
Why we’re working our young people too hard - ZenJosh
http://lkd.cc/post/12863887617/were-working-our-young-people-too-hard
======
tel
This article finally revealed to me the mathematical structure of curriculum
optimization. It's a _bias/variance tradeoff_.

If you've done statistics, you know that B/V tradeoffs are more or less an
unavoidable feature of optimization or learning. If you go in with less clear
goals, you depend on learning on the fly to find the best solution which means
your performance varies a lot depending on environmental conditions. If you go
in with very clear goals, it's likely that people will cluster around them
tightly, but if you're _wrong_ with your bias, you'll be surely fucked.

How do you beat B/V tradeoffs? You put in more effort, more experience, better
sharing of information. You select your biases very carefully such that they
are less clear but cannot possibly be wrong. You constrain your variance such
that it is less harmful to your task.

Finally, there's the idea of consistency and convergence rates. Consistency
means that if any person spends _enough_ time and effort they will eventually
overcome both bias and variance and find the best solution. Rate of
convergence is how much time and effort it takes to get reasonably close.
Consistency and fast convergence are highly valuable properties, obviously,
but both are easy to hurt and destroy, especially through biasing.

------
brudgers
>" _... = Better future workforce_ "

Any educational system where that is the goal is going to be fucked from the
beginning...at least for anybody who agrees with Dewey's idea that the goal of
education is to make better people.

A country that considers itself made up of consumers and workers rather than
citizens, invites crap like SOPA, PATRIOT, and the TSA's shoe fetish.

~~~
mentat
The goal of a country is to continue improving the quality of life of its
citizens. Grouping working and consuming in that is totally bogus. Working
(theoretically) produces things which should, all in all, improve the quality
of life. Consuming is totally different and an essentially broken way to
promote growth.

~~~
asolove
Of course, not working is a much quicker way to increase most people's quality
of life.

~~~
brc
I disagree entirely, for two reasons: 1) Working is all about becoming a part
of society, of contributing, of belonging. Few people can take a prolonged
period of not contributing without some level of depression.

2) The overall quality of life of people is determined by the application of
time and labor saving devices, as well as by technical enhancements to
lifestyle and health. There is no higher improvement of quality of life than
low infant mortality and longer lifespans. All of these things are delivered
by a society that embraces specialisation as a way of increasing productivity
by everyone.

Sure, you'll get no argument from me that pointless consumerism backed up by
debt-based spending is not the path forwards, but that is an entirely
different proposition to stopping working altogether. Only the committed hobo
will get satisfaction from a life like that.

~~~
philwelch
> There is no higher improvement of quality of life than low infant mortality
> and longer lifespans.

Really? You'd trade off absolutely anything to increase those metrics?

~~~
brc
Obviously these are things that are harder to improve in a Western society, so
the big gains are in developed countries. My original comment was probably
slipping towards rhetoric-ville, but the point still stands - maximising the
chance your child will make it's 5th birthday and that you and your family
will live as long as possible definitely trumps most things.

------
Icer3107
So many times I have complained about the horrors of Microsoft Word and
Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Access and Turbo Pascal and Typing Mario (does
anybody even know what that is anymore?). Education is a complete mess.
There’s a particular sentence that I think needs more emphasis:

"I noticed a recurring theme. Hackers would bring up anecdotes of playing
around with BBC Micros in their spare time, learning C in their spare time or
building basic command-line games in their spare time."

How do they think they are helping us children by stuffing us with hours upon
hours of mindless work, following instructions on textbooks almost verbatim,
whether it’s Computer Science or Math or Chemistry or Literature? Students are
only allowed to interpret a literary work as the teachers see fit, only
allowed to play with chemicals on paper in their own imagination, only given
dull Math problems and a few certain “tricks” to solve them, and, yes, of
course, only allowed to complete computer projects that involve Microsoft
Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or Access. I don’t hate you, Bill Gates, but your
office suite is killing me. There has to be change. Only the best of the best
will be able teach him/herself the basics of IT while survivng high school
(and K12 and higher education in general); the rest will just lose interests
even though they have tremendous capabilities. Not to mention how it gets
lonely once in a while.

