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>the actual purpose of school is to socialise children I agree that this is probably the most important thing for children to learn. My point is that sitting i

>the actual purpose of school is to socialise children I agree that this is probably the most important thing for children to learn. My point is that sitting in a room for 8 hours does very little to accomplish that. >And telling if time spent learning is wasted is actually quite hard - if you know something and everyone else knows something it often fades into the background and nobody notices. But it still makes a difference. I had the direct comparison when I went to university. It became very clear that I was learning much more and faster. To talk about schooling we first have to make clear what the goal is. Sure everybody needs to learn how to read, write and do basic arithmetic, but that is not a 12 year endeavor. Even including basic general knowledge is not a 12 year endeavor. And we should not be wasting children's time on things, just because we can't be bothered to have them do something actually meaningful.

myrmidon 1y ago
> I had the direct comparison when I went to university. It became very clear that I was learning much more and faster. Sure, but this should be expected. If you filtered out all children with low interest/performance/support in preschool and just threw them onto a playground, learning rate could also be much faster in school for the rest. But if you want a solid baseline of reading/writing/math/general education for everyone in society, those twelve years are already barely enough. I'm very confident that early discrimination/segregation ("gifted" and "idiot" tracks in school) is a net negative for society and encourages unethical outcomes on top. Optional programs for faster/more targetted learning are much better and can be very positive IMO, but even there you need to be careful with how you set things up to avoid problems.
- andrepd 1y ago
  > I'm very confident that early discrimination/segregation ("gifted" and "idiot" tracks in school) is a net negative for society and encourages unethical outcomes on top. I'm curious about this, can you elaborate more? My feeling is that in a class of 25 kids grouped by age being taught by 1 single teacher, it's basically impossible that the teaching pace and style is adequate for more than a handful of them. You're going to have kids bored out of their minds learning nothing and being unengaged, and you're going to have kids that can't keep up and would need extra support / a different kind of support. You're not doing either of those any favours.
  - myrmidon 1y ago
    My view is that schools purpose is teaching everyone not only a common baseline in language/math, but also how to deal with expectations/responsibilities and other people (teachers and classmates). By doing "early segregation" you make this more difficult because that "common baseline" no longer exists; you'd expect to get significantly more people that struggle with language and basic math as a result (in exchange for better outcomes in your "gifted" track). Furthermore, you are sorting people into social buckets in a way that is really bad for social cohesion (inevitable, all the white kids with rich parents are gonna end up in the "gifted" schools). Everyone is gonna grow up in a echochamber, basically. Finally, this is going to lead to restrictions on a young adults options, that I find really unpalatable to blame on the affected children: Can you honestly argue that people don't deserve the chance to study medicine at university just because their parents did not tutor, push and mentor them sufficiently? Equality of opportunity as a principle is gonna be nigh impossible to preserve in such a system. I do not dispute that you could teach children faster and better with individual tutoring and customized programs, but that would be cost-prohibitive, and I see currently no realistic way to get there without above consequences. Maybe AI will solve it :P
    - bluGill 1y ago
      Don't forget that kid that was 1 point off from making the gifted track that now gets stuck with much worse options for the rest of their life even though they could probably pass the gifted track as well (at the bottom of the class, but still a pass).
    - ndriscoll 1y ago
      I would expect everyone at all levels to do better under a more highly segregated model. In the desegregated model, faster students are artificially held back and slower students are left behind (unless the class operates at the level of the absolute slowest student). In a segregated model, you are better able to approximate a mastery learning approach, which is known to create vastly better outcomes for everyone. The mechanism AI would use to solve the problem is to give everyone individualized education, which would effectively be maximal segregation. For socialization, another commenter here wrote a few months back about their experience at a school where they had more academic classes segregated by ability and more social classes segregated by age[0], which sounds to me like an excellent solution. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42117313 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42117313
- constantcrying 1y ago
  >Sure, but this should be expected. If you filtered out all children with low interest/performance/support in preschool and just threw them onto a playground, learning rate could also be much faster in school for the rest. In Germany you have schools for students targeting university. I was in such a school. Every student there was there to get into university.
  - myrmidon 1y ago
