

Ask HN: How would you change public education? - Fire30

So I am writing an essay on the american public education system, and this made me think about what HN would want to change to make public education more successful. I am interested in hearing peoples thoughts and opinions.
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japhyr
I am starting by working on a pilot project[1] to put control of education
standards back in the hands of educators. It's inspired by ideas that are
quite familiar to the hacker crowd, but quite new to education: continuous
improvement, forking, and open source.

The main problems this project addresses, and how it addresses them:

First problem: Most education standards are written by an external standards
body, over which educators have little or no influence. Solution: Make it easy
for educators to develop, maintain, and share sets of standards that they
create and modify.

Second problem: It is difficult for a successful school to share its overall
system with another school. Solution: Make it easy for one school to fork
another school's system.

Third problem: Most schools have one set of graduation requirements,
regardless of the fact that students have widely varying interests, aptitudes,
and experiences. Solution: Allow the creation of different "pathways" through
the curriculum that students can follow to earn a diploma.

Fourth problem: Many ed-tech offerings these days are built more with a profit
motive in mind than with the desire to foster widespread adoption of what is
best for students. Solution: Commit to a fully free and open set of tools for
educators and learners.

It's a pilot project just for my school this year, but it is public and the
source is available for anyone interested. It is also set up to be scaleable
as soon as the pilot phase is over.

[1] [http://opencompetencies.org](http://opencompetencies.org)

[https://github.com/openlearningtools/opencompetencies/](https://github.com/openlearningtools/opencompetencies/)

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tokenadult
More power for each learner to shop for different schools. See

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6299910](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6299910)

for the longer version of this answer.

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X4
IMHO: Schools should be no different than grocery stores, you should be able
to shop knowledge and get what you need from any school, teacher or professor.
They should not force you into learning something you will never need and
waste a billion people's time. They should not teach you anything beyond
basics, but encourage you to research on your own for a project, a purpose, a
goal that you define yourself.

Schools should build a friendly, personal and nice environment around people,
strengthen the weak, speedup the slow and motivate the smart .

tl,dr:Schools should sell individual knowledge, become a more important part
of the government, do startup acceleration, be your mentors and community.

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fouc
hint: focus on learners, not educators

