I went to a Waldorf school up through eighth grade, and it was wonderful. Then I went to a run-of-the-mill private high school, and it was hell.
Ask HN: What do you think about the current education system?
11–20 of 34 posts
Re: Ask HN: What do you think about the current education system?
#12There is very little good about the current education system:
1/ Dividing kids in age based groups is very poor. They only learn negative behaviour from each other. Skill based would be more interesting as the younger kids would learn from the older students and the older ones learn some responsibility towards the older students
2/ Scientific research has proven teacher based education to be sub-optimal. You take away the inquisitive nature of the kids. They will take what the adult says as true and fail to look for different ways to reach the same goal.
3/ School just isn't fun. Information is pumped into children which they forget once it has been tested. Let them discover things in a playful way and they will remember it much longer.
4/ Exams really only test how well one can game exams and tests, not how well one understood the matter. Test should be used as a personal measure to check if you understood everything and if you are ready to move on to more complex issues, not as a benchmark compared to others.
And so much more.
Re: Ask HN: What do you think about the current education system?
#13I think we probably need to pay teachers significantly more if we want to improve things, at least until we understand education sufficiently well to be able to train anyone to do the job.
Back in the early 1900s, and even through a significant part of the century, teaching was nearly the only place for graduates of top women's colleges, at least until they got married. Upwards of 90% of employed graduates of these schools were teaching. Whether that was a matter of it being the most respectable or the most lucrative thing for women to be doing, the fact is that it had a pretty great talent pool to work with. By the 1980s/90s, when you looked at the top 10% of women in terms of academics, only about 10% of them had any interest in teaching as a profession [1].
Now, both the money and the respect are lacking. The perception is that any idiot can become a teacher as long as they can make it through their four years of college. Some people will be quick to say that you can't teach for the money. While that's certainly the case in the US right now, and it agrees with the overall notion that it's much better to be in a job you love, it ignores a lot of the problem. Top students, when they pick what area of studies to pursue, are bound to think about the prestige and earning potential of their future careers, though the amounts of those will differ for different people. If you could easily be headed for a job where you'll make upwards of $100k, accepting $40-50k is a lot for some people to swallow. Suppose I think I'd really enjoy teaching, and hopefully even be good at it, but asking me to be unable to retire for ~40 years, versus the 7-10 I can manage otherwise, is a bit much. Even if I'm not doing my ideal job, I can afford some hobbies that will make up for that. I like sailing, skiing, and traveling, and I'd like to get my pilot's license. Teaching isn't going to pay for any of that. So I make my trade-off, reducing by one the pool of potential teachers. And there are a lot of others doing the same thing.
I have many more things I could say, but I should wrap up my rant. I also believe that home life has an enormous influence on school performance, and I think land use patterns in the US increase this effect by reducing community cohesion, and along with it possibility of parents who struggle being assisted by the people around them.
[1] Somerville College Report, 1987 and 1996. (I've used statistics from Oxford here, but the trends are similarly mirrored for US. I just don't have a resource handy.)
Re: Ask HN: What do you think about the current education system?
#14Trying to make kids memorize a bunch of stuff that's unimportant to them is incredibly inefficient and the information fades fast.
Having them do this at the expense of play (accelerated self-guided learning through social simulation, art and sports), at the expense of physical activity and in an insanely toxic social environment, is plain crazy.
Apprenticeship, where one learns what they need to learn when they need to apply it, and then uses the newly learned skills to achieve own goals beats that hand down. Look up Tobi from shopify and his posts about his learning to write software in Germany's apprenticeship programs.
Convincing kids that they are smart or stupid based on their teacher's opinion on the kids' obedience and ability to regurgitate uninteresting (to them) data is harmful at best. Convincing them that what they are experiencing in school is learning is even more harmful.
Schools are great at efficiently enacting a plan that has little to do with children's needs and little to do with learning.
Like a close friend who attended an elite private school with tiny classes and a lot of self-elected subjects, time allocation and projects said, "when I went to college I thought I was surrounded by idiots. Later I realized these were kids who didn't get a chance to learn good writing, or public speaking, or to plan, schedule and execute on their own nprojects, or to navigate bureaucracy."
I'd say same goes for other important life skills, like financial planning, media preparedness (understanding propaganda and advertising), job hunting, entrepreneurship, art, etc.
Re: Ask HN: What do you think about the current education system?
#15We all know what the problem is.
The solution is to preserve curiosity and honesty. These are the only traits that matter.
Re: Ask HN: What do you think about the current education system?
#16The current education system is broken, yet it's designed to prepare people to the real world, which is even more broken.
We can't fix education without fixing the rest of society. The system is so complex and inconsistent, we simply can't expect a kid that keeps what makes him good (curiosity, honesty, idealism) to thrive in the real world.
Re: Ask HN: What do you think about the current education system?
#17Very simple, the problem is not education but the true purpose of it. If education is a mean to earn more money, or the best way to get to the top and it doesn't matter how to get it, then learning only teach you what to avoid and how to simulate being a person.
Education is about making up what is important for us as a society. If we are to allow million of people to starve and get convince that what we see is just a natural state of affairs, then we have defined education as a system not about us as a society but about you as an individual. Society must speaks out with their pockets: If you are paying low wages to scientist, teachers and doctors, you are educating people about what to do with their lives. Forget about the shiny words, education is a lot about economic, incentives and giving people a decent life. Education can't be build without a framework and a clear purpose. Today all of us know what is the purpose of education: save yourself, stay alive, survive. The rest is just a hollow mud of words, deceitful, vain group of vacuous words.
In this forum virtual reality can be turned into a platform for education. We can use virtual reality to replace opium and get people sideway of our way, that is convert into passive, sleeping minds.
But otherwise, we could transform virtual reality into a platform for action, were people are actively engaged into learning and helping others to create and promote knew ways of learning and discovering what is being a human being in the 21th century.
We all want feedback, learning is about communication for action not for self-oppression. I am for an education for action. Now, go, ruin the idea, sell the product, crook the intention, ban the action and feed the vultures and continue educating for succeed.
Re: Ask HN: What do you think about the current education system?
#18Trying to make kids memorize a bunch of stuff that's unimportant to them is incredibly inefficient and the information fades fast. Having them do this at the expense of play (accelerated self-guided learning through social simulation, art and sports), at the expense of physical activity and in an insanely toxic social environment, is plain crazy. Apprenticeship, where one learns what they need to learn when they need…
"Trying to make kids memorize a bunch of stuff that's unimportant to them is incredibly inefficient and the information fades fast."
I've come to the conclusion that it's not about this information itself. It's more about learning how to learn. This is the skill that the education system helped me develop, and which is useful for me long after the "training data sets" the school used have fallen into complete oblivion. Personalized mnemotechnics.
Re: Ask HN: What do you think about the current education system?
#19I think we probably need to pay teachers significantly more if we want to improve things, at least until we understand education sufficiently well to be able to train anyone to do the job. Back in the early 1900s, and even through a significant part of the century, teaching was nearly the only place for graduates of top women's colleges, at least until they got married. Upwards of 90% of employed graduates of these s…
> Some people will be quick to say that you can't teach for the money. [...]
> Top students, when they pick what area of studies to pursue, are bound to think about the prestige and earning potential of their future careers [...]
To support this point, if the profession is lucrative and respected, it attracts both people who love it and people who just want prestige. If the profession is not prestigious, less people who would love it choose it (i.e. only those who want to work in it despite its status), the rest being filled with drop-outs from other areas.
Re: Ask HN: What do you think about the current education system?
#20Relevant https://youtu.be/H5NUv0nOQCU