~~~
dfxm12
_How do they think they are helping us children by stuffing us with hours upon
hours of mindless work, following instructions on textbooks almost verbatim,
whether it’s Computer Science or Math or Chemistry or Literature?_ This is
because it is too hard to grade otherwise. I agree with you, it stinks, but
the first step to solving a problem is understanding it. We “need” these types
of assignments to gauge the progress of the students. Maybe the instrument is
wrong, but all things considered, it’s the best we have. Ideally we’d have
more teachers to reduce class size & these teachers will have the skills to
make children explore. Instead, we have standardized tests that only really
measure how well you can prepare for standardized test.

~~~
drivingmenuts
The politicians who fund our schools demand results so they can get
elected/re-elected. The numbers they need can only be obtained through
standardized, modular testing. It's a vicious cycle.

There are schools that eschew the standardized, rote methods of learning. But
they produce people like Cory Doctorow, who is a writer/speaker/etc. and
doesn't produce anything terribly useful. Well, except for thoughts, books,
etc. - things that do not follow measurable standards. But certainly no
iPhones, yet.

We will have to flip the whole teaching scheme on it's head in order to sort
this out, and it will be painful. Teachers will have to be valued more than
engineers and politicians (since the teachers produce little engineers and
politicians) and we'll actually have to trust them to know enough and do their
job. Possibly even pay them more.

Until then, it's square pegs in round holes all around.

NOTE: I am not Cory Doctorow nor would I even know him if he laid a hard,
sharp thought on me in a crowded room. But he did go to a liberal school in
Canada.

~~~
anamax
> The politicians who fund our schools demand results so they can get
> elected/re-elected.

You write "demand results" like it's a bad thing.

It isn't. If we're not getting "results", why bother?

Of course, which results we're talking about matter. I'll pay for some results
but not others.

> The numbers they need can only be obtained through standardized, modular
> testing.

Not true.

We tried the alternative, namely "trust the teachers". We got crap results.

That said, a kid who can read a crappy standardized test is better off than a
kid who can't. I mention that because we have hundreds of thousands of kids
who can't read.

If you can't measure it, how do you know whether you're doing it?

~~~
jbooth
He should've written "demand statistics", that would make his point more
clear. Did you not get that from what he was writing?

Also, when did we get "crap results" with "trust the teachers"? Was there some
point in the past where we were using standardized tests, abandoned it in
favor of 'trust the teachers' and watched them turn out a bunch of lazy
hippies?

~~~
anamax
> He should've written "demand statistics", that would make his point more
> clear.

That's a different point. Since there is no shortage of folks complaining
about demand results, it's reasonable to assume that he meant what he wrote.

Besides, why is demand statistics wrong? Why don't you think that we should
know how well (or not) things are going?

> Also, when did we get "crap results" with "trust the teachers"?

Trust the teachers is what we did before the current testing mania.

> Was there some point in the past where we were using standardized tests

Huh?

> abandoned it in favor of 'trust the teachers' and watched them turn out a
> bunch of lazy hippies?

Trust the teachers seemed to work for quite a while. Then we noticed that it
wasn't working.

Are you claiming that US education worked better right before the testing
mania?

~~~
jbooth
I'm claiming that you can't just say "oh we had some big downturn in
educational quality so we're adding tests to insure that teachers do their job
right".

Some amount of quantitative results measuring makes sense in any situation.
But remember, whatever you measure, that's what you get more of. Kloc, issue
tickets, or standardized test scores. I'd say in all cases it's important to
leave a lot of leeway for professional judgment along with the thing you're
measuring.

~~~
anamax
> I'm claiming that you can't just say "oh we had some big downturn in
> educational quality so we're adding tests to insure that teachers do their
> job right".

Why can't we say that? We did have a big downturn in education quality. If we
don't know whether teachers are doing their job right, why should we pay them?

> But remember, whatever you measure, that's what you get more of.

Absolutely.

Why the assumption that the majority of education is untestable?

> I'd say in all cases it's important to leave a lot of leeway for
> professional judgment along with the thing you're measuring.

Which reminds me - why the assumption that teachers are professionals? Yes,
they're paid, but traditional professionals are liable.

What have teachers done to earn leeway?

