5 ms·

This is tangent, but your comment reminds me of this essay that floats around HN every so often about how limiting school is. Young children are absolutely capa

by vwcx 2y ago

This is tangent, but your comment reminds me of this essay that floats around HN every so often about how limiting school is. Young children are absolutely capable of greatness beyond what we ever ask of them, and most of us are okay with them growing up in the rigid, ordained box of modern public schooling: https://map.simonsarris.com/p/school-is-not-enough https://map.simonsarris.com/p/school-is-not-enough

11101010001100 2y ago
Yes, this is also somewhat obvious (speaking as a teacher).
watwut 2y ago
I prefer my kids going to school then being limited by what a single household can teach them. Modern schooling is way better then what conservative attacks on it claim. And I would strongly preferred to live in a country with functional public school system then one without it.
- theultdev 2y ago
  I don't think you need to trust what "conservatives claim" when you see the test scores and literacy rates. American public schooling is and has been broken for awhile.
  - alistairSH 2y ago
    There are many reasonable criticisms of modern public schooling, but the claim that's it's completely broken (and needs burnt to the ground, as many conservatives will claim) is hyperbole and unhelpful to making actual productive change. And the notion that private schooling (in general) is better is hard to believe. When we looked at private schools for our son, test scores and college admittance were only marginally higher and much of the gap was simple selection bias (private schools are not legally required to take all students, so don't deal with disabled, disadvantaged, or otherwise non-exceptional students). The only time private was substantially better was hyper-elite, hyper-expensive schools (Sidwell Friends, DC vs Paul VI, Fairfax vs the publics in FCPS).
  - watwut 2y ago
    I did checked them. And while it is not perfect, it is not a massive horrible disaster conservatives like to make it. It is just not unfixably broken as it is called. Compared to Europe, it does fine, being above average or around there depending on the test. Also, America do tend to be country of extremes, so it has some very good public schools and some bad ones. Bad ones being in poor place. And it just so happen that the countries doing better tend to have less poverty and less issues related to it.
  - bongodongobob 2y ago
    Pretty much any teacher will tell you it's because parents aren't involved and treat school like daycare. When Mom and dad come home and veg out on their phones and TV after work, the kids learn that as well. The ones that succeed have parents that are involved with their schooling which is less and less likely these days. Teachers are quitting left and right because of it.
    - theultdev 2y ago
      Of course they would say that. Blaming the parents and kids is just a scapegoat. But yes, the kids that succeed are the ones that the parents are involved, because the teachers are useless. The quality of teachers has gone way down, especially since federal student loans. Anyone can become a teacher, it's a default path, and it shows.
      - bongodongobob 2y ago
        You're part of the problem and know nothing of the shift that these teachers have seen over the last 30 years.
        theultdev 2y ago
        I've experienced terrible teachers (especially math teachers) and had to teach myself. I've seen good schools crumble due to terrible policies and teachers. You're enabling the problem by apologizing for these poor performing teachers. Literally all of 8th grade was learning how to count to 10 in other languages and some stupid cross-stitching art. In Math!!! Luckily I learned through programming on my own time, but once you're behind from one shitty math teacher, it's hard to catch up.
        bongodongobob 2y ago
        [flagged]
        2y ago
- ty6853 2y ago
  The main conservative complaint is that without competition for your tax money, public schools are at best a democraticly controlled monopoly with captive consumers. Middle grounds like keeping public schools but let them compete with private ones, using vouchers, for whatever reason reaches this contrived argument of certain interests being scared that a parent may decide another school is a better pick for their child's voucher. If public schools are best parents will be happy to select them, so why not find out?
  - MITSardine 2y ago
    "public schools are at best a democraticly controlled monopoly with captive consumers" Public schools are not companies with a monopoly, nor do they have consumers, these are very loaded terms. Do you speak of all infrastructure in this way? Do you say the police have consumers? Or the firefighters a monopoly on putting out fires? Roads a monopoly on letting cars drive over them? This world view that everything relates to money first and foremost, lives on markets, only improves by competition, should justify its existence in some measurable wealth producing way is very dangerous in my opinion, because not everything can work this way. Public service has to be unprofitable in many cases, its first mission is to bring a service to the population, not to compete with the private sector. I once visited Maripasoula, a <10k pop town in the middle of the Amazon only accessible by river or small (10-20 passenger) propeller plane. I was fascinated to see it has: a post office (that doubles as a bank), a modern high school with