, thusly more coveted jobs, generally filter against good grades which then the requirement pushes downwards into schools because, at scale, it's a decent system; leveraging the schools to help decide who is good. > Being _really_ good in one thing should allow you to make up for being subpar in other areas, but it doesn't. I counter with, if you are "_really_" good, it shows because you truly are a genius and you get fast tracked on that subject, but I think your "_really_" is actually just "_pretty_" and you're trying to include more than the 1 in 100 million. To directly answer your point, for the "slightly smarter than everyone else" my middle school allowed kids to attend highschool in specific subjects and then highschool into the nearby community college and considered "harder/more prestigious" than the AP programs - admittedly only in math for this latter part. The school was in a more affluent neighborhood so I recognize the privilege.
  - WgaqPdNr7PGLGVW 2y ago
    > but I think your "_really_" is actually just "_pretty_" and you're trying to include more than the 1 in 100 million. I don't quite understand your point. Pretty good still puts you far ahead of the average. I could easily handle second year college maths and computer science while in high school. And I couldn't hold a candle to Ramanujan. I still needed to do well in my other courses in order to be able to get into my chosen college.
babyent 2y ago
I'm honestly no genius but I can relate to R in that one way. As a child I used to get all As and even got into a Stanford pre-collegiate program as a kid where I learned C++ and geometry. Unfortunately after a surgery in 9th grade that left me unable to attend school for 3-4 months and just terrible QOL for about a year my grades slipped (went from A+ studen to C grade student) and I basically became average. I lost all interest in most subjects at school due to depression and other things. My goal as a child was to get a Stanford JD/MD MBA (lol I know..), and today I have only a bachelors from a low ranked state college in business. I enjoyed programming so much as a kid that one summer, so later in life I ended up going back to it. Taught myself enough in a month to get on some projects as a swe. Later I got lucky working at a unicorn company that IPO'd. Now I am trying to build my own company and see how far I can get as a solo founder. Sometimes I wonder how my life would have turned out if it wasn't for that injury, but oh well. Shit happens, right? Jeez sorry for the sob story but it feels good to get it off.
- jyunwai 2y ago
  Another student at a martial arts gym unexpectedly gave me some advice that is somewhat common, but had an impact because the words came at the right time and from the right person: he kindly told me to never judge myself based on the person that I might have been, and to instead compare myself now to how I was a month ago. I believe that any person here with an inkling of relatable technical experience can greatly appreciate the work you've been doing. Software development can be complicated and frustrating, especially when things don't work as you expect them to (but then, you learn and become better). Leading a business is very difficult, often due to sources of problems you don't expect (such as regulatory and legal requirements, accounting, and publicity). Some people cruise on to great careers without facing many barriers. But many others face unexpected setbacks and have to manage them. A close friend of mine was living an overall good life until it was profoundly disrupted by a civil war in his home country. But he made it to my country where he began his undergraduate degree at a great university that he loves. A past colleague of mine spent much of her early twenties managing physical disability, but successfully received treatment and went on to graduate with an engineering degree. She has since landed a position at a top aerospace company that she really wanted to work at. You are setting up a good life for yourself. Many people lack that kind of drive or struggle with executing ideas; several people I personally know would be very proud to one day experience just a small part of your successes so far.
kiba 2y ago
I missed out on theater and improvisational comedy only because I pigeonholed myself as a computer nerd and engineering type and almost nothing else. I found that I have a certain knack for it and really enjoyed performing.
oh_my_goodness 2y ago
It is good to expose them. But that doesn't mean the previous point is backwards.
trgn 2y ago
> College is the place to specialize in a subject. In Europe maybe, but in America a lot of students receive their general purpose liberal arts education in College, and will then specialize later with a post graduate degree.
- bonzini 2y ago
  So what is high school for? Also does the above apply also to the most selective and renowned institutions, or only to community colleges?
  - trgn 2y ago
    High school is preparing to be able to do a college education? A bachelor's isn't that trivial most of the time. I'd say applies to most colleges, of any size. Community colleges tend to be more like trade schools
    - bonzini 2y ago
      In Europe high school is when you get a generic education, and in college you choose your topic. So if you are a languages major you'll have no more math, if you're a STEM major you'll have no more history, if you're a philosophy major you might have logic and some history but no physics or linear algebra, and so on. I studied computer science (M.Eng.) and I had to provide an English certification as a foreign language, but that was it. The only non-computer science, non-math, non-electronics courses were one semester of chemistry, one of economics and three of physics (which you could say is related to electronics though). So basically 15-20%. Having to study more history or biology would have been a huge waste of time in a CS university, and I say that as someone who did more Latin and Greek than math and physics in high school.
llm_trw 2y ago
