
Ask HN: What subjects should be removed/replaced in school? With what? - RichardHeart
Do you remember the order of the planets from the sun?  You were surely taught it right?  Why&#x27;d you forget?  Because you don&#x27;t have a spaceship and will never miss your left turn at Mars. Hackernewsians probably break this example.  The things they’ve forgotten are far more exciting.
Why not teach things things with more utility instead?  You still get all the side benefits of learning. For instance, how to be a good friend, how to give a good apology, how not to get scammed, how to invest in your future.  Heck, if you&#x27;re going to force kids to be bad versions of wikipedia, and remember stupid lists of trivial knowledge, like the capitals of states, perhaps teach them mnemonic technique first.<p>Software is eating the world, teach it. Why&#x2F;How to not max out your credit cards, so very many useful things are taught far too late or never at all. The concept that the parents are supposed to be the source of some of this information relies on parents being good at parenting…<p>Anyone can justify any education about anything. Which is why progress in this field is so slow. No one can actually win an argument with anyone about any taking any topic they care about off a curriculum, because every topic is passionate and useful to someone. So in a world where everything is super important to someone, you have to use a more advanced system of comparison. Like eliciting someone’s values on a psychological evaluation.<p>Not exactly, but something like, would you rather lose your index finger or your big toe? Ok, would you rather lose your index finger or 3 toes? Ok, how about one eye or one hand. If you ask enough of these rather odd questions, you can actually result in a value in dollars per a body part. Like this: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;projects.propublica.org&#x2F;graphics&#x2F;workers-compensation-benefits-by-limb<p>It is the tragedy of the commons that no educator wants to pay the price of seeing their curriculum reduced or replaced with something better. For them better doesn’t exist.
======
Broken_Hippo
A few changes I would do:

I'd drop a lot of the homework, possibly only introducing it at a high school
level. I'd drop grades for young students - up to middle school - and adjust
the grades for the upper levels so that an average mark - a C in the states -
actually reflects the average levels.

See, I think when your average or goal is an A - perfect - it doesn't leave
room for those that go above and beyond what is expected. It also makes it so
that the struggling students are really, really far behind. I mean, think
about it. A C student struggling and earning a D would get help, yet in the
current system, they still get help at the D or F level, yet their peers are
generally making A's or B's - so the difference is greater. I think we could
make use of standardized testing better as well, with fewer and shorter tests.

I'd also do much more cross-learning. Want to teach kids to work in fractions?
Teach them to cook, teach them to read music. Actually apply maths, including
algebra and geometry, to real-life scenarios. History can be taught with
literature - and science, and math. After all, many scientists were really
given a hard time because of the politics of the day.

Above all, I think general skills should be the focus. Everyone should know
how the justice system works in practice (not just theory). Folks should know
how to get credit and keep it, how to file taxes, what taxes are used for, and
so on.

We could also do Much better teaching about health. I had many classes going
over basic anatomy and sex education, where they mostly told us that it could
make a baby and we could get horrible diseases. Unfortunately, learning how to
take care of your own body, what to do when you are sick and when to go to the
doctor or ER aren't included. The same goes for learning about healthy
relationships, signs of abuse (for both sexes!), and learning about the needs
of children are absent and I generally think this sort of thing is a shame.

~~~
cesarbs
> Actually apply maths, including algebra and geometry, to real-life
> scenarios.

I very much agree with this. Back when I was in high school we had some
overlapping topics in Math and Physics. But in the Physics class we'd actually
see things applied to the real world (e.g. a quadratic equation representing
the trajectory of a cannon ball), and that made the stuff learned in Math a
lot more interesting to me.

> Unfortunately, learning how to take care of your own body,

This should be fixed in PE. I only got interested in being active after I was
already an adult (and a very sedentary one). For years I hated the thought of
doing physical activity because I associated it with PE class and all the
bullshit I had to endure (bullying and having no option but to play sports I
didn't really like).

Would be nice if we were taught at school about body composition, nutrition,
different results you can get from exercise (strength, hypertrophy, endurance,
that kind of thing). PE is often instead a bunch of random stuff with no
explanation of what results can be expected.

~~~
Broken_Hippo
Oh, I completely agree with you.