dorms, firefighters and a police station. No private sector actor is going to provide any such service to this population in these conditions. These services do not improve by competition, because there can be none, yet they exist and work well. Crazy, that. Where there is a mix of private and public, the private sector only services where (be it location or target population wise) it is most profitable and leaves the rest to the public sector to fend with. That does not in itself indicate it functions better, only that it only goes for the lowest hanging fruit by essence of why it exists: to maximize profit. The private sector is not in the business of making its life complicated, the end goal of any company is to provide the least possible for the highest price possible. In the case of schooling, private schools' only merit is being inaccessible to the poorer populations, hence giving kids a network that sits higher on the social ladder. Generalize this and you find that it no longer brings anything worthwhile to the table, except for those with arbitrary educational constraints such as religious ones. Not that this "benefit" is particularly defensible to begin with.
- andrepd 2y ago
  Exactly. Education has a long long way to improve, but the alternative to mediocre public schooling is better public schooling, not homeschool which is even worse than a mediocre school.
  - johngladtj 2y ago
    We have the data. Homeschooling outcomes are better. This isn't up in the air, we know the answer.
    - andrepd 2y ago
      I would love to see "the data" you're alluding to because everything I've read points to the opposite.
- cosmic_cheese 2y ago
  Yeah as someone who was homeschooled, I don’t know that I would ever attempt it myself. I’m simply not qualified to teach a whole lot beyond the most bare of basics, except in the narrow band representing my experience and interests. To act otherwise would constitute an embarrassing level of hubris on my part. There’s a lot of good in modern schooling. It’s not perfect, but throwing out the baby with the bathwater as is so frequently proposed is not the solution here.
wisty 2y ago
This argument is immensely popular. It looks a bit like a warmed over Rousseau - just shake off the chains of the old fashioned education system, give kids one on one guidance for 10 years with a great mentor, and they'll do pretty well. Let's look at a few counterpoints: - Biologically secondary knowledge are the things that it's proposed that humans haven't evolved to naturally of. Math writing, ect. The upper middle class academics who had their mommy and daddy teach them literacy and numeracy felt stifled by the "drill and kill" explicit teaching, and provably think they'd have "flourished" if they could follow their own heart and figured it all out themselves, but only because they were privatised to have effectively a private tutor. That doesn't scale. - Motivation. Schools do OK at teaching the things that are a priority, as long as they aren't too progressive (the preogressive education movement is older than the more modern traditional approach, but progressive educators claim they are the hot new thing for some reason). Just look at something dead easy that lots of people want to do - learning a second language. How many people can be bothered without school? (And sure, schools suck at language teaching, but only because it's not a real priority). Like critics of capitalism, the most strident critics of modern education often have a solution they are trying to sell and it's a solution that doesn't work very well at scale in the real world. Could schools compress the curriculum, getting kids ready for uni by year 10, then putting 2 years of uni into years 11-12 (or the trade school equivalent) so unis don't need to teach the drab basics? Yeah, probably. Middle school could probably be done in half the time if it wasn't treated as a total joke since it doesn't count for anything. But you can't cherry pick extremely privileged or exceptional people and expect that everyone can replicated their results
- zozbot234 2y ago
  > give kids one on one guidance for 10 years with a great mentor Aristocratic tutoring works. The whole issue with it is that it's not affordable except for some kind of extreme super elite, hence why the rest of us have to make do with mass education, supplemented with some very limited individual tutoring and "tiger parenting".
  - tough 2y ago
    Feels like AI could fix this, learning with a llm companion that never is exhausted and always encourages you to follow your intuition and curiosity is already better than 99% of teachers on a public school (sadly) not blaming the teachers, but the system, one teacher 30 students will never work well
meroes 2y ago
My own experience is I went to an amazingly pre school. Like teachers invite students and their families for dinner at their own house, let kids do what they wanted during free time unless and until they actually did something bad. That freedom and trust created an environment where I taught myself how to ride bikes during preschool recesses. No teacher came running out to tell me the right way, they just watched. And they just had real bikes for preschoolers to use at their own comfort freely accessible. Needless to say by the time I got the first grade I had a hard time adapting. I have no idea if the less restrained model works long term, I suspect not when society is so intermixed and rigid. I joined the STEM Pipeline (introduced by the NSF in the 1970s and continues to this day) like so many others.