To quote an artist friend: exposure is good until you die from it. Being forced to do subjects that you hate is not exposure, it is being forced to do things which you are completely unsuited for. I would go so far as saying that being forced to take music until 7th grade put me off any musical pursuits for the next 20 years. The less said about the torture disguised as education that is PE the better.
- jajko 2y ago
  Yeah that's a common result of forced learning by lets be polite mediocre folks. Utter hate of the whole topic for easily 2 decades too. Then finding slowly my own personal way back to them, despite school. If anything, current (and this is valid globally) school system is not designed at excellence at its core, its about raising an army of obedient but not too stupid citizens. And its not missed expectation, just look at what type of work they expect to fill in. Don't expect massive changes unless society changes itself. Some narrow excellence is not what our society at large values, those few that made it through made it despite their environment.
db48x 2y ago
Specialization does begin earlier than that. Most high schools in the US have advanced classes that students can opt in to, and there is the AP program. Personally I think that we could do better by tailoring every student’s education to their abilities. Put in simplest possible terms, we could arrange classes by complexity rather than by year. Have one class for addition and subtraction, another for multiplication and division, then geometry, algebra, etc, etc. Then let students graduate from one to the next based on proven ability rather than by age. Do the same for language, history, etc. Let every student proceed through the courses at their own speed.
- angled 2y ago
  One such school: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AME_School https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AME_School The kids that went there … some succeeded, some really struggled to adjust to other schools and environments.
  - db48x 2y ago
    > In 1992, there was a proposal to fully integrate the AME school with the ACT Government school system. However the idea floundered after the ACT Teachers Union amongst other things, knocked the idea on the head, due to compatibility issues. It felt the idea of having a school principal having selection over teaching staff was outside the scope of the Unions control. It came out fighting against the proposal. Now there’s a depressing thing to read. Teacher’s unions are the worst.
- kyawzazaw 2y ago
  A bit too late if you are comparing to football level of specialization to produce people like messi
eviks 2y ago
"Exposure" would be spending much much less time on those subjects, especially the free home time. Then the number of subjects is practically infinite, so expecting "most" is just as unrealistic (and colleges also continue this "exposure")
paulpauper 2y ago
It's good that public school exposes children to many subjects - hopefully most of them. So that they can discover if they click with one of them. The real danger is that someone never gets exposed to a subject at all. College is the place to specialize in a subject. then why does this 'discovery process' have to continue into college? That was the OP's point. When money and time is on the line, let adults decide what they want to study. An 18-year-old is no longer a child.
echelon 2y ago
> It's good that public school exposes children to many subjects - hopefully most of them. So that they can discover if they click with one of them. The real danger is that someone never gets exposed to a subject at all. College is the place to specialize in a subject. While some exposure is probably better on average than none, in some instances bad experiences can trip the fuse on developing an interest. The rote nature of canned education, bad teachers, bad parents, or bullies can turn kids off of subjects they might otherwise come to love.
TeeMassive 2y ago
Is it "good", certainly, but I don't think most of the stuff is worth it in the technological world. Let kids follow their interests, keep the general stuff to a minimum and you will have a lot more of happy kids with who excel more.
flockonus 2y ago
To overemphasize in a complex topic as good | bad is overly simplistic and doesn't help at all. Hardly anything is complete good or completely bad, it's meaningless to make a black or white point.
bluecalm 2y ago
The problem is that there is too much of this general exposure and specialization happens way too late once the brain is not as good at learning anymore. People peak in competitive fields when they are in early 20s or even before that. In our education system we are not even allowed to do the job before we are like 25 or later. There is only so much you can learn sitting in a chair listening to a professor. It's a completely backwards system that limits potential of about anyone with average+ intelligence.
littlestymaar 2y ago
It's good that schools expose children to many subjects. It's not good at all that school reward being OK in every subject more than being really good in a handful of them. The school system is a mediocrity factory.
is_true 2y ago
A subject "clicking" is strongly dependent on the teacher.
DragonStrength 2y ago
The miss, which in my state has changed recently, was kicking kids out eventually who failed one subject but were succeeding in others. Sure, that kid isn't going to an Ivy League school, but there's value in finding ways to make up for what they aren't getting versus producing a high school dropout with bleak prospects in today's society.
thr0waway001 2y ago
Agreed. Given that most people are not exceptional at anything it makes more sense to give them a well rounded education by exposing them to a lot of subjects to see what takes. And all the exceptional people, well, they're just gonna have to use their gifts to push through the monotony of the things they don't like while still pursing their passion. Unless they are born wealthy or find a benefactor so they can go to private school or a gifted person school, that caters to their specific needs, it's the best we can do to serve everyone.

