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Only a few countries are teaching children how to think

• sillysaurus2 13y ago
  Growing up, I declined to participate in the educational system (primarily to avoid harassment at school) and instead spent all of my time learning to program video games at home. So I would sleep through class, go home, and try to write Pong. My academic performance was nonexistent, but I came out of it with a career. I was wondering, was anyone else's childhood experience similar? Highschool felt at best a dungeon, and at worst a torture chamber. That was primarily due to my mindset. I didn't really know how the world worked, and it seemed to me like the system had been designed for the purpose of dragging me down to the level of the brutes around me. But unfortunately the experience killed my interest in wanting to strive to attend a good (or any) university, which I now deeply regret. Not due to loss of credentials, but rather due to missing out on the social experience of uni. If it were explained to me that the reason I was in school was because an industrialized society needs a place to put children for 8 hours each day so their parents can work, it would've made so much more sense than trying to believe the lie that we were there to learn. It felt so obvious that we weren't there to learn anything substantial. By learning to program video games I'd gotten a taste of the amount of effort real learning took, and memorizing historical dates or doing trivial math problems definitely wasn't any effort. So maybe one solution to "How do we cultivate the desire to learn?" is to relax on the idea that school is even supposed to be a place for kids to learn.
  • kiba 13y ago
    It seems that America has a higher rate of maverick learners than other countries. It may be due to availability bias that I would know more American mavericks more than Asian mavericks. However, in the manga and anime that I watch, I do not know of any of the maverick learner archetype. It seems to be a trope that the smartest student usually have the highest score.
    • einhverfr 13y ago
      Largely because it is the only option ;-)
    • saraid216 13y ago
      It's also because America has a culture of encouraging mavericks. This is seen as more individualistic, ergo morally better. Every system set up in America is effectively doomed to perceived failure because you're not really considered doing well until you're circumventing or beating it in some way.
  • kevincrane 13y ago
    I feel like I'm in the minority here (backed up by a similar discussion on reddit today), but I really enjoyed high school. I liked the classes, I felt like I knew what I was doing with life when I graduated and went on to college, and then there's the whole social thing that people seem hit/miss on. I made a ton of lifelong friends in high school, played on sports teams all 4 years, and evolved from a shy little kid to a reasonably social adult by the end as I gradually learned to come out of my shell. Maybe it's just the people who comment on these types of articles are the kinds of people who also didn't like school, but I personally wouldn't change my high school or college experiences for the world.
    • dnautics 13y ago
      I liked my high school experience as well, but I went to this school: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-B_Woodlawn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-B_Woodlawn But I did attend elementary school in Japan (and had cousins who went to high school there at the same time I was) and while they may have achieved a proficiency higher than most americans, the freedom granted to me at my high school allowed me to do even better - and I was given a decidedly non-standard education emphasizing critical thinking and questioning of authority. This served me exceptionally well in college, and on through grad school and postdoctoral studies. Perhaps this is a bit of an overgeneralization, but almost all of the East Asian postdocs that I encountered did not, outwardly, exhibit as critical a stance towards data and evidence as did american postdocs - with the generalizeable exception of the East Asian postdocs who did their grad school in the States.
    • p4bl0 13y ago
      I have had the same experience of high school as you on the social level (well, except I didn't do sport). However, I felt really close to what sillysaurus2 said about classes. Beside, thinking by myself is clearly not something I was taught in class, but was rather taught to me by my parents' education, by my social interactions with friends, and by learning how to program during middle and high school.
    • _delirium 13y ago
      I didn't hugely enjoy school socially, but I did find the classes, well, educational. I learned a lot of things on my own or from parents as well, but in high school I had basically a few hours a day set aside to studying stuff that I might not otherwise have studied, from math to U.S. history to art theory. I also got better at communicating an argument in short (2-5 page) essay form, which has been a useful skill later in life. One additional aspect is that, while many classes were too easy/slow-paced for me, the fact that they weren't for everyone else made that a useful experience too. For one it was interesting to understand what people found easy or hard to get. For another I would often help other students with their homework, which was good practice in how to explain subjects understandably, basically in how to do tutoring.
  • InclinedPlane 13y ago
    I have a somewhat similar, though critically different, story. For much of school I wasn't very engaged in formal learning. I didn't hate it, but it didn't hold my attention, and the drudgery was boring. I would often not do homework and slack off on projects. As a consequence of this when I entered high school I was put on the advanced track on math and nothing else. To the everlasting credit of my adolescent self I realized this was a problem and I set about fixing it. I tested into the advanced English track for my sophomore year and I figured out how to get onto the advanced science track as well. I ended up graduating near the top of my class and I earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics after only 2 years of college. Nevertheless, as much learning as I accomplished through school I achieved about the same level on my own. I read about what interested me. I read magazines (like Scientific American back when they were good) and even textbooks for fun. I was supposed to have taken a biology class in high-school prior to entering AP biology but I never could fit it into my schedule, so I didn't. And despite that I was still at the top of that class, often scoring the highest on tests. Because so much of that material was stuff I had learned on my own. But I got lucky. If I had attended a different high school with different teachers or if I hadn't had the insight to realize that it was important to invest in my education or if my personality had been slightly different things would have turned out much different. I might have even dropped out. And I can't help but wonder how many other smart people have been ill served by the school system because they weren't so lucky. Edit: as an aside, as I grow older I've become more and more disillusioned with formal education. I see the skills that the system instills in students and in many cases I'm of the opinion that those skills would be better not to have (the worst variety of competitiveness, concentration on minutiae and policy) while at the same time doing a poor job of instilling actual knowledge, problem solving skills, and so on.