I'd also extend PE so kids have it all through school - in high school, I only
had 2 semesters over the years. 6 weeks of that was Ping Pong. Yes. Ping pong.
Valid physical activity, sure, but I really don't need to know the rules. It
would be more helpful to know how to build up a running habit and how to do
resistence and flexibility training safely. It'd be helpful to know how to
stay active without equipment - and in addition, how to use the equipment
safely.

I generally seperate the nutrition into a health and life skills class, but
they could be combined easily.

------
tabeth
I personally would love to see two things:

1\. School curriculum structured more like an RPG skill tree. The main point
or advantage of this is that students can take any path they'd like to be
"Level 12th Grade." Many schools let people into physics who don't know
algebra. This, for example, would result not only in kids not learning
physics, but also becoming less enamored with learning themselves due to the
inevitable total failure they'll experience. .

Obviously, as a by-product of this we'd have to get rid of grades. Rather than
grades you simply can take courses, and once the "cluster" of requirements are
completed you'd be deemed to be "nth grade."

2\. School should ideally be intertwined with practicality. For at least K-12
I see little reason why everything can't have a more practical focus. This
removal in abstraction will keep students engaged and make more clearly the
point that everything they're learning is actually useful. With this being
said, schools should actually emphasize teachers less. Kindergarteners/1st
years and 12th grades/final years should be the only ones to be taught by
teachers directly.

Ideally, everyone else would be taught by the year above them. Teachers would
be present, but mainly to oversee curriculum development, and keep things on a
higher level moving along. This has the nice advantage of making it so that in
2nd - 11th grade, student "teacher" (who's just another student) is 1:1. With
this kind of attention most students on the cusp of learning will finally be
able to get the individualized attention they need.

The main problem with this is if the students aren't smart or knowledgeable
enough themselves to teach anyone else. This goes back to (1). Students should
be ideally, excellent or out. The idea of passing grades is kind of silly.
Passing should be excellence. I wonder why people think it's OK to just get by
in school? Everyone is capable. School isn't [that] hard.

~~~
huevosabio
This resembles largely my experience at a Montessori school
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montessori_education](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montessori_education)).

While there were "grades" (they had to to be compliant with the Mexican
education system), grades were bundled into clusters, so a room would have
grades 1-3, another 4-6.

For each room, there would be one teacher, whose main goal was to guide the
students (in fact we called them "guides", not teachers).

Skills and knowledge were containerized and were part of a dependency tree.
There were several different areas (biology, math, linguistics, etc) and in
each you were expected to reach a certain level at the end of your 6th grade,
but you were otherwise free to explore subjects at your own pace and in the
direction of your preference.

This resulted in kids specializing in certain areas, a certain level of
competition and pride in your expertise, and an early grasp of what you liked.

Overall, I think the result was very positive, and the most visible
difference, at least when I left the Montessori school to a new traditional-
style classroom, was that I felt that Montessori kids had a certain genuine
love for learning and sharing knowledge, whereas most of my new peers felt
that learning was a chore imposed on them. Obviously this is one anecdote, and
would love to hear more cases.

------
ssono
The schools system most definitely has its issues as far as curriculum is
concerned. However I think the problem is more in the way schools are
structured than what they teach. Salman Khan has a great book about it.

Curriculum organization is one of his main points. An alternative to periods
and subjects is a sort of freeform classroom with unpaced curriculum with
several teachers circulating to help. This is supposed to avoid classes moving
too quickly or too slowly and continually engage students.

~~~
bko
I second that curriculum organization is terrible in most schools. This became
obvious when I was working on a mobile game. It involved a wide range of
subjects from (obviously) programming, geometry, algebra, logic, design, etc.
I imagine that if students had a project they would touch on many different
subjects. This would be a lot more effective than learning subjects in a silo
with no understanding of practical application.

------
tmaly
I would like to see History taught in reverse as they never seemed to reach
modern day history.

