

The Underworked American Child - tokenadult
http://www.economist.com/world/unitedstates/displayStory.cfm?story_id=13825184

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blhack
The problem isn't the time spent in school, the problem is the school itself.

We teach people to be the status quo, we don't encourage them to excel.

For me, summers were spent learning about computers and all the magic spells
that I could cast to get them to do whatever I wanted them to.

For some students, school is holding them back. If we want to fix things, we
need to abandon this psychotic idea that all students are the same, that there
are no dumb kids and that you can just dump 20 similarly aged kids into a room
that has somebody standing at the front of it talking at them and that they
will somehow come out of the situation better for the experience.

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timr
You're the exception, not the rule.

For the other 99% of children, the benefits of longer school years are well
documented. Even for the "exceptional" children (who usually aren't as
exceptional as they make themselves out to be), longer school years are good
-- the question of time spent in school is entirely independent of the subject
matter studied, or how it is taught.

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bokonist
Well documented? Where? Links?

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johnnybgoode
I'm going to guess that whichever study came to this conclusion, it took "good
for students" to mean "higher grades" or some other bogus measure.

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asdlfj2sd33
Speaking as an immigrant from Europe, I was surprised just how much Americans
value summer jobs for kids, even blue collar summer jobs.

In Europe working kids is considered a sign of coming from the lower classes,
the people that might actually need the income. And upper class families would
be embarrassed if their kids worked blue collar jobs.

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nop
What you are saying for about kids working is definitely not true for my part
of Europe. I've had plenty of friends from rich families growing up and if
anything they tend to be more likely to get a summer job and I can't in the
slightest imagine anyone getting embarrassed over their children having a blue
collar summer job.

Just because you are rich it doesn't mean you get everything you point at and
even still it's quite satisfying for any young person to know hes earned
something.

I on the other hand come from the lower classes, pretty much as low as it gets
in Sweden and I've never felt the need to have a summer job because of income.

~~~
dimitar
My observation is that richer kids do find jobs more easily because they and
their parents usually have plenty of connections. They usually do this so they
would have more money to party :-).

Also regulation in many places in Europe effectively limits teenage employment
- until I turned 18 I had to either get something like 9 documents or work for
money paid under the table for someone I knew before.

Please remember that Europe is far from homogeneous, so observations may vary
wildly. :-)

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nostrademons
This seems to miss an important point: choice. Most middle-class Americans get
to choose their jobs, within reason. Most American schoolchildren do _not_ get
to choose their schools.

I went to a charter high school whose curriculum focused on letting us do
individualized projects catering to our interests. Its 7-hour day (8:30-3:30)
seemed far less oppressive than the 6-hour-and-20-minute day at my public
middle school. I've kept up with it after graduation, and they now offer
after-school classes and programs until 5:00, and summer courses. And kids go,
even though they don't have to. Why not, when their friends are there and the
programs are stuff they're interested in anyway?

Similarly, I don't mind working long hours at the Googleplex, because my
friends are there, they give me food, and the work is interesting and
meaningful.

When those conditions aren't met, you'll find many fewer people bragging about
how much time they spent at work. Some working-poor people will work two jobs
to make ends meet, but they don't brag about it, they complain about it. It's
only because a relatively large number of Americans can now work in jobs that
they find challenging and stimulating that we get the workaholic American.

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kiba
Learning programming or even learning how to operate a lemonade stand have far
more economic values than a school system churning out ton of quadratic
equation walking calculators.

Reading is not that hard to maintain even. What kind of a social environment
the school is to discourage such disinterest in maintaining reading skills?
Where is the internet? Where is the texting? Where are the blogs, or the
twitter even? Literacy should be stronger than ever before.

Mathematics? For god sake, what reason do we need to learn useless concept
like cosine, sine, and tanget and how to do the quadratic equation? What
everyone probably need is an education on how to manage their money and do
financial calculation, but beyond that, it is mostly unneccesary. I serously
doubt business manager, nails shop, and musicians need to know that.

Programmers at the very least need to know algebra. If he want to do cooler
stuff, he can learn on his own, just like how he learn all his tools and
programming languages.

Other field may required lot of mathematics. If you need mathematics for your
career, why not take a school specialized in making engineers out of you?

Schools, are the very least an hinderance to the economy. It is a test, a fake
test at that. It have nothing to very little to do with the performance of our
economy.

The smartest scientist in the world probably don't need English Literature
101. English literature is probably the scientist know, but is it revelant to
his career? No.

If schools want to be useful to the economy, than make them churn out skilled
work force for whatever their economy may need and do it well. We would still
have schools like grammatica and mathematics that will equip people with the
basic essential(Let face it, it is hard to go anywhere without learning how to
write and read and do basic mathematics)

For those who still want a scholar's education(English, Social Science,
Alegbra, the work), well...you still have the money to pay for such an
education, right?

Let forget all the government beucracry, rules, and abritary grading guideline
and start schools like the Hacker School where young and old alike get to
learn technologies and skills in fast and furious courses like the Art of Unit
Testing or Rails boot camp or whatever.

Our profession doesn't have guilds or unions, occupancy licensure, and all
that bullshits that other professions have. If we program, than we're
programmers.

If some bold hackers can show the world a successful example of a trade school
where teachers teach because they know their stuff and teach well not because
of their bullshit degrees and license that said they're teachers. This can be
an example to other field to replicate.

Than our frailing education system will begin to rebound and starts to produce
workers who are not quadratic equation walking calculator but can actually do
real work!

Now, all we need is a little less regulations(actually just abolish all laws
regarding education) and the privization of government run schools and their
so called educational standard.