    > In Germany you have schools for students targeting university. I was in such a school. Every student there was there to get into university. Yes, but if half the class was not smarter than you (by whatever standard), then that segregation was too low to really hit the spot anyway. My personal experience was the completely opposite: I learned more useful knowledge in school than in university, despite wasting like a year of math on trigonometric sum formulas and similar nonsense; but the baseline for physics/electronics, programming and math was much more applicable and necessary than anything I learned in university (frequently overspecialized and barely useful). Sure, I also learned a lot during university on my own, but mostly thanks to sufficient free time and personal interest; university itself did not contribute too much there, and this was somewhat similar during school already anyway (most specifically with programming). To me, it sounds like you suffered from mediocre teachers in school and learn better on your own-- but neither is universal enough to draw system-wide conclusions IMO.
roenxi 1y ago
> To talk about schooling we first have to make clear what the goal is. What can I say; I like arguing. We don't actually have to choose a single goal - everyone can have different goals. If schooling isn't compulsory then you could have a mass of different people doing different things for different reasons and it all gets called 'schooling'. If schooling is state managed ... the same interest groups exist, they just have to fight over the curriculum in parliament or the Department of Schooling. The end result will be a weird hodge-podge of compromises that nobody can confidently say satisfies them completely and doesn't have a clear goal. It happens that we cannot say that there is a goal of schooling. Some people may have one goal, but other people may have alternative goals. There are some really tricky edge cases, like History - should Mongolian schoolchildren be taught that Ghengis Khan was a hero, a scumbag, a disaster, a triumph, a fact, a national symbol or someone best forgotten? That is not a question where a reliable and enduring consensus can be reached because real life is too complicated to take a final universal stand on something that happened 1,000 years ago.
- constantcrying 1y ago
  >We don't actually have to choose a single goal - everyone can have different goals. If schooling isn't compulsory then you could have a mass of different people doing different things for different reasons and it all gets called 'schooling'. I completely agree. If I wanted anything from current schooling it would be giving students more abilities to develop themselves. Obviously that doesn't mean a 16 year old playing videogames for 12 hours a day, but students who like doing sports should be doing much more of it and those who like learning should be doing much more of that and so on.
  - bluGill 1y ago
    I disagree. Most kids need to be forced a bit to learn something hard. Sure the kid who likes sports should play. However only exceptional kids will ever be good enough to make a good future playing sports. Most kids will grow up to realize that much as they love the game they will never make a living at it. Thus we need to ensure those kids don't spend all their time getting better, but instead spend time getting useful life skills that they will need as an adult. Much as "post scarcity" people like to think otherwise, we are still not in a world where many people can "slack off". Kids learning how to develop themselves is a good thing ONLY if they choose the "right thing" to develop. You can get really good at video games, but as you already said probably not a good only investment (a fine hobby, but keep it a limited time hobby). There are some sports that because of injuries should really be banned (but I won't list them because as soon as I do there will be a lot screaming from people who live that sport). What we need is kids who develop themselves into something that makes them good productive adults - for some jobs we need adults to do this is boring and so kids won't do it unless forced.
eitally 1y ago
I would argue that, no matter what your perception is, school is much more than "sitting in a room for 8 hours". Sure, academic advancement can be accelerated massively through home schooling, self-study or tutoring -- and many families take advantage of this fact -- but most school districts offer all sorts of non-academic enrichment programming (even including things like elementary school recesses here) that you don't get otherwise and which result in more well-rounded socialization than you'd get without an intentional effort to augment homeschooling with the same. Also, the sometimes dramatic gulf between private and public school academic rigor means that some private school students are essentially receiving an early college level education during their tween/teen years. This isn't necessarily bad, but it absolutely is more time consuming for most kids who aim for straight As and high test scores, and this in turn impacts their ability to pursue extracurricular activities with seriousness, and without impacting their health/wellbeing. The fact that many public school students are learning slowly means those same students can work outside of school, can pursue sports/arts/etc interests almost full-time, can be caretakers for family members in need, and have flexibility in their social lives. Yes, it's unfair to paint with a broad brush but this is largely true if we're looking at the high achieving population (say, kids who might be expected to apply to Ivy League universities). No matter how suboptimal the pace of academic instruction is at public schools, it's important to recognize that kids are still developing into adults and it's not normal or fair to treat them as adults (from a brain development, psychological and relationship management POV).