------
robfig
This article is working ME too hard in order to read a dark grey font on a
darker grey background

~~~
ghurlman
Oddly, I liked it, but that's probably due to my bias for coding with a dark
background.

I highly recommend installing one of the many instapaper/readability
extensions -- god knows with my ever-aging eyes I'm hitting that '~' key more
and more often.

------
firefoxman1
It's often hard to see a bright side of something as broken as the US
educational system, and perhaps I'm just a weird kid, but the mindless
bureaucratic nature of school actually caused me to seek out more interesting
subjects and read more books whenever possible because school never left me
"satisfied."

I used all of my high school "elective" blocks to attend a specialty school to
study CIT (graduated high school A+ and NET+ certified!) and spent all of my
free time doing IT consulting and building websites for clients. It taught me
a TON, but I'm almost positive that if school was mentally fulfilling each day
I probably would have just gone home and watched TV and socialized like
everyone else.

It is strange, though, that while most most of the messages and predictions of
dystopian/Cyberpunk novels and films tend to be vastly over-exaggerated, the
underlying principals and ideas seem to have come true. One of the nearly
universal themes tends to be an extremely bureaucratic and systematic world
and when you compare most aspects of 21st century life to 50 years ago, it's a
little frightening.

~~~
mechanical_fish
While consulting and building websites is a fine thing, it is not the _only_
thing.

Moreover: You literally have the rest of your life to do paying work. Unless
the alternative to going to work as a kid is hardship or hunger (which would
be an even _more_ regrettable problem) I see no sense in rushing into the
workforce.

It would be nice if your school had been interesting enough to capture your
attention with one of the hundreds of other subjects of possible study. One,
perhaps, that is mind-expanding and awesome but which doesn't pay. Math and
science. Art and music. History and philosophy. Languages and literature.
Machine shop and robotics lab. Studying these things is what school is for.
Building stuff for clients is what the remaining five or six decades of your
working life are for.

I find it heartbreaking that the most interesting thing you found to do in
your school days was to get a NET+ certification. Obviously, everyone's tastes
are different, and details matter, but my first-order reaction is to regard
that as a terrible failure of your environment.

~~~
firefoxman1
Well like I said, I found lots of subjects interesting because they weren't
ruined for me by school. I'm only taking a few classes in college now, yet I
find myself spending every free moment in the school's library because I feel
free to learn on my own terms now.

So I guess to clarify, what I meant in my first comment was that school
sucking helped me learn the one of most important skills around: self
education.

In the past few years I've become interested in several subjects that I
wouldn't have enjoyed in a classroom setting. My recent interests have been
philosophy (specifically Stoic and Epicurean), tea, Javascript and Node.js,
Redis and MongoDB, Japanese art and aesthetics, investing/finance, Guitar, and
classical music.

I hated learning Visual Basic, for example, because my teacher was aweful.
That's what you risk when you put your education in the hands of others. When
you teach yourself a subject, the only person you have to blame is yourself if
you don't learn it well.

~~~
mechanical_fish
Okay, I feel much better for you now. ;)

But I managed to simultaneously enjoy school a lot _and_ learn to self-
educate. These things aren't mutually exclusive by any means. All good
education is self-education, and a good school is one that operates with this
principle in mind: The teachers and the environment should _amplify_ your
self-educational tendencies, not thwart them.

Mind you, you'll never find a _whole_ school, of any size, that works that
well. (Especially in high school, and especially these days, when my
understanding is that school is more regimented than ever.) You have to find
the special corners.

You should take classes that help you. One rule is simply to study any subject
that has a good teacher, no matter what it is: Ask around, find the teachers
that are any good, and learn from _them_. Another rule, which I suggest often
around here, is to take classes that incorporate resources that you won't find
on your own. Guitars are easy to find on your own. Entire student symphony
orchestras or choirs are harder to find, and fully-equipped semiconductor
wafer fabs are the hardest of all to assemble in your garage, unless you're
Bill Gates.

~~~
firefoxman1
Ah I do see your point now. Knowledge is easy to acquire nowadays, but the
resources to pursue the knowledge further, to experiment, and materialize it
into something useful are much harder to find outside of a classroom.

Also, I really appreciate your tips on how to get the most out of my college
experience.

~~~
JonnieCache
The number one tip for learning lots of cool stuff at university: you don't
have to be enrolled in a course to attend it. The tutors generally don't give
a shit who you are or if you're meant to be there. Just turn up to whatever
you want, it's fine.

EDIT: Oh yeah, and make friends with someone who has access to the Film
Studies department's DVD collection. That, or hang around the door with an
RFiD scanner. If you lack one of these, make your own.

