Surprising Things About School

Readings that may be relevant to those who find this Twitter thread intriguing:

- "On the Wildness of Children," on what kind of educational experiences we might imagine for our children if we consider what children are like first: http://carolblack.org/on-the-wildness-of-children/

- "Deschooling Society" (on my reading list): https://archive.org/embed/DeschoolingSociety

I, perhaps cynically, think some universities have even started "hacking" that process. In Nottingham you can hire graduates from either of our 2 big universities where the University pays part of their salary! [1]

[1] https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/careers/employers/vacancy-adver...

- parents care more about extracurricular and athletic pursuits than academic. They'll help their kids play a sport, but rather than try to help their children learn, they'll complain that the teachers are not doing their jobs

- children react to changes in environment the same way adults do, but this isn't considered by schools because they know the students have no choice but to comply

- many children still go hungry at school, making learning difficult to impossible

- one in ten children are diagnosed with ADHD; somewhere between 1 in 20 and 1 in 10 may be on stimulants, antipsychotics, antidepressants, etc

- private schools may pay half the salaries of public school teachers, and their curriculums are not as strict (virtuslly no required curriculum)

- children are still told today (by teachers) that they will be destitute and homeless if they do not go to college, but they do not provide any extra assistance either, making them either extra stressed or give up

- teachers pay, pensions, etc and overall school budgets are still cut short by politicians whenever they need to trim their budgets, while other areas of budgets are increased

- children in 8th grade often have a 3rd grade reading level in many parts of the country, but especially major cities with a history of segregation and a lack of access to jobs

- some kids are still booted from one school to the next and used as scape goats if anything negative is on their transcript

1. selection bias (unemployed or low-income graduates would feel embarrassed to respond)

2. the mean of the (biased) sample being much higher than the median (die to outliers)

I'm only half-joking; I think the problem here is lack of information. That the student was likely to move from $10/h to $70k/y is something that the teachers might know, but random lenders probably don't.

On the other hand, I don't know if I want to see financial companies partnering with schools to provide loans - seems ripe for abuse.