    • visakanv 13y ago
      "how many other smart people have been ill served" In fact this line of reasoning always leads me to question things like "smart" altogether. What is smartness, really, but the ability to navigate ideaspace and execute in meatspace? And how much of ability is trained, practiced, nourished? Sure, there's always some variance, but it makes you think.
  • thaumasiotes 13y ago
    > I didn't really know how the world worked, and it seemed to me like the system had been designed for the purpose of dragging me down to the level of the brutes around me. A huge amount of education "policy" in the US is driven by the goal of closing the "achievement gap" between blacks and whites (for educational purposes, Asians are honorary whites). Since when you improve instruction, high performers tend to benefit as much or more than low performers, gap closing is usually accomplished by enforcing a low ceiling for achievement generally.
    • dreamdu5t 13y ago
      You're reminding me of a High School I went to that has a large mural with the words "Don't mind the gap" and a bunch of different colored children on it.
    • normloman 13y ago
      Please provide a statistically significant number of examples when effective teaching strategies were discouraged because they improved education for whites and blacks equally. Otherwise, I'm left to assume you made this up, because it sounds good.
    • comrade_ogilvy 13y ago
      "Enforcing a low ceiling" is a very bias conclusion, with no logical support provided here. The school system as we know it is a mass education "factory" system. There is and always will be cracks for students to fall through. Furthermore, it is not clear that the system ever served top students very well -- I emphasize issues around the "ceiling" is not actually new. How to deal with those cracks in the system is a complex topic. But that hardly matters for purposes of this discussion because... The school system is under intense pressure to produce results in the form of standardized test scores. What are they supposed to do? They focus on inching up the scores of those below the median, of course. That has exactly nothing to do with "enforcing a low ceiling". The school system simply no longer cares about the brightest students, while the taxpaying voters are clamoring for those average test scores to climb. Individual teachers would love to care, but they are generally not allowed to until those scores go up first.
  • hrktb 13y ago
    I genuinely enjoyed school from primary sections to university, but now as a parent I feel more and more that the school is also there to act as a buffer between the parents and children and push society's values down the kid's throat, for better or worse. i.e. Sitting 8 hours a day in school is a way to make it normal to sit 8 hours a day in a cubicle. I don't know if I'd want my child to go through that and be able to do any corporate job he'd be qualified to, or try completely exotic ways but have him more limited in choice afterwards because he didn't get the 'training'
    • kappaknight 13y ago
      Do you have Montessori schools near where you live? Look into those... =)
      • sillysaurus2 13y ago
        Actually, I went to a Montessori school from kindergarten through 3rd grade. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4459226 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4459226 Summary: There were 60+ kids and only two teachers. The kids were allowed to do whatever they wanted all day. About the only thing I learned is how to forge the signature of my assistant teacher. And some kid hit me with a metal shovel and wasn't given more than a stern talking to about why hitting people with shovels is a bad thing. I may have just gotten unlucky in attending a particularly bad Montessori school, however.
    • charlieflowers 13y ago
      I feel that way too, so we're homeschooling our fifth grade daughter. BUT -- she hates it and fights us every step of the way, because she feels she would have more friends if she were in school like a "normal" kid. And she probably would. If you're not on the "normal" track, it is hard to make relationships in the American culture today. Kids don't seem to meet and play in the yard like they used to. So we're mulling this problem over. If anyone has found some solutions, I'd love to hear them.
      • saraid216 13y ago
  • austenallred 13y ago
    "Highschool felt at best a dungeon, and at worst a torture chamber." I had a largely similar experience, though my method of coping was a bit different. Simply put, day in and day out, I would try to manipulate systems as best as I could and raise hell. Every teacher had figured out a system that they wouldn't deviate from. Spend the first two weeks of each class studying how the teacher behaves and befriending the students, and you're set for the rest of the year. From staging an "essayist uprising" in AP Literature complete with founding documents that closely mirrored the Communist Manifesto, to forcing use of sexual innuendo in every sentence in a class with a particularly senile teacher, to starting a "barefoot" trend (which was strictly against the rules but I hate shoes) high school was a huge game and a joke. I feel I learned a lot from it, but almost never from the actual material. The pace was so mind-numbingly slow that I could spend my days plotting and sneaking out windows, while learning what really worked to influence people. Come test-time I could read the book for 15 minutes the day before class and do fine, or even just notice the patterns in the teachers' awful test writing and follow it throughout. High School, at least academically, was a complete joke.
    • ericd 13y ago
      I didn't realize how lucky I was to attend the public school I did. I need to write my diff eq teacher a thank you card for deciding to teach high school instead of doing engineering work for much better pay. Maybe someday I'll do the same for my kids' school, when I have kids.
      • TeMPOraL 13y ago
        Please do so. You may just make his/her day much, much better.
        • ericd 13y ago
          I tracked down his email address and shot him off a long email. Hopefully he still remembers who I am :-)
    • Houshalter 13y ago
  • Qantourisc 13y ago
    Well you DO need a school to learn to read and write. Atleast for a few years. Otherwise their won't be much learning on your own :) And about declining school: there are does that decline them trough reasoning, and other due to being lazy... The most important thing to teach a child, any child, and you need to get this one right: self-reflection/evaluation: what am I doing, what effect will this have? Get that one right, and you won't need to do a lot of parenting at all after you got that one down. (Well for my parents at least.)
    • pgeorgi 13y ago
      I know lots of kids that knew reading and writing before they entered school. Second year level calculation, too. Of course the writing is quite crude, but motor control improves with age not with schooling. The main thing in common I could discern so far is that the parents encourage curiosity and use those skills themselves.
      • TeMPOraL 13y ago
        > I know lots of kids that knew reading and writing before they entered school. There are kids who don't know reading/writing before school? o_0. I thought it's what parents are for.