EDIT2: By the way, I take no responsibility if the administrators at your
educational institution are crazy and you get in trouble as a result of
anything you may have read here.

~~~
firefoxman1
Haha that's awesome. I'm definitely going to try dropping into some classes (I
kinda like breaking rules).

~~~
droithomme
Here's some money saving tips then. Most universities don't charge extra for
taking crazy numbers of units as an undergrad, so rather than just drop in why
not take 30 units a semester. A lot of undergrad survey courses have multiple
choice exams and don't represent significant additional workload, but can be
fun, the psych classes are also a place that will have pretty girls you don't
find in engineering.

Dorms and school cafeteria food are expensive. But living off campus means
commute time and parking expenses. Two options are to secretly rent a couch
from someone living on campus, and to find a location on campus to stash a
bedroll and just live there. Where I went to school there were carefully
camouflaged dugouts in a canyon behind the physics building where there were
about a dozen students living incognito for free.

~~~
JonnieCache
People at my university used to live in the woods, in tents. Some were known
to construct multi-storey treehouses. Says a lot about the institution I
attended. (It says it was full of hippies, rather than that it was expensive.)

Can't you just live on campus and cook your own food rather than eating at the
cafeteria? Or are you forced to pay for the cafeteria as part of the package?
I'm unfamiliar with the american system.

 _> Where I went to school there were carefully camouflaged dugouts in a
canyon behind the physics building where there were about a dozen students
living incognito for free._

That sounds _awesome._ This probably isn't correct, but when you say
camoflaged dugouts, I'm thinking of an elaborate system of WWI style trenches,
or perhaps that Al Queada cave complex that Dick Cheney saw in a fever dream.
In my mind, it's like some kind of survivalist-nerd version of a frat house.

I doubt I would have been able to resist the temptation to forget my classes
and concentrate on expanding my _invisible canyon-based physics fortress._ Who
amongst us can honestly say that it has never been their dream to inhabit a
secret underground base with a team of renegades?

------
steverb
I don't think the blame can be necessarily be placed entirely on the school
systems though. I find that I have to fight my own urges to over schedule my
kids' free time. I am also way more involved in my kids' lives than my parents
were, for better and sometimes for worse.

I think it's important for parents to make sure that their kids have some time
to do nothing, get bored, and find their own mischief and passions. It's a
tough balancing act.

~~~
kstenerud
My parents had a very laissez-faire approach to involvement in our lives.
They'd have some family activities from time to time, but for the most part it
was up to us to find things to do. We'd disappear in the morning and so long
as we were back by dinner (mandatory family time), all was well.

Sometimes I'd go check out what my father was doing in his workshop, and he'd
show me how to use the tools or teach me the theories behind whatever he was
working on (construction, metal work, electronics, magnetism, etc). It was up
to me to decide if I was interested enough to try my own hand at it, and there
was no fallout if I decided after starting that I wasn't interested after all.

As a result, we've grown up to be independent thinkers. We don't depend on
other people to give our lives meaning or to give us structure. And most
importantly, we're all very creative.

Kids will find things to be interested in so long as you don't smother them or
stunt their independence.

~~~
nazgulnarsil
anecdotes are not data. you have no idea of the correlation between your
upbringing and your creativity and independence. twin studies disagree with
you.

~~~
john_b
An anecdote about one's own life is not just an anecdote...it's personal
experience. And personal experience offers a perspective that no amount of
data can. We are discussing how to nurture creativity and productive skills,
after all, and inherent in that goal there is a severe measurement problem
that severely limits any data-driven approach.

The twin studies I'm aware of basically say that you can expose twins to
identical circumstances and they will still turn out different. I'm not sure
how that contradicts his main point though.

~~~
randomdata
I assumed he meant that two twins growing up under completely different
circumstances will still turn out to be the same. Which then implies to me
that success is already determined before birth. If true, working our young
people hard or not working them won't have any profound affect on their lives.

Incidentally, my upbringing sounds a lot like kstenerud's. My brother and
myself sound much like he and his siblings. Another anecdote, sure, but still
an intriguing point of view.

~~~
ericd
Mine as well. Also an anecdote, but we had the same results. I'm definitely
planning on raising my kids the same way.

------
gatlin
I was sucking it big time on a video game once, and my friend turned to me and
said "Don't try harder; try _better_."

We should be working young people better.

~~~
nocipher
It's interesting how subtle yet important that difference is.

