
Ask HN: What do you think about the current education system? - alejandrohacks
Is it good, bad? What can be done better? What problems do you identify? Is it upsetting? are you used to it?
======
andrei_says_
Trying 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.

~~~
V-2
_" 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.

~~~
CuriouslyC
The problem is almost all schools fail miserably at teaching people to learn.

First off, we learn best when our learning is motivated by something more
concrete than "good grades". As an example, I had a hard time with advanced
math in school. When I went on to build engineering projects that required
advanced math, the same concepts that mostly eluded me previously became
fairly straightforward.

Secondly, learning happens best when the material presented is varied, and
revisited many times over a long period of time. Schools tend to compress
learning about a given subject into a limited time frame, then only revisit it
in final exams.

Third, learning occurs far better from trying to recall and apply information
than from having it passively presented to you. Instead of having school be
mostly lecture with a few exams, school should be mostly tests, with the
teacher going back and clarifying only things that many students had trouble
with.

In the end, school mostly teaches people to sit still and follow instructions.

~~~
andrei_says_
> In the end, school mostly teaches people to sit still and follow
> instructions.

And we all know that following instructions does not lead to fulfilling lives,
and that sitting still for long periods of time is a sure predictor for a
shorter lifespan.

Schools were institutionalized and were good for preparing cheap factory
labor.

Our society no longer needs this.

So schools fail the economy and the kids. Preparing today's children for
yesterday.

The very institutions that proclaim themselves as the beacon of knowledge and
enlightenment act as the opposite.

Ironic.

------
matt_o
I think it's bad, mainly because it was built at the end of the 19th century
and since then it's calcified. It's like having legacy code and instead of
refactoring it when you need to make changes, you build more stuff on that,
get more technical debt.

To add some context to what I mean, the current system is largely based on the
decisions of the Committee of Ten[1]. If you read that short note, you'll
notice that it's pretty much applying the lessons of industrialization to
education ie. assembly line approach.

The example of the assembly line approach is especially relevant for me
because I don't think that it is applicable to humans. Different humans learn
at different rates so it doesn't make sense to group them by age.
Additionally, teaching everyone the same things, while making things nice and
uniform, takes away the biggest motivation for learning - curiosity.

This is completely anecdotal, but the further away I moved from this assembly
line education system (from high school to college, from college to self-
taught developer) the better grades I got (college) or more money (work) and
the more time I spent learning, even things that are unrelated to my main
focus because the world is fascinating.

As for an idea on how to fix this, I admit that I don't have a concrete one.
I've skimmed the topic and the thing that drew my attention most is the
Montessori system[2] system of education. It proposes a few points relevant to
what I wrote in the previous paragraph, but also one that I find particularly
interesting to developers: "Uninterrupted blocks of work time, ideally three
hours".

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_of_Ten](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_of_Ten)
[2]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montessori_education](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montessori_education)

------
jvvlimme
There 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.

~~~
_kyran
My high school had a vertical curriculum. From the age of 12 to 18, every
student got to select 7 different subjects (plus sport) each semester. Most
students would accelerate a level in one subject they were proficient at,
although due to the 'levels' of classes it would usually end up with each
level being 95% a certain age.

There were exceptions, like one student (may have been a savant) finished his
high school certificate in four subject areas 5 years early.

This curriculum had its weaknesses. I accelerated in Math at the age of 13
after starting high school. I was then in a class with no friends, and without
much social interaction, I'd zone out and spend the lesson trawling the
internet.

Since that class, I've struggled with maths ever since and ended up eventually
returning down to a standard level for my final two years of high school.

Happy to answer any other questions about having a vertical curriculum for
those that are curious.

------
Kinnard
I'm in no way an expert, but I've pretty much seen the gamut: private
preschool, public elementary school, charter middle school, inner-city public
middle-school, elite private boarding school, magnet public high-school . . .
I think the public education system is a travesty, but I know it also doesn't
make sense to talk about "the system" as if there's anything approaching
uniformity. Detroit Public Schools and Bloomfield Hills public schools are
worlds apart.

And even still, today's education system might be the best there's ever been .
. . most people learn how to read . . .

This doesn't address higher-education, which is a whole 'nother shit-show . .
.

------
oxplot
I think the current education system is inefficient at best. It also fails to
expose kids to variety of skills/professions out there enough, so they can get
a taste of what it's like to be this or that. Most kids don't know what they
want to do even after starting college because all they've dealt with has been
subjects that taught them the tools (e.g. mathematics, language) without
giving them context.

Further to that, instead of focusing on minimalism and utility, each subjects
goes to depths far beyond of what most kids need to know to make use of. Lo
and behold, they're going to forget majority of it in a month. And some
subjects have gone completely off the rails, like English, with the main focus
on past literature. That's not what natural languages are most used for.
Arguments, public speaking, legal, journalism, marketing. These matter day in
day out, not what Shakespeare spewed while he was high on an Autumn afternoon.
That's fine too but let the kids do it on their own time and focus the efforts
in equipping them with critical thinking, etc for when they enter the wild!

------
mathpepe
Very 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.

------
bxh
I find the use of examinations and tests to assess the "quality" of the
student non-ideal.