        • DanBC 13y ago
          > There are kids who don't know reading/writing before school? o_0. I thought it's what parents are for. There are children who don't know what books are, let alone how to read. The UK (which starts school at a very young age) has several things in place to help. There's the charity BookTrust which gives books to parents. Early Years teaching (pre school) has lots of stuff around books and reading. There are charities and schemes aimed at improving parent literacy so that can be passed onto children; and at increasing the number of men reading to their children. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booktrust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booktrust
        • saraid216 13y ago
          There's no institutional system that teaches parents to be competent. Unsurprisingly, many parents are not competent.
  • visakanv 13y ago
    This is very similar to my experience. I did very well in the first 4-5 years of my schooling, but afterwards I coasted through with as little effort as possible. I spent my time reading, writing, surfing the internet, writing more, arguing with people, writing still. I played in a rock band, I organized concerts, did stand up comedy. Almost everything meaningful I learnt, I learnt outside of the curriculum. I learned to appreciate the beauty of mathematics from YouTube. Today, I make a living using the skillset that I developed outside of school. I don't even have a resume. I was headhunted through my blog. I think this is something that's going to happen a lot more. People Google for almost everything else, why not for employees? School was never about learning- it was about indoctrination, subordination, assessment, sorting and daycare. I'm biased, as you might be, but I think learning is something that's going to happen primarily outside of school- especially now that everything outside of school is so much more interesting and compelling.
  • ballard 13y ago
    Neat. I was fortunate to attend an over-achiever public hs with half a dozen perfect SATs and full rides to Ha'var-d. The prevailing view was "legally-mandated prison, CWOT." The best thing was finding ways to take classes that allowed more time off campus and coding time in the computer lab (eg total anarchy.) I'd never have wrote a friendly TSR virus that included hotkeys for a calculator and an ASCII table if it was "EZ-bake oven" rote instruction. Also, private school (Challenger) for K-3 probably did some good.
  • rlpb 13y ago
    You might be interested to read: http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html
  • benched 13y ago
    I felt the same about school: mostly, I hated it, and it was torture to go. I did very well, mostly because my mother instilled a kind of fear of getting less than an A on anything, which my extreme personality ratcheted up to a fear of getting less than A+. I obsessed over test scores, and remembering information came pretty easy. The only part of school I enjoyed was math. I absolutely loved learning and doing math. That I could do a problem with lots of complicated steps, many of which seemed almost creative, and arrive at a common answer, was like logical magic. And it complimented my budding programming hobby very well. I started trying to program games almost as soon as I had a computer, when I was still very young. I remember it took a long time to understand for loops at first. Then it took a long time to figure out how to poll keyboard input the right way. Then it took a while to learn the ins and outs of BLTing, and so on. I left college after only one semester. I still thought the programming thing would probably only be a hobby. Still, I made a game, and tried to sell it. But it only sold 500 copies, so I was discouraged. My adulthood got off to a very rocky start, not knowing what to do. I took me 2 years to realize that I could actually get a programming job with what I already knew. At first, I wouldn't have believed it was possible, not without college. But through a couple of lucky breaks, it happened, and I found myself a full-fledged software developer at a real software company at 21, with no formal education. 15 years later, I find myself in the middle of a pretty interesting, varied programming career. Looking back, the only parts of school that served me were math, and english. I could have just studied those two during high school, I think, and come out just as well. Everything else was self study.
• einhverfr 13y ago
  Over here in Indonesia, most of the more prestigious schools follow the Singapore model. Kids do end up studying a lot, but on the whole it doesn't seem more than I did as a kid (in rural America). They tend to be pretty well-rounded, teach three languages (English, Bahasa, and Mandarin), and follow roughly the math courses I remember as a child though perhaps a year advanced by 4th grade. In the US, schools seem to be succumming to two very serious trends. The first, and most basic, is in the school attempting to replace rather than support the family as the basic unit of education. You can't do this though. Education begins and ends at home, and what schools offer is largely a supplement for the home. This leads directly to the second problem which is the worship of innovation. I get told by friends in the US about how math classes are teaching Fibonacci parlor tricks for multiplication (like lattice multiplication, which I know enough math to understand but only because I know a lot more math than the average parent). This joins the high tech toys in the idea that gadgets and trinkets can teach our youth but parents cannot. The innovation focus further devalues the home as the center of learning, and it leads to a highly institutional, almost assembly-line view of learning. In the end, I don't see how American higher education can survive another generation without some major adjustments to our public school system (and probably society as a whole, to be honest).
  • kiba 13y ago
    The innovation focus further devalues the home as the center of learning, and it leads to a highly institutional, almost assembly-line view of learning. I thought the whole world is about assembly-line learning rather than self initiated learning.
    • Ygg2 13y ago
      Only the worst kind is assembly line learning.
  • joshuaheard 13y ago
    "Education begins and ends at home, and what schools offer is largely a supplement for the home." I think it is the opposite. I pay the school to teach my kid. I don't expect to have them come home and require me to finish the job. Can you imagine if you went to a restaurant and they said, we prepared the food, but you must cook it. I work every day with my child on her homework, but it is not to teach her what she learned at school, it is to supplement her teaching with things you won't learn in the classroom.
• clavalle 13y ago
  > the company is struggling to find Okies with the skills to fill even its most basic factory jobs. Such posts require workers to think critically Perhaps those educated enough to think critically put that skill to work before accepting a factory job making mass produced biscuits. My critical thinking skills lead me to guess that is not the most fulfilling, high paying, or upwardly mobile job even for Oklahoma.