~~~
billpatrianakos
I don't get the difference. Can someone please explain? Seriously, I'm not
kidding.

~~~
Kuiper
To extend the video game analogy, one activity that some video gamers have
made a sport of is "speed running," or trying to completely a single-player
game in as little time as possible. Sites like <http://speeddemosarchive.com/>
host videos, and people compete to get the lowest time.

There are two ways that one typically goes about improving on the existing
record. The first is to look at the video posted by the current record holder,
dissect the run, and find all of the small mistakes that the current record-
holder made. Shave off a few seconds here, a few seconds there, and by the end
of your run you've beaten a game in 4 hours and 57 minutes instead of 5 hours.
That's playing harder.

The other way to break existing records is to start completely from scratch,
map out the game and figure out if there's a different route to take that the
previous runner didn't. Maybe it's doing the levels in a different order so
you spend less time walking across the world map. Maybe you spend an extra 10
minutes picking up a stronger sword that allows you to save 20 minutes over
the course of the game because you're killing enemies faster. These are the
kinds of improvements that lead to people turning a 5 hour game into a 4 hour
game. That's playing better, not harder.

------
InclinedPlane
Several factors are important here:

Degeneration of K-12 education. College freshmen have to spend significant
effort (up to 1-2 years on average I'd guess) just getting caught up to levels
of basic mastery of reading, writing, logic, and mathematics that they should
have had as a HS graduate.

Increasing concentration on volume of "material" rather than on level of
mastery.

As the college loan bubble and the increasing reliance on a college degree as
a necessary credential for most white collar work colleges have shifted
towards becoming degree mills. More and more students are valuing the
credential more than the knowledge, and they are pumping huge amounts of money
into the system sustaining those values. This necessarily warps the
institutions of higher education. And as they struggle with ways to soak up
massive influxes of tuition without throwing their integrity out the window
(or losing their accreditation) they've increasingly fallen back on volume and
intensity of course work in lieu of demonstration of mastery of knowledge.

------
forensic
Nobody wants to admit that the concept of "school" itself was designed to
church out assembly line slaves.

It's not a surprise that when the system is designed to turn humans into
robots... that's what you get.

Anyone who comes out of school with useful skills does it despite school, not
because of school.

John Taylor Gatto figured this out years ago.

~~~
epo
Perhaps nobody wants to admit it because few are that stupidly paranoid.

For one, schools predate assembly lines. For another, if that is what schools
were designed to do then they are remarkably poor at it. The ruling cabal who
you seem to think is trying to push us all into servitude would surely have
noticed and remedied the situation YEARS ago. Finally, you did read enough of
the article to realise it was about the UK? What this Gatto person thinks is
irrelevant.

~~~
randomdata
He does have a point. A high school teacher friend of mine and I were
discussing how certain aspects of school, like scheduled class time, project
deadlines, etc. were intended to prepare the students for the workplace.

As an adult who makes my own choices, I only work when I want to work, and I
only meet deadlines which I set on my own accord. I imagine, given the context
of this site, that a lot in the HN crowd are the same way. However, when you
get out into the real world, most people do follow the same schedule and obey
the same rules that were ingrained into them in school.

A lot of people do not even realize that they have choice. I have actually met
people who look down upon me for not following the same 9-5 schedule that
everyone else does, like it matters or something. I imagine that attitude
comes from their upbringing by having it pushed upon them by educators.

I wouldn't go as far to say that the only reason for school is to shape people
into obedient workers, but that element is definitely present.

~~~
forensic
If you cancelled all schools right now, no one would stop learning useful and
applicable skills.

But many many people would stop being obedient.

The bait of school is the opportunity to learn, something every human
inherantly loves. The opportunity to learn and access to knowledge is just the
sugar that is used to get you to swallow the medicine: the medicine is your
obedience training.

When people graduate from high school, often the only thing they have to show
for it is their obedience and conformity. If they are good readers, they
probably read a lot outside the curriculum. If they are good at math, they
probably did a lot of math outside the curriculum. etc.

One thing from the curriculum which they did thoroughly learn, however, is how
to obey, how to conform, how to navigate bureaucracy, how to play social
pecking order games, when to bully, when to submit.

Conspicuously absent from the gifts of the curriculum is anything related to
what used to be called a liberal education or an enlightened scientific
education. These things are always learned despite curriculums, and those who
achieve a true scientific or artistic education usually have the air of a
rebel or hacker, someone who eschews their lessons, who breaks out of the
mold, who skips their homework in favour of reading poetry or hacking their
graphics calculator.