energy123 2y ago

The exposure to subjects isn't the problem, this is the problem: https://paulgraham.com/lesson.html https://paulgraham.com/lesson.html

Onavo 2y ago

But if their overall SAT scores aren't good enough to get into the elite colleges, won't we just be denying the eccentric geniuses?

coliveira 2y ago
Well, the eccentric geniuses have already left the system... Frankly, if you go through the last 30 years, how many such geniuses you can find in American universities? I only see a little bit higher than average, so it seems that the system has already eliminated the geniuses.
- clipsy 2y ago
  > I only see a little bit higher than average Could you share your source for statistics on "eccentric geniuses"?
theGnuMe 2y ago
I like to look at the backgrounds of the people who win the Nobel prize. Everyone is interdisciplinary. For college and life in general, I think main skill needed is emotional regulation. Everything else flows from that.
Spooky23 2y ago
The eccentric geniuses at these elite schools will end up doing stupid shit for a bank.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

brutal_true_101 2y ago

Most colleges now inundate students with painful core classes that go on into senior year. It's getting ridiculous.

Arainach 2y ago
College is not trade school. College exists not to generate people who are masters of Framework v3.0, but to generate people who can quickly learn to use whatever tool they're given and who can connect the dots to solve generic problems. Part of that is exposure to a broad range of ideas. Part of that is showing that you can learn about and deliver results on things you're not necessarily excited about.
- kiba 2y ago
  I don't think college teaches people how to learn, and if they do it's only by accident. There's a body of knowledge on how to teach and how to self educate and it takes a long time for systems to incorporate these knowledge.
- esafak 2y ago
  Isn't that what high school is for? What's the difference then?
  - WgaqPdNr7PGLGVW 2y ago
    High school has been dumbed down and is mostly a waste of time.
  - BurningFrog 2y ago
    Most of school is primarily baby sitting these days, if were being really real.
  - TimTheTinker 2y ago
    That is what high school is, for families where parents want their kids to learn to learn and are well-resourced enough to teach the kids themselves or pay someone to teach.

seiferteric 2y ago

Exposure is good, but success in school requires you to be successful in these subjects as well. I have had similar thoughts recently as OP thinking about what I want for my young kids and what my experiences in school were. Being _really_ good in one thing should allow you to make up for being subpar in other areas, but it doesn't. You can only get an A (or A+) in math for example, even if your a genius. But maybe you should be able to get an A++++ that makes up for D's or F's in English for example and still get accepted into top universities. We need a system that accommodates spiky people better.

irjustin 2y ago
> Exposure is good, but success in school requires you to be successful in these subjects as well. Being specific, it's not school, it's what school grants you i.e. a paying job. The higher paying, thusly more coveted jobs, generally filter against good grades which then the requirement pushes downwards into schools because, at scale, it's a decent system; leveraging the schools to help decide who is good. > Being _really_ good in one thing should allow you to make up for being subpar in other areas, but it doesn't. I counter with, if you are "_really_" good, it shows because you truly are a genius and you get fast tracked on that subject, but I think your "_really_" is actually just "_pretty_" and you're trying to include more than the 1 in 100 million. To directly answer your point, for the "slightly smarter than everyone else" my middle school allowed kids to attend highschool in specific subjects and then highschool into the nearby community college and considered "harder/more prestigious" than the AP programs - admittedly only in math for this latter part. The school was in a more affluent neighborhood so I recognize the privilege.
- WgaqPdNr7PGLGVW 2y ago
  > but I think your "_really_" is actually just "_pretty_" and you're trying to include more than the 1 in 100 million. I don't quite understand your point. Pretty good still puts you far ahead of the average. I could easily handle second year college maths and computer science while in high school. And I couldn't hold a candle to Ramanujan. I still needed to do well in my other courses in order to be able to get into my chosen college.