A course on technology and ethics would be an interesting course to add.

~~~
Broken_Hippo
"I would like to see History taught in reverse as they never seemed to reach
modern day history"

This! It is hard to understand the world if you don't know what has led up to
it. I'd even expand it. I think "older" history should be taught with thought
about present-day context as well. Questions such as: Do you think there are
modern-day consequences to the war of 1812? What do you think this book says
about the political atmosphere at the time it was written? What world events
do you think might have inspired this book?

Mostly, I got this view from my spouse. When he went to school, history and
literature were combined into one subject. And I very much like the cross-
subject learning like this.

------
lordCarbonFiber
After half penning comments a few times, Im just going make a top level one.
This post talks as if the study of pedagogy doesn't exist and, as someone
pretty interested in the field, it just pains me. There's _a lot_ of progress
in the field but to hear people in this tread talking about grading on a bell
curve I can see why people outside of the education community might think
there isn't (current [as in the past 50 years that's how behind you are]
pedagogical theory focuses on the idea of mastery and building on compounding
skills; there's no value in tuning a test to produce a Gaussian)[0]

All the OP's proposed suggestions can, and do, fit into a semester homeec
course many highschoolers already take, so I just can't see the supposed
failing. The reduction of a basic foundation of facts to "useless trivia" is
the reason we can have white house offficals take to the news and say they
have alternative (but somehow equally valid) facts. Without this foundation
(of conveniently measurable skills and masteries, who do you even evaluate a
"good apology") students are essentially cut off from a memetic ocean of
shared knowledge. You cannot have a functioning democracy without a populace
with basic literacy and numeracy as well as a shared body of facts that acts
as the training set for all subsequent facts.

[0][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastery_learning](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastery_learning)

~~~
RichardHeart
Look at a magazine stand, these are the things people actually care about. If
you think of something people care about that isn't on the magazine stand,
consider starting one and filling the niche.

Why is it that we would focus on all the things people do not actually care
about, as opposed to the things they actually do? Let learning be a pull
process, not a push process. You pull in the skills you need to do things
well, you don't learn all the things you might need, only to discover you
didn't need them.

Shoving information into peoples heads and hoping that it leads to utility
somehow in the future is a long shot when compared to using utility itself to
pull the required knowledge as needed, and you then have a 100 percent hit
rate on the cache. You're never filling your cache up with junk.

Some exceptions to this exist, obviously, such as language, speech, writing,
math up to algebra, some geometry, logic, ethics, hygiene, and success tactics
such as delayed gratification, goal setting, teamwork, etc.

Those subjects have the largest amplification effect on other subjects. Some
other subjects are better endpoints than starting points, and it would be
great if the people that loved those subjects wouldn't try and pretend they
were good amplification starting points.

The mastery learning you linked to seems to beat a dead horse? More profit can
be had by giving up on some hard things and returning to them after you've
tried learning things you weren't burnt out on yet. Some people will just
always hate a certain subject. If you require 90 percent performance before
you move on to the next thing, you lose the profit of task switching for
freshness.

Also, this seems to unrelated to the point of better subjects. If teaching
technology doubled in effectiveness overnight, you're still learning things
you can't make money with and are unlikely to ever use, no matter how well you
know it.

------
wj
You haven't yet convinced me that what you propose is "something better" than
the educators' current curriculum. I know the education system is far from
perfect, and obviously some schools are more effective than others, but I am
open to hearing your ideas more fleshed out.

Once kids know the three R's then maybe you can introduce some of these other
topics. Writing effectively is a job skill (and one that is lacking as anybody
who hires and reads cover letters knows). Basic algebra is practically a
prerequisite for programming. You mention learning how to "invest in your
future" and that is was I think the standard curriculum aims to achieve.

I agree with you that the order of planets and capitals of states are not
particularly useful knowledge by themselves. But in order to understand the
what is going on in the world knowing geography is pretty important. If you
work in any company of a certain size (whose business spans states or
countries) then you should not have to refer to Wikipedia for context for
every business decision.

It has been a while since I have been in school but I have managed to offend a
few teachers since with my suggestion of getting computers out of the
classrooms completely. This might have changed but when I was in school the
students already knew more about computers than the teachers and the teachers
could not effectively teach using tools (computers) they did not know.

------
gimagon
One small change I'd like is to teach a lot of math from a more numerical
approach. Learning to approximate sines, cosines, limits, derivatives, and
integrals in university made me feel much more confident in my understanding
of the concepts. An advantage of this approach is it still gives STEM bound
students a good intro to core math, but allows all students to learn a bit of
programming. It also teaches how to implement something concrete from an
abstract specification. I felt like a lot of high school math was very
algorithmic, so why not just teach kids how to implement basic algorithms?

~~~
tbihl
Are you taking about mental approximation or writing programs for
approximation? Or did you switch between the two?

I'll say that knowing mental approximations for sines is a wonderful thing.
And, come to think of it, writing something to do the same approximation as
the calculator sounds good too. And then analyzing the error introduced by the
two methods... So many fun tangents!