It's very possible to perform very well on tests with minimal actual
comprehension of the material through memorization. In fact, it's quite
possibly easier to memorize solutions than to actually learn to solve them.

~~~
jonobird1
Do you have a proposed solution to test understanding rather than memory?

I think possibly regular problems. E.g. with learning code, you put each
question into a solution by learning the way to do it, and then implement a
solution.

------
sova
Education! First and foremost, teachers must be paid very well, they are the
stewards of knowledge...

Secondly, globalization without universal cultural appreciation has done a lot
of damage to what we could consider our collective human heritage. A great
dream would be to have schools that rotate around the continents, so that
students/scholars/people would be exposed to the best of what other parts of
the globe have to offer. It would forward-leap humanity a lot if there were
simply better crosstalk between tribes.

Thirdly, the emphasis of education should not be to
create/fuck/produce/consume but to actually emphasize co-reliance of beings,
species, environment, nature. We cannot exist without our planet, and although
we can drive fast places, most people do not realize at what a cost this
simple luxury comes. Sure we can advance and make up for some damage, but not
making damage in the first place is generally the best idea.

I suppose my main beef is that education is not looked upon as a topic worthy
of evolution, when it is in fact the head of the inch-worm of humanity-at-
large.

------
westurner
* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Taylor_Gatto](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Taylor_Gatto)

* [http://www.wesjones.com/gatto1.htm](http://www.wesjones.com/gatto1.htm) _

------
jtcond13
It's too expensive, takes too long and fails to accommodate the diversity of
educational needs. It also does fairly little to help people find suitable
careers during adolescence.

That said, these problems are widely known and discussed. Alternatives such as
Montessori education are becoming more available. Most American 18-year-olds
are reasonably numerate and literate; some even manage to pick up some
scientific, historical or foreign language knowledge as well.

In hindsight, the weirdest thing about it was how difficult it was to find
suitable times to go to the bathroom.

------
taurath
Its becoming more of a business than a public good. College prices are out of
control - you need to get into large debt to do anything. Very little support
for people who needed to work to support themselves after (or during) high
school. Grants are awarded based on parents income regardless of relationship
with parents (mine disowned me after I came out), unless you get a judge to
legally separate yourself from them.

------
exolymph
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.

------
miguelrochefort
The 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.

------
yompers888
I 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.)

~~~
dozzie
> 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.

------
vinchuco
Relevant [https://youtu.be/H5NUv0nOQCU](https://youtu.be/H5NUv0nOQCU)

------
miguelrochefort
We all know what the problem is.

The solution is to preserve curiosity and honesty. These are the only traits
that matter.

------
id122015
teaching should be a private affair. If you want supersmart kids, avoid
sending them to the compliance system. Governmet intervention has to be
minimized from now on.

------
kdamken
Speaking in terms of the USA here.

Garbage. An almost complete waste of time and energy. For grades K-12 a lot of
it is just babysitting, to give kids a place to be and keep them out of
trouble while their parents are at work. I value my primary school education
very little.

While I wouldn't go so far as to say that college is a scam, I would say it is
often one of the poorest financial investments people make, and it's even
worse because we trick naive 18 year olds into doing it. College is not for
you to find yourself, and it's not for you to waste time pursuing a degree
that can't help you support yourself and pay back the insane amount of debt
you took on to go there.

The current generation of kids was told that you need to go to college or
you'll be a failure in life. My dad constantly was saying that if we fucked up
and didn't get into a good college we'd be "Making hoagies at Wawa". They say
your major doesn't matter, it just matters that you have a degree - you can
figure out the rest later.

It's a shame no one sits kids down and says - "Hey, you're about to take out
one of the largest loans of your life, one that you'll have to pay many years,
maybe even decades. Why are you doing that? What career do you want? Will this
degree get you there? What can you expect to earn with this degree - can you
pay down these loans with it? If your loans are X, you will be paying _at
least_ Y a month."

Most people I know did not get a talk like that from their parents, or high
school teachers/guidance counselors. I wish they did.

Some things to improve the current system:

1\. Not every kid needs to go to college. Are you bad at that book learning
stuff? That's fine - push more kids into trade schools.

2\. In the upper grades of primary school, focus on teaching kids the things
that will actually matter and are useful. Financial things - how to do your
taxes, how to use and maintain a budget, how to pay your bills on time. Life
things - applying for jobs, finding an apartment, what careers pay best and
how to get into them. Civil rights - how to protect yourself from the police.
Real life things that will actually benefit them.

3\. Encourage kids to do community college for two years then transfer to a
real college to save money. The "college experience" isn't worth the price
most pay.

4\. Hammer it into kids' heads that unless you're going to MIT, Harvard or
Yale, where you go to school doesn't matter. Your degree and the field you
choose to go into matters a lot more. Require all colleges to provide what the
average jobs and starting salaries are for all majors before a student is
allowed to pick one.

Education is important, but the system we have today sucks.

------
ankurdhama
Humanity screwed up education the day teaching became a profession (to earn
money).

~~~
tsmffh
You do not attract high quality staff by offering $0 salary. Nor do you get
high quality staff when they cannot be fired(as is so common today).

~~~
ankurdhama
I guess my concept of education is completely different then yours. For me
education is the idea that we - the current generation - can give knowledge
and skills to the next generation so that they are ready to face the
challenges of future and the cycle continues and humanity wins. BUT who give a
shit to humanity, all we want to teach kids is how to "score good marks and
get a good earning job".

The problem of education is not how it is done but the current purpose of
"education" is wrong i.e it is "what" that needs to be fixed about education.

By the way "You do not attract high quality staff by offering $0 salary" is
exactly whats wrong with education.

~~~
jonobird1
I could not agree more. I do however think fundamentals are important, our
focus is just wrong.

The fundamentals and mentality need to change. However a wise man once taught
me that it is human nature is to cheat and find easy ways out - which is why
KPI's never work if they are implemented for more than six months or so. So it
is necessary to keep goals fresh and change things every so often.

But more to the original point and a specific solution, more things should be
taught of how to be an adult, morals, values, goals, communication,
persuasion, how to do your tax etc.