babyent 2y ago

I'm honestly no genius but I can relate to R in that one way. As a child I used to get all As and even got into a Stanford pre-collegiate program as a kid where I learned C++ and geometry. Unfortunately after a surgery in 9th grade that left me unable to attend school for 3-4 months and just terrible QOL for about a year my grades slipped (went from A+ studen to C grade student) and I basically became average. I lost all interest in most subjects at school due to depression and other things. My goal as a child was to get a Stanford JD/MD MBA (lol I know..), and today I have only a bachelors from a low ranked state college in business. I enjoyed programming so much as a kid that one summer, so later in life I ended up going back to it. Taught myself enough in a month to get on some projects as a swe. Later I got lucky working at a unicorn company that IPO'd. Now I am trying to build my own company and see how far I can get as a solo founder. Sometimes I wonder how my life would have turned out if it wasn't for that injury, but oh well. Shit happens, right? Jeez sorry for the sob story but it feels good to get it off.

jyunwai 2y ago
Another student at a martial arts gym unexpectedly gave me some advice that is somewhat common, but had an impact because the words came at the right time and from the right person: he kindly told me to never judge myself based on the person that I might have been, and to instead compare myself now to how I was a month ago. I believe that any person here with an inkling of relatable technical experience can greatly appreciate the work you've been doing. Software development can be complicated and frustrating, especially when things don't work as you expect them to (but then, you learn and become better). Leading a business is very difficult, often due to sources of problems you don't expect (such as regulatory and legal requirements, accounting, and publicity). Some people cruise on to great careers without facing many barriers. But many others face unexpected setbacks and have to manage them. A close friend of mine was living an overall good life until it was profoundly disrupted by a civil war in his home country. But he made it to my country where he began his undergraduate degree at a great university that he loves. A past colleague of mine spent much of her early twenties managing physical disability, but successfully received treatment and went on to graduate with an engineering degree. She has since landed a position at a top aerospace company that she really wanted to work at. You are setting up a good life for yourself. Many people lack that kind of drive or struggle with executing ideas; several people I personally know would be very proud to one day experience just a small part of your successes so far.

kiba 2y ago

I missed out on theater and improvisational comedy only because I pigeonholed myself as a computer nerd and engineering type and almost nothing else. I found that I have a certain knack for it and really enjoyed performing.

oh_my_goodness 2y ago

It is good to expose them. But that doesn't mean the previous point is backwards.

trgn 2y ago

> College is the place to specialize in a subject. In Europe maybe, but in America a lot of students receive their general purpose liberal arts education in College, and will then specialize later with a post graduate degree.

bonzini 2y ago
So what is high school for? Also does the above apply also to the most selective and renowned institutions, or only to community colleges?
- trgn 2y ago
  High school is preparing to be able to do a college education? A bachelor's isn't that trivial most of the time. I'd say applies to most colleges, of any size. Community colleges tend to be more like trade schools
  - bonzini 2y ago
    In Europe high school is when you get a generic education, and in college you choose your topic. So if you are a languages major you'll have no more math, if you're a STEM major you'll have no more history, if you're a philosophy major you might have logic and some history but no physics or linear algebra, and so on. I studied computer science (M.Eng.) and I had to provide an English certification as a foreign language, but that was it. The only non-computer science, non-math, non-electronics courses were one semester of chemistry, one of economics and three of physics (which you could say is related to electronics though). So basically 15-20%. Having to study more history or biology would have been a huge waste of time in a CS university, and I say that as someone who did more Latin and Greek than math and physics in high school.

llm_trw 2y ago

To quote an artist friend: exposure is good until you die from it. Being forced to do subjects that you hate is not exposure, it is being forced to do things which you are completely unsuited for. I would go so far as saying that being forced to take music until 7th grade put me off any musical pursuits for the next 20 years. The less said about the torture disguised as education that is PE the better.