  • aspensmonster 13y ago
    >Such posts require workers to think critically, yet graduates of local schools are often unable to read or do simple maths. This is why the company recently decided to open a new factory in Poland... This was the solution? Seriously? Going through the hassle of opening up a factory on the other side of the planet across language and legal barriers all because the local population in Oklahoma didn't come shrink-wrapped precisely as ordered? Seems to me that a far more simple solution would be to train your work force, rather than externalize that responsibility. If the problems are really so systemic as they are claimed, then demonstrate some civic responsibility and see to it that your community gets its act together.
    • westicle 13y ago
      I fail to see how that is a more simple solution. Teaching people how to think is both an educational and cultural challenge which far exceeds the trivial challenge of outsourcing work. People have a wide range of different responsibilities (self, family, local community, humankind etc). I don't see why Polish people are morally any less deserving of jobs than Oklahomans. This company clearly thinks the Polish are more capable of doing the job. Who are we to say otherwise?
      • eru 13y ago
        But don't you see, the Poles sit on the other side of the fence! (Yes, this kind of nationalism bothers me no end.)
    • philwelch 13y ago
• nawitus 13y ago
  >Students forego calculators, having learned how to manipulate numbers in their heads. Not true in Finland.
• arbutus 13y ago
  From the outside, the state of education in the US seems really worrying. Hard to see the wage gap closing any time soon with the way it sounds like their kids are being educated.
• kubov 13y ago
  Well, reading that as a 22 years old Polish male gives me mixed feelings. I was living in Poland and studying there for my whole life and basically I have experience basically in whole educational process here (preschool, elementary, gymnasium, high school and now pursuing BS degree at polytechnic) I can definitely say that polish educational system is not that great. Of course we have a lot of people contesting in computer science /maths /physical national Olympic which are very hard contests but it is still very small factor, those kids are often struggling with the same problems you would expect they have (harassment, bullying etc). Polish educational system (especially nation wide maturity exams after high school and college education) are in my opinion decreasing. The maturity exam is getting easier and easier each year to allow more people just to pass. Sure, life is going to verify that somehow, but it also diminish value of this exam. In my opinion people that are successful in polish school are only those who decide to not follow teaching process given at school but they work very hard on they own, in my opinion the main problem that is present here (and probably worldwide) is students assessment process, every student is taken to the lowest common denominator when it comes giving grades. People that (in scope of the class room) are doing fine, let's say B grade students think they are doing just fine and there are only few things to improve, similarly A students - they generally tends to think they have already reached the peak, when there is still unbelievable much things to learn.
  • CrankyPants 13y ago
    Thanks for the insight. Every major publication runs a piece just like this every few years. The exotic countries and methods always differ somewhat, but the formula is always the same. It's the pseudo-intellectual version of the filler/cover-baitait articles on new ways to become heart healthy, or inventions that will change the world, usually done well in advance and saved for slow news-weeks. Not that the subject matter isn't of value, but it's always oversimplified, and oversold.
    • CrankyPants 13y ago
      Sorry, typed that one out on a touchscreen and blew it. "baitait" = "bait"
  • 13y ago
• xux 13y ago
  Most people don't need to think. Thinking isn't necessary to live in today's world.
  • usernew1817 13y ago
    right, that makes sense....
    • deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
    • Ygg2 13y ago
      Well thinking, allows people to see things under a different light. Under different light you look at state and say - What a piece of shit! Tell me who is gonna call out governments on the stupid shit they do? The stupid? No, they are too busy drooling. It's the thinkers. They are always troublesome. The less of them, the better /devil advocate.
    • polymatter 13y ago
      well, you don't need any creative thinking. you can easily scrape by life doing what you see other people doing without questioning it.
  • LionRoar 13y ago
    Although sounding a little bit cynical, there is unfortunately some truth in it: if thinking was important then the smartest people could be found on the highest positions. Clearly that is not the case (with a few exceptions). So we can only conclude that thinking is not of great value and smart people are not really wanted (unless they make cool, nice, shiny toys). It's just a simple observation; the world around us is not based on the smartest solutions. A documentary I saw about the human brain gave an explanation for this: the brain always looks for the easiest solution because it wants to preserver as much energy as possible (it has already enough to do in the modern world). It is just natural that energy follows the path of the least resistance. And that is the reason we don't have Plato's State :)
• aresant 13y ago
  A must read corollary to this is PG's "why are nerds unpopular" http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html
• kenster07 13y ago
  Worse yet, the standard education indirectly discourages independent thought. It is difficult to reconcile the standardization of education with the wide diversity of students. There is simply no way everyone's intellect can flourish under a one-size-fits-all system.
• patrikr 13y ago
  Supplemental reading: Linus Torvalds's (from Finland) opinion of American schools: https://plus.google.com/+LinusTorvalds/posts/J1NCgKQi55X https://plus.google.com/+LinusTorvalds/posts/J1NCgKQi55X
• dnautics 13y ago
  Was I the only one who found no evidence in this article about 'teaching children to think'? There was some discussion about metrics (such as PISA) but that is not, to me, any sort of evidence about the ability to think.
  • davidvaughan 13y ago
    No, you weren't the only one. The only reality-based test mentioned in this review was whether Okies could get a "basic" job in a factory, and an assertion that this would require critical thinking skills (with the implication that such skills would be of the sort taught at school). However, I think Ripley may give more in her book. An NYT review suggests she discusses how American school-leavers "lack the knowledge and skill to compete in the global economy". It's all a bit vague, I admit. "Teaching children to think" is a much-used phrase. It could mean a great many things.
    • notahacker 13y ago
      Anyone with any critical thinking skills should question the example of outsourcing manufacturing to Poland as an endorsement of Poles' critical thinking skills. The alternate hypothesis - that the Polish education system is much more effective at producing drones who are efficient and motivated when performing menial tasks for low pay - has much to recommend it.