At school, true learning is always a form of rebellion.

~~~
megablast
How many people do you imagine do maths outside of school?

~~~
forensic
<http://www.maa.org/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf>

------
robot
Education is broken. Everyone is different, and meant to excel at one thing
they do well to make a difference, yet the standardized education forces
people to be indifferent. It also keeps you locked in an idealized world of
grades and exams delaying your chance to become street-smart for a mere 15
years. We then end up with people in their 30s having their first born
children, whereas the biological clock for this kicks at teen ages.

~~~
Volpe
> Everyone is different, and meant to excel at one thing they do well to make
> a difference

And that one thing is genetically wired? As in their DNA was just 'Ballet
Dancing' inclined?

The only reason people excel at something, is because they practice it.

~~~
robot
They are not genetically wired but definitely inclined.

------
mferrell
I'm lucky enough to attend a high school where freshman are required to take
the equivalent of AP Computer Science, and those who wish to can go on to take
CS classes taught by teachers with PhDs from MIT and Yale - you'd be hard
pressed to find a better curriculum.

Despite the environment, there are very few students with a "hacker"
mentality- maybe ten or so, a number not drastically higher than what you'd
expect to find anywhere else. Plenty of kids choose to take the upper level
(from a high school perspective) classes, and have no trouble understanding
recursion, pointers, or any of the traditional hangups, but it's a much
smaller number who would ever consider working on a project that wasn't
assigned by a teacher. For everyone else, even among these incredibly bright
students, programming is seen as the work you have to sludge through in order
to guarantee a cushy $120k job.

For this small percentage of self-motivated students, the free time proposed
in the original post would be a godsend, used more productively than any sort
of schoolwork. For most everyone else, however, regardless of intelligence, CS
education, or resources available, this time would be thrown away to TV or
video games, with a net productivity less than an hour spent doing the most
menial busywork under the dullest of teachers. I think many of us on Hacker
News, surrounded by peers who are the sort of people that start businesses,
tend to forget that while students might spend lectures wishing they were
elsewhere, that elsewhere is rarely 80x24.

Admittedly, I don't have a solution. Increased STEM funding helps, no doubt,
but not in the exponential way many of us envision. Resources in the form of
state of the art equipment or funding for student projects only serves to
empower those who are already driven, and this drive seems to be something
determined long before students enter high school.

------
Robelius
I find this to be quite hilarious. I just came back from a movie at my school
called "Race To Nowhere" that touches on the issue. I then participated in a
45 minute discussion with members of my community, including my principal and
other staff at my school. I was going to go onto Hacker News and make a very
detailed thread on the topic....but someone stole my thunder. I will be back
over the weekend to discuss this. I obviously can't leave with just this post
since it's a pretty low quality post. So here it is:

We must shift the focus of education back to education. It is ridiculous to
believe that a single letter can show how much work a student put in to learn
the content. A "C" can be given to a student who puts in their best effort but
just can't remember when to use a semi colleen. Yet an "A" can be given to a
student who crams for the test the night before, yet can't think critically on
any subject.

We must rethink our approach to education, and shift it back to education,
rather than to that test at the end of the year.

------
tayeke
I ignored English homework and taught myself jquery. Now people call me
incredibly smart and are jealous of the great agency I started working for at
only 21. These days kids have to take education into their own hands, because
even though there are classes available in a subject; techers do not know what
knowledge is most relevant in the workplace.

~~~
firefoxman1
Agreed. Self-education is just so much more scalable because a self-educator
doesn't need a teacher or assignments to learn. All one needs is a book or
access to a knowledge on a subject. The Internet has connected us to more
knowledge one every subject imaginable than previous generations could have
dreamed, and yet most of my friends still take classes on something that can
be picked up with a few tutorials and a well-written book. It's a lot of extra
money down the drain that could be spent other, wiser ways.

~~~
pnathan
Baloney.

Stuff worth knowing in academia takes dedicated effort and access to deep
resources that are unavailable on the internet.

Even knowing what _book_ to read can be a significant challenge.

Just cause you can read some tutorials, watch a MIT lecture, and write
PHP/jQuery does not a computer scientist or a mathematician make.

~~~
lukejduncan
Taking a class and getting a piece of paper also does not a computer scientist
make.