~~~
gimagon
I guess I was trying to advocate for somewhat orthogonal ideas.

On the one hand, learning how to approximate functions with arbitrary
precision definitely solidifies an understanding of what those functions are
doing.

On the other hand high school math classes are often taught quite
algorithmically. Therefore, rather than tests and problem sets, what if the
student's chief deliverable was a small python package that performed the
algorithms for that lesson? This has a really good advantage of teach basic
life skills of turning a specification or intention into a physical product.
It also does not significantly impair students that need a strong math
background going forward. Finally, makes life a little easier for teachers
because some of their grading work could be automated.

Now these two approaches could be applied independently, but I think they
would work well together, particularly because the numerical approximation
programs generalize a bit better than symbolic ones.

------
hacknat
Why are German and French taught in so many schools when their native speaker
counts are so much lower than other languages? Are we going by economic
importance? Then why isn't Mandarin just an assumed course at every high
school? I know lots of schools are starting to pick up on this, but it seems
like it still viewed as a special thing.

Kids should be far more computer literate than they are now. People understand
basic biology, chemistry, etc, but almost no one I know outside of work could
give you even a rough abstraction of how a computer works (except maybe the
idea that there is "memory" and the "cpu" is the thing that does the work).

I could rant about this topic forever, the state of high school education in
our country is absolutely atrocious. I learned way more from reading in high
school than I did in class (save my Chemistry teacher who was awesome).

------
pizza
What if the schools of the future are student-run?

~~~
RichardHeart
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudbury_school](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudbury_school)

------
qwrusz
> It is the tragedy of the commons that no educator wants to pay the price of
> seeing their curriculum reduced or replaced with something better. For them
> better doesn’t exist.

I don't think this is correct. The issue is much more complicated. First,
_education is not really a tragedy of the commons, more like a tragedy of the
anticommons_ [1].

I agree there's a time constraint to a curriculum. But that little hiccup is
trumped by education's private-public problem: the US compulsory education
space involves the private interests of parents/students overlapping with the
public interests of their state, overlapping the big interests of the federal
government. Education doesn't operate like an under-regulated scarce resource
being depleted, much worse than that, it's an over-regulated scarce resource
where nothing useful can get accomplished or make real changes - a dark hole
of the anticommons.

I also agree schools seriously need to add more practical subjects as well as
life skills classes. With that said, every educator I see is not happy with
the current curriculum and they usually have opinions on what to change first.
Plus small shifts in curriculum have happened and are slowly spreading. There
are states and public schools with software classes, health ed, workplace
training etc... But fuck some states and school districts don't even want to
teach science and want to keep teaching the Bible, to everyone, by law. The
federal government had to step in a few times, but there are limits to what
the fed can and should do.

I'm not exactly sure how the workers comp values you brought up tie in with
your very good education question, but I do see how workers comp in each state
deals with similar problem: Why is an index finger valued at different amounts
in different states? And then why is an index finger valued the same for
different people? Surely some people are going to lose much more in life
earnings due to such an injury vs others people, so how can it be standardized
or fair?

This is America. We have a Constitution. And have a social contract. And we
have a population of all shapes, colors and sizes. A good education curriculum
and system, determined by the government seems very difficult to implement and
be compatible with the other structures here.

If I had to answer I would say students should be given much more freedom, at
a much earlier age to focus on a subject they want plus more freedom to learn
on their own and get credit. Besides that, add philosophy and computer
science. Cut pure math after algebra, offer math in the context of the other
sciences like physics and computers. Cut some of the pure literature, no more
old English and Beowulf taught for weeks, maybe a single class, teach more
literary non-fiction in English classes. Pray for the best ;)

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_anticommons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_anticommons)

~~~
RichardHeart
The workers comp example was to show that even very hard decisions can have
numbers assigned to them for comparisons sake if you ask the right questions.
Thus even if its hard to tell why goal setting is more valuable than
calculating the volume of imaginary vases, it can be reasoned about.

Specialization is power. What profitable skill could students be learning that
wouldn't have tons of side value? Creating, fixing, doing nearly anything that
was worth paying for would pull the right skills into their brains and push
out the useless ones.

If you need to learn to calculate the volume of a vase for an actual reason,
with money on the line, you have a better chance of actually retaining the
knowledge, and seeing the value in it. Autodidacts have a trick up their
sleeve. Interest. Normal students can be interested as well, if they were
learning things worth learning.