  • cicatriz 13y ago
    The headline is misleading, but the article itself is more solid in this regard. In fact, if you want children to be able to think, you shouldn't "teach them to think". You should teach deep knowledge and skills in a particular subject matter context: "Maths classes tend to be more sophisticated, with lessons that show the often fascinating ways that geometry, trigonometry and calculus work together in the real world. Students forego calculators, having learned how to manipulate numbers in their heads." High expectations can also be effective: "Yet his most effective change was also his wooliest: he expected the best work from all of his pupils." See http://www.aft.org/pdfs/americaneducator/summer2007/Crit_Thinking.pdf http://www.aft.org/pdfs/americaneducator/summer2007/Crit_Thi...
• rquirk 13y ago
  Oh come on! It's a classic case of out-sourcing, isn't it? Workers in Poland get paid a lot less. The min wage in Poland is €384 per month (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_wages_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_wages_by_count...) or $525 at current rates, while the minimum wage in the US is $7.25/hr (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage_in_the_United_Sta...) - or for a 40 hour week that'd be $1160. I don't know what taxes would do to that, but we're looking at double the rate in the US. If on top of that Poles are better educated, that's great. Plus Europe needs jobs. But I'm sure the primary concern is the bottom line. BAMA could staff the factories in Oklahoma if they could get away with paying the workers $4/hr.
• grn 13y ago
  I live in Poland, went to school here, and definitely cannot confirm the claims made in the article. Half of my education happened in the reform school system that the article mentions and almost everyone agrees that it's much worse that the previous one. High school in Poland used to be a preparation for further education at university. It ends with a nation-wide exam called matura. The reform greatly reduced the number of other types of schools. It has two effects. First, it's much harder to find a skilled worker because there are much less workers trained. Second, the general level of education at high schools dropped significantly. It had to drop because otherwise many of the new pupils wouldn't pass the matura. Notions of a logarithm, exponential, prime decomposition has become foreign to pupils. No one has heard about a derivative or an integral for more than a decade. Of course all the above is a generalisation. There are some great schools with teachers who really want to teach their subjects instead of just formally completing stages of the government-mandated education program. Unfortunately they are in minority. I'm really concerned about quality of education that my children will get in this country. Home schooling is an option though an expensive one.
• sunnyujjawal 13y ago
  Some MNC's and NGO can play important role in it.
• qwerta 13y ago
  I am from Czech Republic, which has educational system similar to celebrated Poland. "The holly cow" of reforms is to increase number of university graduates, if possible without spending extra money. On technical universities it means rationalizing and streamlining (for example before reforms to study IT I would also have to learn technical drawing). Also three years bachelor degree was practically non-existent. In reality this eroded university degrees by one level down. Also unemployment rate among university graduates is rising. On other side unemployment rate among younger people is lower, since most of them are studying until 25. There is shortage of qualified workers such as plumbers, electricians and welders. Those professions can easily make more money than software developers.
  • mtts 13y ago
    You actually touch on a good point: because educational success of a country is measured in the number of university* graduates, governments incentivize universities to, well, produce more graduates, which they do both by lowering standards for existing fields of study and by creating new fields that attract a lot of students but which don't really teach anything worthwhile. The result is graduates are far, far less well educated than their predecessors but on paper (including, I would presume, PISA) a much larger proportion of the population is "highly educated", making the government look good. To give an example of lowered standards everyone here can probably relate to: up until about five years ago, students at the school for applied information science where I work were required to learn (a bit of) assembly so they understood how computers work at the CPU level. This requirement has now been scrapped, resulting in applied information science graduates who don't know the first thing about how computers actually work. On paper, however, our school looks very good, because, after all, it is producing a larger number of "knowledge workers" than before. * this goes for schools for higher vocational training as well
• zmk_ 13y ago
  Having grown in Poland, I have to say I was very lucky to be born in 1985 which was the cut-off year for the reformed educational system. I managed to escape it. It is widely agreed that the system brought nothing but deterioration in the level of education students receive pre-univeristy, esp. in maths/physics/chemistry. So much so that when I was still studying in Poland, I often heard that "new" students are at a level comparable to "old" part-time students. > He decided to keep all Polish children in the same schools until they were 16, delaying the moment when some would have entered vocational tracks. This is misleading. First of all, education is obligatory until one is 18 years old in Poland. There is no such thing as dropping out of school before that age. The previous educational system was two-tier, with primary school lasting until 15 years old, and high school lasting the remainder 4 years (5 years for vocational high school, AFAIR). There were no electives in primary school, so the first real sorting of students based on ability was taking place at entrance exams to high schools (which had no obligation to accept a student based on their geographical location). What the reform implemented is it created a third tier in between primary (shortened by 2 years) and high schools (shortened by 1 year), the gymnasium. Gymnasiums do not have the sorting ability of high schools. With the end result being that what high schools were previously struggling to teach in 4 years now they have to condense into 3 years. So a lot of things are left out now. Plus the students they get at entry are also of lower quality -- I remember browsing through the first set of chemistry textbooks for gymnasium and being shocked that what the "old" system primary school students had to cover in two years was supposed to be covered in a lesser form in 3 years of gymnasium. So yes, the reform postponed the division of students into university/vocational tracks by one year, but at the cost of overall quality of education.
  • Marwy 13y ago
    > First of all, education is obligatory until one is 18 years old in Poland. I was about to point out your mistake, but decided to actually check that fact, and you're absolutely right. > There is no such thing as dropping out of school before that age. I must have slipped through the government's fingers. I'm not sure if it's a bad or a good thing.