jajko 2y ago
Yeah that's a common result of forced learning by lets be polite mediocre folks. Utter hate of the whole topic for easily 2 decades too. Then finding slowly my own personal way back to them, despite school. If anything, current (and this is valid globally) school system is not designed at excellence at its core, its about raising an army of obedient but not too stupid citizens. And its not missed expectation, just look at what type of work they expect to fill in. Don't expect massive changes unless society changes itself. Some narrow excellence is not what our society at large values, those few that made it through made it despite their environment.

db48x 2y ago

Specialization does begin earlier than that. Most high schools in the US have advanced classes that students can opt in to, and there is the AP program. Personally I think that we could do better by tailoring every student’s education to their abilities. Put in simplest possible terms, we could arrange classes by complexity rather than by year. Have one class for addition and subtraction, another for multiplication and division, then geometry, algebra, etc, etc. Then let students graduate from one to the next based on proven ability rather than by age. Do the same for language, history, etc. Let every student proceed through the courses at their own speed.

angled 2y ago
One such school: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AME_School https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AME_School The kids that went there … some succeeded, some really struggled to adjust to other schools and environments.
- db48x 2y ago
  > In 1992, there was a proposal to fully integrate the AME school with the ACT Government school system. However the idea floundered after the ACT Teachers Union amongst other things, knocked the idea on the head, due to compatibility issues. It felt the idea of having a school principal having selection over teaching staff was outside the scope of the Unions control. It came out fighting against the proposal. Now there’s a depressing thing to read. Teacher’s unions are the worst.
kyawzazaw 2y ago
A bit too late if you are comparing to football level of specialization to produce people like messi

eviks 2y ago

"Exposure" would be spending much much less time on those subjects, especially the free home time. Then the number of subjects is practically infinite, so expecting "most" is just as unrealistic (and colleges also continue this "exposure")

paulpauper 2y ago

It's good that public school exposes children to many subjects - hopefully most of them. So that they can discover if they click with one of them. The real danger is that someone never gets exposed to a subject at all. College is the place to specialize in a subject. then why does this 'discovery process' have to continue into college? That was the OP's point. When money and time is on the line, let adults decide what they want to study. An 18-year-old is no longer a child.

echelon 2y ago

> It's good that public school exposes children to many subjects - hopefully most of them. So that they can discover if they click with one of them. The real danger is that someone never gets exposed to a subject at all. College is the place to specialize in a subject. While some exposure is probably better on average than none, in some instances bad experiences can trip the fuse on developing an interest. The rote nature of canned education, bad teachers, bad parents, or bullies can turn kids off of subjects they might otherwise come to love.

TeeMassive 2y ago

Is it "good", certainly, but I don't think most of the stuff is worth it in the technological world. Let kids follow their interests, keep the general stuff to a minimum and you will have a lot more of happy kids with who excel more.

flockonus 2y ago

To overemphasize in a complex topic as good | bad is overly simplistic and doesn't help at all. Hardly anything is complete good or completely bad, it's meaningless to make a black or white point.

bluecalm 2y ago

The problem is that there is too much of this general exposure and specialization happens way too late once the brain is not as good at learning anymore. People peak in competitive fields when they are in early 20s or even before that. In our education system we are not even allowed to do the job before we are like 25 or later. There is only so much you can learn sitting in a chair listening to a professor. It's a completely backwards system that limits potential of about anyone with average+ intelligence.

littlestymaar 2y ago

It's good that schools expose children to many subjects. It's not good at all that school reward being OK in every subject more than being really good in a handful of them. The school system is a mediocrity factory.

is_true 2y ago

A subject "clicking" is strongly dependent on the teacher.

DragonStrength 2y ago

The miss, which in my state has changed recently, was kicking kids out eventually who failed one subject but were succeeding in others. Sure, that kid isn't going to an Ivy League school, but there's value in finding ways to make up for what they aren't getting versus producing a high school dropout with bleak prospects in today's society.

thr0waway001 2y ago

Agreed. Given that most people are not exceptional at anything it makes more sense to give them a well rounded education by exposing them to a lot of subjects to see what takes. And all the exceptional people, well, they're just gonna have to use their gifts to push through the monotony of the things they don't like while still pursing their passion. Unless they are born wealthy or find a benefactor so they can go to private school or a gifted person school, that caters to their specific needs, it's the best we can do to serve everyone.