

Generalizing Palish's question: how would you fix high school? - dfranke

There was a lot of disagreement over whether Palish's "hacker schools" could be viable, but I think most of here agree that high school in its current form is horribly broken.  So, what would you do to make it less miserable, particularly for hackers but also in general?<p>Don't cop out by just saying "hand out vouchers (or abolish public schooling) and let the free market take care of it".  If you believe that's the right first step, then go on suppose that you're the headmaster of a private high school.  What will it look like?
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pfedor
I think the replacement for the high school system should be based on similar
principles as the chess clubs. I don't know if there is such a thing in the US
so let me tell you a few words about how chess clubs worked in Poland (and I
assume in all countries of the soviet block).

First of all, they were open to any child. I was never any good at chess, but
I had this friend who was quite good so I wanted to be like him so I decided
to enroll. I showed up and declared that I wanted to become a chess player.
They told me to play a game against my friend to asses my level (I remember at
the same time there was another kid who came without a friend, so they made
him play against a computer; the chess computer was big, easy to beat and
manufactured in East Germany). Then they assigned me to a group. The number of
children in my group was varying between three and five during my time there.
Each group had a coach. Our coach was an international master and former
champion of Poland--it's a bit like assigning university professors to teach
you fractions; but that's how it was. We met twice a week and our coach would
teach us all the important stuff, openings, endgames, combinations, strategy.
He would analyze our games with us and give us homework. He would tell us what
to concentrate on and gave specific tips on the effective practicing. The club
had a nice library of chess books. It also organized tournaments. And, the
clubs were competing against one another.

It was fun. Not all kids were good players, but we were passionate about it,
we would play blitz tournaments, discuss various topics and argue about our
favorite openings (which felt a lot like arguing about programming languages,
now that I think about it). The fact that we got to meet other kids who played
chess made us more excited about it. The whole experience was wonderful on
many levels and, while not all of us made much progress, some did.

I imagine how great it would be if instead of compulsory schooling there was a
system of math clubs, hacking clubs, physics clubs, chemistry clubs and so on.
I don't think it would cost more than the current system.

Now, you may object that since this system would not involve coercion, many
children wouldn't enroll to any clubs and they would remain terribly
uneducated. I don't think in reality that would cause much difference. Let's
do a thought experiment. Imagine you approach random 100 people in your city
and ask them to complete two tests: one on chemistry and one on chess. Both
tests would cover very basic questions as well as more advanced (of course,
the decisions which questions represent the same level of difficulty is
arbitrary, but let's skip over it and say we are using some common sense
approach). What do you think the results would be? Would more people know the
answer to "How does a Knight move?" then to "What is the valency of carbon?"?
How about, say, King's Indian Defense vs. nucleophilic substitution?
Personally, I think that on average people would score better on the chess
test. But I have never really performed such experiment, so I may be very
wrong here.

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euccastro
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summerhill_School>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudbury_model>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unschooling>

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brlewis
<http://www.michaelolaf.net/montessori12-18.html>

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jgamman
school vouchers don't need to be aggregated to the school level, just the
teacher. a headmaster is then the facilities manager (school sports and stuff
are a good part of school). you may not like vouchers and they are not the
whole answer but connecting teachers to shock, horror gasp, the kids they
teach has to part of the solution