• jwr 13y ago
  I am Polish, I live in Poland, and I found the article's praise for our education system strange. My opinion of it is much lower. I regularly worry about teaching my children to think for themselves — because I believe this is something the schooling system actively discourages. I also don't think that recent reforms did much to improve education, and I don't see why anyone could think they did. I would approach this book very, very sceptically.
  • speeder 13y ago
    I also think the article to be terrible. The article believes making more children have more shit on their head is the way to go... No, seriously, that is not "learning to think" that is learning formulas and other random shit that you will never use on your life with few exceptions. Learning to think is when you allow kids to learn on their own, what they are curious about, when curiosity drives learning, THEN people learn to think, because they have to. When you just hammer random facts on someone head, you just fill that someone head with random facts... And the only need for that, is to hammer those random facts on someone else head.
    • zanny 13y ago
      This. I don't think a single education system in the world gets this right, because it is so diametrically opposed to being able to gauge performance or have metrics to evaluate aptitude. You basically have to sit down and have a conversation with the person whenever you want to profile their progress, but nobody wants to put that time in with children, and it isn't something you could rate on a scale or regurgitate into teachers brains on how to perform. It requires critical thinking to see critical thinking.
  • anonemouscoward 13y ago
    Everything the Economist publishes is motivated purely by politics. Poland is the number one USA ally, offset against the EU, and, especially, Russia, the evil bad guy in this current cold war.
    • 13y ago
• yeellow 13y ago
  This article is really funny for somebody living in Poland. It is totally opposite to what you hear in Poland about our educational system. I am really worried about other countries if Poland works as an example in education. The reform mentioned in the article has a very bad reputation here and most experts, citizens and politicians would like to take back the changes. Education standards declined rapidly as it become more egalitarian. I am laughing at the level of mathematics when I compare it to what I learned at school (in late 80s) and back than it was already a joke comparing to 70s. The most often repeated argument is that our schools do not teach pupils how to think. I don't really want to go further as it is somehow nice that The Economist, being so wrong, is giving us so much undeserved credit.
• lucraft 13y ago
  Slightly ominous headline, perhaps?
• pavlov 13y ago
  My opinion and anecdotal experience is that the first priority in teaching children should be foreign languages. The younger you start, the easier it is to learn to speak and think in a foreign language. Almost everything else of any relevance can be taught basically as a side effect of language immersion. I'm Finnish and went to a French-speaking school. I didn't understand any French going in, but at the age of 6, you pick it up quickly as long as it's a friendly environment. Later during the standard 12-year education, I had English as a third language, then Swedish (it's obligatory in Finland) and also German. All the other stuff taught in school is such that a reasonably smart kid can learn it on her own as needed. But foreign languages are not like that. Thanks to computer games, I was somewhat fluent in reading English even before the classes started in school, but I couldn't speak a word -- you just don't learn pronounciation and conversation from games and TV shows, you need to have a real teacher.
• TausAmmer 13y ago
  Does smart child earns a lot of money and stupid one does not?
• Semaphor 13y ago
  2 anecdotes: We had a guy from Poland living with us in Germany for 6 months. I think it was around 2003/2004 when I was still in school. His math skills were absolutely impressive but he still had to study a lot to keep up (he was living in Germany due to some excellency initiative, so this is a slightly skewed sample). When he showed me some of their lessons it was way beyond what we had to do in school. In 9th grade I took part in an exchange program with the UK. As they lacked exchange partners , I got matched up with a guy from 10th or 11th grade (can't remember). The school was supposedly one of the better ones. I wasn't very good in math (usually hovered around grade 3 [1 - 6 with 1 being the best grade and 4.0 the worst passing grade]) but I was pretty much the best in their class. Wasn't very impressed by them.
• rustynails77 13y ago
  This year, I've engaged schools at length to discuss computer based systems. There are a few recurring threads that I have seen that would support this article. * Real-world examples are not favoured. I'd go as far to say they are unpopular. There is an over emphasis on theory and rote learning, without providing context. This may be a result of "stove piping" mathematics to be "pure math only", rather than having "real-world applications". * Children are shoe-horned and given little opportunity to pace themselves and their learning. The theory may be that kids that progress quickly may become bored. * Technology is praised/shunned in the wrong ways. Tablets are generally praised, and in my view, offer limited opportunity and creativity. PCs are shunned, or treated as "toys". * Over emphasis on rewards. There seems to be a common thread that kids continually need to be bribed. Avatars/humourous or cute animations/etc. There may be a good reason for this, but I find that it actually distracts students rather than helps. I could list other things that have concerned me, but these are the first ones that come to mind. Edited to add comments about "rewards".
  • Joakal 13y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montessori https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montessori ?
• sloth0000 13y ago
  I was born in Poland and lived there until I turned 24 (I am 35 now). Now living in Australia and having previously lived in other countries, mainly US , contrary to others who comment on the quality of Polish education, I can confirm that thanks to the fact I received it in Poland I am much better off compared to my peers in AU or US. I work in IT now but previously got a teaching degree here in AU and worked in education (high schools) for 3 years. To put it in a nutshell, AU education (probably along with other westernized countries) is an utter joke compared to Polish. What AU kids do at school, irrespective of the level they are in is 3-4 years behind Europe. AU is going strong thanks to its migrants coming mainly from Asia who are slowly replacing typical Australians in high paying white collar jobs. Any kid educated in Asia can run circles around top students here and that is particularly evident during students exchange programs where newcomers cannot believe that learning about fractions and watching cartoons to write compositions or essays is a standard curricular approach. The reason I do not work in education anymore is precisely because I could not stand myself to watch how AU curriculum with a plethora of mickey mouse subjects is dumbbing this generations down (and probably others before it). I am not saying that Polish education was the highlight of my youth and that as a student I didn't hate every day of my life while at school, spent cramming Math and English and many other, seemingly useless subjects. However, seeing what I see now, in hindsight I am so grateful for the fact that it was so bloody hard to be even average student at my school and now that I have 2 kids on my own I feel sorry for the fact that unless I pay premium from the start for a private school, they will never have the same opportunity as I did.