by vwcx 2y ago

11101010001100 2y ago

Yes, this is also somewhat obvious (speaking as a teacher).

watwut 2y ago

I prefer my kids going to school then being limited by what a single household can teach them. Modern schooling is way better then what conservative attacks on it claim. And I would strongly preferred to live in a country with functional public school system then one without it.

theultdev 2y ago
I don't think you need to trust what "conservatives claim" when you see the test scores and literacy rates. American public schooling is and has been broken for awhile.
- alistairSH 2y ago
  There are many reasonable criticisms of modern public schooling, but the claim that's it's completely broken (and needs burnt to the ground, as many conservatives will claim) is hyperbole and unhelpful to making actual productive change. And the notion that private schooling (in general) is better is hard to believe. When we looked at private schools for our son, test scores and college admittance were only marginally higher and much of the gap was simple selection bias (private schools are not legally required to take all students, so don't deal with disabled, disadvantaged, or otherwise non-exceptional students). The only time private was substantially better was hyper-elite, hyper-expensive schools (Sidwell Friends, DC vs Paul VI, Fairfax vs the publics in FCPS).
- watwut 2y ago
  I did checked them. And while it is not perfect, it is not a massive horrible disaster conservatives like to make it. It is just not unfixably broken as it is called. Compared to Europe, it does fine, being above average or around there depending on the test. Also, America do tend to be country of extremes, so it has some very good public schools and some bad ones. Bad ones being in poor place. And it just so happen that the countries doing better tend to have less poverty and less issues related to it.
- bongodongobob 2y ago
  Pretty much any teacher will tell you it's because parents aren't involved and treat school like daycare. When Mom and dad come home and veg out on their phones and TV after work, the kids learn that as well. The ones that succeed have parents that are involved with their schooling which is less and less likely these days. Teachers are quitting left and right because of it.
  - theultdev 2y ago
    Of course they would say that. Blaming the parents and kids is just a scapegoat. But yes, the kids that succeed are the ones that the parents are involved, because the teachers are useless. The quality of teachers has gone way down, especially since federal student loans. Anyone can become a teacher, it's a default path, and it shows.
    - bongodongobob 2y ago
      You're part of the problem and know nothing of the shift that these teachers have seen over the last 30 years.
      - theultdev 2y ago
        I've experienced terrible teachers (especially math teachers) and had to teach myself. I've seen good schools crumble due to terrible policies and teachers. You're enabling the problem by apologizing for these poor performing teachers. Literally all of 8th grade was learning how to count to 10 in other languages and some stupid cross-stitching art. In Math!!! Luckily I learned through programming on my own time, but once you're behind from one shitty math teacher, it's hard to catch up.
        bongodongobob 2y ago
        [flagged]
        2y ago
ty6853 2y ago
The main conservative complaint is that without competition for your tax money, public schools are at best a democraticly controlled monopoly with captive consumers. Middle grounds like keeping public schools but let them compete with private ones, using vouchers, for whatever reason reaches this contrived argument of certain interests being scared that a parent may decide another school is a better pick for their child's voucher. If public schools are best parents will be happy to select them, so why not find out?
- MITSardine 2y ago
  "public schools are at best a democraticly controlled monopoly with captive consumers" Public schools are not companies with a monopoly, nor do they have consumers, these are very loaded terms. Do you speak of all infrastructure in this way? Do you say the police have consumers? Or the firefighters a monopoly on putting out fires? Roads a monopoly on letting cars drive over them? This world view that everything relates to money first and foremost, lives on markets, only improves by competition, should justify its existence in some measurable wealth producing way is very dangerous in my opinion, because not everything can work this way. Public service has to be unprofitable in many cases, its first mission is to bring a service to the population, not to compete with the private sector. I once visited Maripasoula, a <10k pop town in the middle of the Amazon only accessible by river or small (10-20 passenger) propeller plane. I was fascinated to see it has: a post office (that doubles as a bank), a modern high school with dorms, firefighters and a police station. No private sector actor is going to provide any such service to this population in these conditions. These services do not improve by competition, because there can be none, yet they exist and work well. Crazy, that. Where there is a mix of private and public, the private sector only services where (be it location or target population wise) it is most profitable and leaves the rest to the public sector to fend with. That does not in itself indicate it functions better, only that it only goes for the lowest hanging fruit by essence of why it exists: to maximize profit. The private sector is not in the business of making its life complicated, the end goal of any company is to provide the least possible for the highest price possible. In the case of schooling, private schools' only merit is being inaccessible to the poorer populations, hence giving kids a network that sits higher on the social ladder. Generalize this and you find that it no longer brings anything worthwhile to the table, except for those with arbitrary educational constraints such as religious ones. Not that this "benefit" is particularly defensible to begin with.
andrepd 2y ago
Exactly. Education has a long long way to improve, but the alternative to mediocre public schooling is better public schooling, not homeschool which is even worse than a mediocre school.
- johngladtj 2y ago
  We have the data. Homeschooling outcomes are better. This isn't up in the air, we know the answer.
  - andrepd 2y ago
    I would love to see "the data" you're alluding to because everything I've read points to the opposite.
cosmic_cheese 2y ago
Yeah as someone who was homeschooled, I don’t know that I would ever attempt it myself. I’m simply not qualified to teach a whole lot beyond the most bare of basics, except in the narrow band representing my experience and interests. To act otherwise would constitute an embarrassing level of hubris on my part. There’s a lot of good in modern schooling. It’s not perfect, but throwing out the baby with the bathwater as is so frequently proposed is not the solution here.