myrmidon 1y ago

> I had the direct comparison when I went to university. It became very clear that I was learning much more and faster. Sure, but this should be expected. If you filtered out all children with low interest/performance/support in preschool and just threw them onto a playground, learning rate could also be much faster in school for the rest. But if you want a solid baseline of reading/writing/math/general education for everyone in society, those twelve years are already barely enough. I'm very confident that early discrimination/segregation ("gifted" and "idiot" tracks in school) is a net negative for society and encourages unethical outcomes on top. Optional programs for faster/more targetted learning are much better and can be very positive IMO, but even there you need to be careful with how you set things up to avoid problems.

andrepd 1y ago
> I'm very confident that early discrimination/segregation ("gifted" and "idiot" tracks in school) is a net negative for society and encourages unethical outcomes on top. I'm curious about this, can you elaborate more? My feeling is that in a class of 25 kids grouped by age being taught by 1 single teacher, it's basically impossible that the teaching pace and style is adequate for more than a handful of them. You're going to have kids bored out of their minds learning nothing and being unengaged, and you're going to have kids that can't keep up and would need extra support / a different kind of support. You're not doing either of those any favours.
- myrmidon 1y ago
  My view is that schools purpose is teaching everyone not only a common baseline in language/math, but also how to deal with expectations/responsibilities and other people (teachers and classmates). By doing "early segregation" you make this more difficult because that "common baseline" no longer exists; you'd expect to get significantly more people that struggle with language and basic math as a result (in exchange for better outcomes in your "gifted" track). Furthermore, you are sorting people into social buckets in a way that is really bad for social cohesion (inevitable, all the white kids with rich parents are gonna end up in the "gifted" schools). Everyone is gonna grow up in a echochamber, basically. Finally, this is going to lead to restrictions on a young adults options, that I find really unpalatable to blame on the affected children: Can you honestly argue that people don't deserve the chance to study medicine at university just because their parents did not tutor, push and mentor them sufficiently? Equality of opportunity as a principle is gonna be nigh impossible to preserve in such a system. I do not dispute that you could teach children faster and better with individual tutoring and customized programs, but that would be cost-prohibitive, and I see currently no realistic way to get there without above consequences. Maybe AI will solve it :P
  - bluGill 1y ago
    Don't forget that kid that was 1 point off from making the gifted track that now gets stuck with much worse options for the rest of their life even though they could probably pass the gifted track as well (at the bottom of the class, but still a pass).
  - ndriscoll 1y ago
    I would expect everyone at all levels to do better under a more highly segregated model. In the desegregated model, faster students are artificially held back and slower students are left behind (unless the class operates at the level of the absolute slowest student). In a segregated model, you are better able to approximate a mastery learning approach, which is known to create vastly better outcomes for everyone. The mechanism AI would use to solve the problem is to give everyone individualized education, which would effectively be maximal segregation. For socialization, another commenter here wrote a few months back about their experience at a school where they had more academic classes segregated by ability and more social classes segregated by age[0], which sounds to me like an excellent solution. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42117313 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42117313
constantcrying 1y ago
>Sure, but this should be expected. If you filtered out all children with low interest/performance/support in preschool and just threw them onto a playground, learning rate could also be much faster in school for the rest. In Germany you have schools for students targeting university. I was in such a school. Every student there was there to get into university.
- myrmidon 1y ago
  > In Germany you have schools for students targeting university. I was in such a school. Every student there was there to get into university. Yes, but if half the class was not smarter than you (by whatever standard), then that segregation was too low to really hit the spot anyway. My personal experience was the completely opposite: I learned more useful knowledge in school than in university, despite wasting like a year of math on trigonometric sum formulas and similar nonsense; but the baseline for physics/electronics, programming and math was much more applicable and necessary than anything I learned in university (frequently overspecialized and barely useful). Sure, I also learned a lot during university on my own, but mostly thanks to sufficient free time and personal interest; university itself did not contribute too much there, and this was somewhat similar during school already anyway (most specifically with programming). To me, it sounds like you suffered from mediocre teachers in school and learn better on your own-- but neither is universal enough to draw system-wide conclusions IMO.