~~~
pnathan
maroons happen everywhere.

But I guarantee you only the most amazing and celebrated of individuals have
self-taught themselves advanced mathematics and performed at the highest level
of the art. The only one I can think of the modern era is
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan>, who is essentially
legendary for what he did.

The core issue is climbing the tower of knowledge of what has gone before
requires deep investment and usually a guide until you attain a deep _and_
broad knowledge. There is so much knowledge, we must leech off of the
knowledge of those who have also done the studying and have more experience.
It's a pain.

------
nchuhoai
jesus, please increase the contrast, i can barely read it

<http://contrastrebellion.com/>

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swombat
For what it's worth, though I didn't do GCSE's (I was in Switzerland at the
time), I coasted through A-levels without much effort. Other high achievers I
know also spent about 2-3 days max (in addition to the required time sitting
on a school chair, of course) studying and revising for each "paper". That
left plenty of time for many extra-curricular activities.

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compman775
No matter how bad the problem may be, please use a lighter background and
higher contrast.

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SamColes
TWENTY TWO GCSEs? Christ... You didn't go to a comprehensive!

~~~
ZenJosh
Yes, I did. Students with upwards of twenty GCSEs are not all that uncommon
anymore

~~~
dpkendal
In general, I think students from better schools get fewer GCSEs. I went to a
selective state grammar school and I only got the usual ten.

~~~
ZenJosh
I think you're spot on there, better schools take fewer GCSEs, thus (Im
assuming) producing a higher caliber of student not necessarily in terms of
qualifications, but in terms of depth of knowledge and culture

~~~
JonnieCache
I also went to a state grammar and got about ten. I find it hard to understand
how you can get 22 though. Your workweek wasn't any longer than mine, and I
certainly don't remember any days off.

What on earth is the point of doing 22 GCSEs? They become worthless the moment
you get your A levels. I like to think I would've refused to go along with
that.

~~~
watmough
I did ok getting 8 back in 1983, one of the smartish kids. Then 5 highers then
university at 16.

I find the thought of 20 absolutely bone-chilling.

------
billpatrianakos
I take issue with the idea that there is too much structured time and students
need more unstructured time to be creative. I think there's room for lack of
structured time but not in school. Does this mean to give a students so,e
materials and tools (materials/tools can be anything from clay or other art
supplies to mechanic's tools, to computers with an IDE installed) and let them
just make something? I don't like that idea. That's not real creativity.

We should be teaching critical thinking skills, then giving them tools and
materials along with, most importantly, a problem to solve with a set of
constraints. Now _that_ is what creativity is all about. The article is from
the UK point of view so I can't speak for them but in the States here we need
something more like I described. And really, students aren't too overworked.
They're just made to memorize and vomit up later useless facts for
standardized tests instead of being taught critical thinking or problem
solving skills.

Here, teachers get the short end of the stick. Especially the ones who are
really passionate about teaching. I've got several friends and my mother who
are all finishing up teaching degrees or have just started teaching and they
tell me all the time that they aren't given the tools they need to properly
teach their students.

Here we're teaching what used to be middle school math in the 50's in college.
I'm not sure if overworked students is a problem. At least not in the U.S.

~~~
asolove
I think this is no different than the situation with programmers. Are most
programmers "overworked" in that they get too much done? No. But many are
"overworked" in that they are constantly distracted with little problems and
don't protect enough time to think hard about any single issue. As a result,
they do lots of short-sighted work and don't get enough done overall, but also
feel constantly busy and hard-working.

I think that's pretty close to what normal high school is like today. There
are constant distractions for standardized testing, mandatory this-and-that,
worry about your SAT scores, etc. And not enough sitting down to understand
what this novel is really about. Or what an integral really is.

I think this explains both the subjective feeling that students are
"overworked" and the objective truth that they aren't doing or learning nearly
as much as was traditionally expected of students.

~~~
ZenJosh
This. Exactly

Its a combination of all of the little things added together. Worrying about
coursework deadlines, conflicts between subjects, modular testing "You dont
realize it now, but this test could be the difference between a good life and
a wasted life". Its not that there is too much hard work, quite the opposite,
its all the little things that count towards the feeling of being
"overworked".

I was suggesting in the op that we eliminate at least a few of the little
things so that students dont feel overworked, giving them time to think hard
about a single issue, rather than barely thinking about multiple.