• sloth0000 13y ago
  I was born in Poland and lived there until I turned 24 (I am 35 now). Now living in Australia and having previously lived in other countries, mainly US , contrary to others who comment on the quality of Polish education, I can confirm that thanks to the fact I received it in Poland I am much better off compared to my peers in AU or US. I work in IT now but previously got a teaching degree here in AU and worked in education (high schools) for 3 years. To put it in a nutshell, AU education (probably along with other westernized countries) is an utter joke compared to Polish. What AU kids do at school, irrespective of the level they are in is 3-4 years behind Europe. AU is going strong thanks to its migrants coming mainly from Asia who are slowly replacing typical Australians in high paying white collar jobs. Any kid educated in Asia can run circles around top students here and that is particularly evident during students exchange programs where newcomers cannot believe that learning about fractions and watching cartoons to write compositions or essays is a standard curricular approach. The reason I do not work in education anymore is precisely because I could not stand myself to watch how AU curriculum with a plethora of mickey mouse subjects is dumbbing this generations down (and probably others before it). I am not saying that Polish education was the highlight of my youth and that as a student I didn't hate every day of my life while at school, spent cramming Math and English and many other, seemingly useless subjects. However, seeing what I see now, in hindsight I am so grateful for the fact that it was so bloody hard to be even average student at my school and now that I have 2 kids on my own I feel sorry for the fact that unless I pay premium from the start for a private school, they will never have the same opportunity as I did.
• yeukhon 13y ago
  I disagree the norm that we don't teach kids to think or our American education sucks. I want to stop comparing education with other countries if possible, but we do this every day anyway. We do teach kids think. I am a Chinese immigrant. I came to US when I was 12 and I am 22 now. I have to say that the American education is quite liberal and most classes I take do ask students to think more critically. The thing about American classroom is that overall classroom interaction is more decentralized than the Chinese's. In China (specifically HK), you sit in the same classroom with 30-40 people for many years. For example, I can sit with 80% of the people for 6 years during my elementary school (in China, elementary school is 6 years, age 6 to age 12). So you build a strong friendship with a lot of people. You work like a team and solve things like a team for many years. Usually with team effort and strong friendship, students are more likely to produce something interesting - everyone can be honest to each other. You are not shy to tell others your opinion. This is quite true for school up to junior high in America as one spends every day with students in their homeroom. When you enter HS, you usually don't have that kind of classroom model anymore. You usually see different people in different classes; it's like a college experience to me. For a school with 3000 students, 20/30 people will not appear in my next class. Now you can still do teamwork, except, team work is with different group of people each time. This has an advantage though: you hear more different opinions. Except people can be shy and skeptical so it's harder to work with. To me, education is not about score. Sure Russian and Chinese are scoring 98% and Americans are scoring 50%. So what? I don't go to MIT and people around me are genius in their own way. I can't make a good joke and people I know can. Every one has their own strength and own creativity. Teaching children how to think is like making everyone to do the same thing: get 100 on your next math competition. That's stupid. If you make fewer exams and more on spreading knowledge, let students have more time to rest and play, eventually students will happier and will have more time to think. When you put emphasis on testing knowledge, you stress students out. I am not saying you don't stress them from time to time - you know, because stress can produce new ideas (think agile and get shit done), but we need to put less on scores. This is why group activity is important. Students in group competitions like sports and robotics (FIRST) are happier. This is why we should go back to HS and help students to organize clubs and events. Or mentor people to do things. Eventually, kids will figure out. Each of us can come up with some crazy ideas for the next biggest startup. It is just a matter of time. Inventions don't come in a day. It takes idea, time, dedication, group effort and knowledge.
• dancecodes 13y ago
  Smarter kids where good education and good relations and good social communicate but it not fifth element and it is insufficient. Kids everywhere are smart but env may stop evolution. Lets kids thinking. Kids needs in protect always.
• casca 13y ago
  For a more detailed understanding of the PISA system, there was a recent Econtalk podcast - http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2013/08/hanushek_on_edu_3.html http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2013/08/hanushek_on_edu_3.h...
• Ras_ 13y ago
  History proves some interesting insight to education. Take for example literacy. There are Finnish/Swedish parochial records/church examination registries dating back to 17th century down to a level of individual families. This is important due to Charles XI's Swedish Church Law of 1686 stating that everyone had to be able to read bible. So you can follow how that emergent Lutheran essence actually turned into literacy. From an individual perspective it was necessary to learn because you weren't allowed to take holy communion, be confirmed and later wed without reading ability. By 1750 some parishes started to have 90% reading ability. What is surprising is the writing ability. It achieved same levels only around 1900 (1920 in Finland). So that is clearly connected to industrial reform rather than spirit of protestantism. At least my initial assumption that reading/writing go hand in hand was proven wrong. In light of this long history of literacy in Nordic countries I tend to value the South Korean jump in literacy from previous generation more highly, even if it was achieved through “culture of educational masochism”. Book about this: Understanding Literacy in Its Historical Contexts: Socio-cultural History and the Legacy of Egil Johansson. Take a look at pg. 47 at Google Books and see how incredibly detailed those church examination registries in 1688-91 could be (pg. 56 has a nice graph differentiating the development of reading and writing ability): http://books.google.fi/books?id=WBLOVq4ocLEC&printsec=frontcover&hl=fi#v=onepage&q&f=false http://books.google.fi/books?id=WBLOVq4ocLEC&printsec=frontc...