roenxi 1y ago

> To talk about schooling we first have to make clear what the goal is. What can I say; I like arguing. We don't actually have to choose a single goal - everyone can have different goals. If schooling isn't compulsory then you could have a mass of different people doing different things for different reasons and it all gets called 'schooling'. If schooling is state managed ... the same interest groups exist, they just have to fight over the curriculum in parliament or the Department of Schooling. The end result will be a weird hodge-podge of compromises that nobody can confidently say satisfies them completely and doesn't have a clear goal. It happens that we cannot say that there is a goal of schooling. Some people may have one goal, but other people may have alternative goals. There are some really tricky edge cases, like History - should Mongolian schoolchildren be taught that Ghengis Khan was a hero, a scumbag, a disaster, a triumph, a fact, a national symbol or someone best forgotten? That is not a question where a reliable and enduring consensus can be reached because real life is too complicated to take a final universal stand on something that happened 1,000 years ago.

constantcrying 1y ago
>We don't actually have to choose a single goal - everyone can have different goals. If schooling isn't compulsory then you could have a mass of different people doing different things for different reasons and it all gets called 'schooling'. I completely agree. If I wanted anything from current schooling it would be giving students more abilities to develop themselves. Obviously that doesn't mean a 16 year old playing videogames for 12 hours a day, but students who like doing sports should be doing much more of it and those who like learning should be doing much more of that and so on.
- bluGill 1y ago
  I disagree. Most kids need to be forced a bit to learn something hard. Sure the kid who likes sports should play. However only exceptional kids will ever be good enough to make a good future playing sports. Most kids will grow up to realize that much as they love the game they will never make a living at it. Thus we need to ensure those kids don't spend all their time getting better, but instead spend time getting useful life skills that they will need as an adult. Much as "post scarcity" people like to think otherwise, we are still not in a world where many people can "slack off". Kids learning how to develop themselves is a good thing ONLY if they choose the "right thing" to develop. You can get really good at video games, but as you already said probably not a good only investment (a fine hobby, but keep it a limited time hobby). There are some sports that because of injuries should really be banned (but I won't list them because as soon as I do there will be a lot screaming from people who live that sport). What we need is kids who develop themselves into something that makes them good productive adults - for some jobs we need adults to do this is boring and so kids won't do it unless forced.

eitally 1y ago

I would argue that, no matter what your perception is, school is much more than "sitting in a room for 8 hours". Sure, academic advancement can be accelerated massively through home schooling, self-study or tutoring -- and many families take advantage of this fact -- but most school districts offer all sorts of non-academic enrichment programming (even including things like elementary school recesses here) that you don't get otherwise and which result in more well-rounded socialization than you'd get without an intentional effort to augment homeschooling with the same. Also, the sometimes dramatic gulf between private and public school academic rigor means that some private school students are essentially receiving an early college level education during their tween/teen years. This isn't necessarily bad, but it absolutely is more time consuming for most kids who aim for straight As and high test scores, and this in turn impacts their ability to pursue extracurricular activities with seriousness, and without impacting their health/wellbeing. The fact that many public school students are learning slowly means those same students can work outside of school, can pursue sports/arts/etc interests almost full-time, can be caretakers for family members in need, and have flexibility in their social lives. Yes, it's unfair to paint with a broad brush but this is largely true if we're looking at the high achieving population (say, kids who might be expected to apply to Ivy League universities). No matter how suboptimal the pace of academic instruction is at public schools, it's important to recognize that kids are still developing into adults and it's not normal or fair to treat them as adults (from a brain development, psychological and relationship management POV).