wisty 2y ago

This argument is immensely popular. It looks a bit like a warmed over Rousseau - just shake off the chains of the old fashioned education system, give kids one on one guidance for 10 years with a great mentor, and they'll do pretty well. Let's look at a few counterpoints: - Biologically secondary knowledge are the things that it's proposed that humans haven't evolved to naturally of. Math writing, ect. The upper middle class academics who had their mommy and daddy teach them literacy and numeracy felt stifled by the "drill and kill" explicit teaching, and provably think they'd have "flourished" if they could follow their own heart and figured it all out themselves, but only because they were privatised to have effectively a private tutor. That doesn't scale. - Motivation. Schools do OK at teaching the things that are a priority, as long as they aren't too progressive (the preogressive education movement is older than the more modern traditional approach, but progressive educators claim they are the hot new thing for some reason). Just look at something dead easy that lots of people want to do - learning a second language. How many people can be bothered without school? (And sure, schools suck at language teaching, but only because it's not a real priority). Like critics of capitalism, the most strident critics of modern education often have a solution they are trying to sell and it's a solution that doesn't work very well at scale in the real world. Could schools compress the curriculum, getting kids ready for uni by year 10, then putting 2 years of uni into years 11-12 (or the trade school equivalent) so unis don't need to teach the drab basics? Yeah, probably. Middle school could probably be done in half the time if it wasn't treated as a total joke since it doesn't count for anything. But you can't cherry pick extremely privileged or exceptional people and expect that everyone can replicated their results

zozbot234 2y ago
> give kids one on one guidance for 10 years with a great mentor Aristocratic tutoring works. The whole issue with it is that it's not affordable except for some kind of extreme super elite, hence why the rest of us have to make do with mass education, supplemented with some very limited individual tutoring and "tiger parenting".
- tough 2y ago
  Feels like AI could fix this, learning with a llm companion that never is exhausted and always encourages you to follow your intuition and curiosity is already better than 99% of teachers on a public school (sadly) not blaming the teachers, but the system, one teacher 30 students will never work well

meroes 2y ago

My own experience is I went to an amazingly pre school. Like teachers invite students and their families for dinner at their own house, let kids do what they wanted during free time unless and until they actually did something bad. That freedom and trust created an environment where I taught myself how to ride bikes during preschool recesses. No teacher came running out to tell me the right way, they just watched. And they just had real bikes for preschoolers to use at their own comfort freely accessible. Needless to say by the time I got the first grade I had a hard time adapting. I have no idea if the less restrained model works long term, I suspect not when society is so intermixed and rigid. I joined the STEM Pipeline (introduced by the NSF in the 1970s and continues to this day) like so many others.