• gambiting 13y ago
  As a Pole, I find it unbelivable. The system is incredibly strict, there is absolutely no place for free-thinking, I have never seen their archaic methods applied to real-world usage in a classroom, and all universities have very low funding,which means that most experiments are ran on ancient machines. There is no budget for buying tools or documentation. My girlfriend was told in front of the class by the professor that she should not be studying engineering because it's not an industry for women. It would be completely unacceptable at a university in the UK or in the States. In Poland she went to see the head of the university and was told that "she probably misunderstood what the professor meant". Obviously every one knows that that these two people are good friends so it's impossible to do anything about the situation. If the Polish education system taught me anything, it is that free thinking is a bad thing,and you are punished for it on every step of your education.
• tokenadult 13y ago
  The review of Amanda Ripley's new book Smartest Kids in the World by Annie Murphy Paul in the New York Times[1] is a good reality check on the review from The Economist kindly posted here. The book is in hot demand in my county library system, so my request for the book hasn't been filled yet. The other excerpts from the book I have seen online have been very good. I have lived overseas and observed the effect of another school system, and indeed education reform is the issue that drew me to participate here on Hacker News,[2] so I am always interested in discussing education policy here. Based on the different country I have observed, I think the book's account is largely correct. Americans underestimate how much young people can learn. School programs in the United States, according to federal sample surveys, are so underchallenging that many school pupils, not just the "gifted" pupils, find school too easy and boring.[3] Mathematics lessons in the United States are especially notorious for emphasizing the mechanical aspects of calculation--thus expecting students to bring electronic calculators to class--and underemphasizing the thinking involved in mathematical problem-solving.[4] Let's discuss what makes sense in education policy on the basis of facts from more than one place. It's significant that we are discussing education policy around the world here in English, as very few Americans could discuss education policy in Korean, Polish, or Finnish, the languages of the countries profiled in the new book. (I could discuss education policy in Chinese, the language I learned as a second language, but that is not the usual experience of Americans.) The new book's encouragement to do that is a good contribution to better education policy. [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/25/books/review/amanda-ripleys-smartest-kids-in-the-world.html http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/25/books/review/amanda-ripley... [2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4728123 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4728123 [3] http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/education/story/2012-07-09/school-too-easy/56120106/1 http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/education/story/2012-07-... http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/MSNBC/Sections/NEWS/z_Personal/Gold/CAP_state_of_education.pdf http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/MSNBC/Sections/NEWS/z_Personal/G... [4] http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/Resources/articles.php?page=calculustrap http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/Resources/articles.php?pa...
  • Jd 13y ago
    I don't see why Americans should be able to discuss education policy in Polish. Seems a non sequitur. I don't think the author of the book claimed to be able to do such anyways. As for technological over-reliance, I take that as given. I'm surprised that you agree w/ the conclusion of the review that segregating talent into higher and lower achieving groups is bad. To me this is one of the strengths of the US system. Even if the high achieving groups are not stimulating enough for high achievers, it seems to provide some sort of positive stimulus that otherwise would be lacking in the system.
• consultant23522 13y ago
  I'm an American so I'm probably biased.. but what I've found is that in most school districts you can get as good of an education as you want. I grew up in South Carolina and went to high/secondary school in Florida.. two states with relatively poor education records. However, by staying on the "right" path I was able to get in advanced programs, programs for students with high IQs that taught critical thinking skills.. I graduated high school with over 30 college credit hours and had completed Physics 1, Calc 1, 2, and 3, and a hand full of other electives... all in high school. Other students in the same exact schools I attended had equal and opposite educational experiences/success.
• hawkharris 13y ago
  In this article the journalist associates critical thinking with economic abilities. In other words, the local factory can't find laborers because children in the area lack reading and math skills. The author then goes on to argue that standardized testing is partially to blame for this phenomenon. While journalists commonly make this leap, it's not necessarily an accurate one. In other words, standardized testing is not always at odds with critical thinking. For example, South Korea, a nation with a very strong emphasis on standardized testing, consistently ranks in the world's top 5 universities, according to Pearson. Its students have strong reading and math skills, which prepare them to meet the challenges of many jobs. We should question the myth that standardized testing always harms critical thinking. In some cases, I think, this argument is used as an excuse to justify American children's increasingly awful test scores.
• lists 13y ago
  >>Yet international rankings now put the country’s students well ahead of America’s in science and maths (the strongest predictor of future earnings), even as the country spends far less per pupil.<< This sentence is exemplary of most, if not all, of the discussion about education reform. Another cue are the explicit goals of the Common Core standards, expressly designed to further economic competitiveness of America's youth. But what about our children's ability to make informed decisions using qualified evidence? This is different from so-called 'critical thinking', which is so vaguely defined whenever it comes up, or 'creativity', which lacks a rigorous method to appreciate its application. These informed decisions I'm talking about not only affect our youth's ability to make decisions about their own lives (because no matter your education system, practical experience is other than doing well in school), but also their ability to make decisions about the state we live in collectively. There's little out there teaching people how to make informed decisions about areas they have no expertise in, and yet, must make a decision. Politicians are voted in for dubious populism rather than the sensibility of their policy programme. Most responses to social issues continue to spiral around ideology and prejudice. America needs a lot more than just an effective STEM education regime.
• Surio 13y ago
  > The argument about knowing how and when to apply formulas misses the fact that practice in applying those formulas is essential to competence. > I am coming late to this topic, and I wanted to make exactly this point that @kaitai made in a thread, in one of the many threads about memorisation vs. critical understanding.... This is the (moot) point that people seem to be missing here, which is surprising, because most of us here do seem to think highly about "code katas" or the "10,000 hour rule" or "immersion into code/algorithms" which is all about the above.