~~~
timwiseman
To focus just on your comments about mathematics, let me point out that going
through at least algebra at a minimum is valuable for everyone in a modern
society.

First it is highly helpful in handling even basic household finance. Second,
you cannot hope to understand even basic statistics without it (and with the
way the media throws out statistics it is very dangerous not to understand at
least the basics if you want to be a participatory citizen). But far beyond
all that, it goes a very long way to teaching you how to think and how to make
reasoned and rational decisions.

Also, I think you vastly underestimate the number of jobs that require going
far beyond algebra. Virtually all technical jobs of any kind requires
calculus. This includes almost all engineers, virtually all scientists, and
most analysts. Also, most finance jobs involve math far beyond algebra.
Remember that even fully analyzing interest rates involves calculus (or at
least formulas derived from calculus, and a good analyst should know where
they come from). And that is again before realizing that the mere study of
math helps teach you to reason and think.

I am focusing only on math here, but I think you will find anyone in an
advanced society will benefit greatly from algebra and far more than you seem
to expect need calculus. I also disagree with most everything else you said,
but I will just focus on math for the moment.

~~~
nihilocrat
Also, in game programming trigonometry is fundamental, and in 3D an entirely
higher order of magnitude is required.

~~~
kiba
I am a game programming hobbyist, even I know how vital trignometry is.

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chaosmachine
I grew up with the long summer break (in Canada), and can't imagine how boring
my childhood would have been without it. It was a great time to meet and make
friends with the neighborhood kids, build forts, go exploring, go to camp,
etc, etc. Some things can't be learned in school.

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pyr3
Do you really think that all people in Europe/Asia lead boring lives just
because they don't get 3 months of 'time off' from school?

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arrrg
This article compares the US to a whole lot of school systems. There is
nothing wrong with that, it’s just possible that if you constantly change the
point of comparison you end up comparing the US to fictional countries –
without the reader even noticing. There are huge differences between the
school systems in different European countries (and, e.g. in Germany, between
the different school systems in different states inside of those countries)
that make those kinds of comparisons dangerous.

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enomar
It seems like everyone would benefit if we spent our entire lives splitting
time between work and school (or perhaps back and forth in cycles).

I've always found it odd that kids don't spend much time working and adults
don't spend much time learning (in a formal setting).

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Locke1689
"On top of that, American children do only about an hour’s-worth of homework a
day,"

Haha _what_??

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pyr3
That average has no meaning. Are they averaging the homework loads of grades
K-12? Obviously kids in higher grades will have higher workloads, while kids
in kindergarten will have little to no homework.

~~~
jazzyb
Right. Between sixth and twelfth grades I averaged about 4-5 hours of homework
per school night. A lot of those numbers in the article aren't reflective of
my experience.

~~~
tokenadult
_Between sixth and twelfth grades I averaged about 4-5 hours of homework per
school night._

What kinds of subjects were you studying, in what kind of school? What kind of
university education were you aiming for with those studies in grades 6
through 12?

~~~
jazzyb
It was a normal American public school in the south. I was in a group of
advanced students in my junior high school (we took classes like algebra and
Spanish two years before our peers), and I took a few AP classes in high
school, so I suppose I wasn't the average high school student.

The explanation of why there was so much homework: In K-5 I had only one
teacher each year who taught all the subjects (math, English, history, etc.),
and I received just 1 or 2 hours of homework a night. When I entered sixth
grade, I suddenly had a different teacher for each subject, each of whom sent
me home with an hour or so of homework for each subject.

Keep in mind that I'm trying to average the number of hours I spent per school
night. I might have had one night a week where I had very little homework, but
once I was in high school, I would spend two or three nights a week up till 1
or 2 in the morning finishing an English essay or work for some other subject.

I think I can honestly say that I wasn't aiming for any university education
in sixth grade ;-) I never had any ambition to go to a prestigious university;
I only applied to one state school my senior year which I wound up attending.

I guess I just had a lot of tough teachers.

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asorbus
I transferred from a 200 school day per year charter school to a 180 school
day per year public high school, and I found that I learned a lot more at the
public school, so I have first hand experience with the differences. Also, the
charter school's days were about an hour longer than the public school's. I
found there were no advantages to going to the charter school for longer days
and longer school years.

It's hard to stay alert as a young kid during such a long school day, with
class times being so long. When I transferred to public school, I met a lot of
very intelligent people my age, and I was surprised to see that. For the first
year after transferring, I felt that I was too smart to be there, since I had
just transferred from a charter school. It turned out that I had met people
who were much smarter than me and just as insightful.

Sure American kids don't do so well on international tests, but maybe that's
because they're not taught to take tests, they're taught to learn and apply
what they learn. I don't know about you, but I'd rather my kids grow up
knowing how to learn new things and broaden their horizons, rather than grow
up knowing how to write answers down on a piece of paper.

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GeneralMaximus
So what is the point? Force children to work _harder_ when you could revamp
the entire education system in a way that _motivates_ them to work harder?

This article is just plain silly. Here's a summary: "South
Korean/Chinese/India/Foo children work harder than American children, hence
American children are doomed to a life of misery".

(I'm Indian, BTW. And no, Indian children don't work any harder than American
children.)

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diN0bot
right idea, but the beginning of the article erroneously focuses on quantity
not quality.

