I went to school in the 60s. We did a fair amount of sitting down, but also we did quite a lot of moving about. There was the little field behind the school ('nature table' in the classroom &c) and there was 'music and movement' every day for half an hour with music and instructions broadcast on school radio. Team games, beach walks, and so on. There was also a fair amount of play-like activity in the classroom itself. No national testing.

Now we have this...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-35940084

...which the government is actually doing something about (replacing the tests with teacher-lead assessment). So I agree about the (pointless and counter-productive) introduction of stress into early education.

On the more positive side (I'm an optimist, teachers tend to be) I was in a bank yesterday doing some stuff a bit out of the ordinary and there was a queue. A bank employee toddles up with an iPad and a chip reader on the back and asks me what I wanted to do. We moved to a corner of the large banking hall and completed the transaction. We could just as easily have been in a large public room somewhere or a cafe. The future could include a lot of movement!

I went to school in the late 90s/early 00s, and there was at least as much movement as you describe. We had "gym" class every day (almost every day in high school), which was basically non-stop movement. We also had recess when we were younger, which again, was typically non-stop movement. If you played a sport (which a lot of people did), then there was even more movement.

No arguments here about the testing crap though. :-)

I remember gym class containing not nearly enough movement. Every week was learning some new game and it took half the time each day to explain rules.

I worked in an elementary school a few year ago though and it's gotten worse. About 20 minutes lunch and 20 minutes recess, which was often canceled due to weather. The kids only had gym one week out of every three.

(warning, German experience bias)

Additionally, obese, impeded or just untalented kids get mercilessly attacked by the other kids. The only ones to shine are the guys who go on soccer or basketball practice, and they're usually the guys going after "weaker" kids in the first place (which is easy when you got some muscle).

Usually it is one teacher responsible for the entire group of kids, which means that the teacher is busy the whole time explaining stuff to kids which means that inappropriate behavior gets unnoticed way too often.

Organized school sports/gym classes like the ones I had are beyond evil and next to useless, speaking out of more than enough experience.

I agree...at least in the US you have the option to pull your kids out of school and (theoretically) homeschool them. In Germany, if you tried that, you end up in prison and your kids in foster care. There the control over them by the state is complete. I grew up in Austria. We went to school also on Saturdays for a few hours - however the rest of the week we came home at 2pm. The rest of the day was spent outside, playing with others, roaming through forests, completely unsupervised (late 80s, early 90s). I cannot imagine seeing my kids forced to a desk the entire day with what little free time is left over spent in a highly addictive computer game. But as an adult, in a society that considers the new norm 'normal', it's not easy to give your kids more freedom.

On the other hand, forced public schools provide three very important advantages:

1) kids don't fall into religious sect schools as easily as in the US, e.g. the Amish - thereby the state ensures that kids have an experience outside a tightly controlled environment, as well as exposure to stuff like sex ed (which is apparently neither compulsory nor scientifically accurate in some US places).

2) it protects children from abuse going unnoticed (again, religious sects come to my mind, but also "ordinary" home abuse). Simply said, if a teacher notices that a student comes to class every other day looking badly beaten or complains being sexually abused at home, the teacher can inform police. In a homeschooling environment, this protection cannot be provided at all, because parents can literally prevent anybody else from ever seeing the kid.

3) it ensures at least some form of quality of teaching. In Germany there are some exceptions to the mandatory public school system, and these have been fraught with scandals ranging from fake degrees of the teachers to outright corporeal punishments of pupils instead of providing an alternative to public schools (and mostly been shut down).

That said, our public school system is not perfect either - it's not inclusive to students with disabilities, the curriculums are biased towards economical, not societal, needs, it does not provide students with adequate time, place and resources for actual free play, and it selects pupils into the three different high-school tracks way too early. But it's way better than the alternative, whose downsides appear regularly in HN submissions and comments.

Yeah, that's just fucking ridiculous.

http://www.independent.ie/world-news/europe/britain/father-l...

Fucking penalties and strict government mandates for school attendance/absence? Jesus Christ...

> REDUCE THE STRESS THEY GET IN SCHOOLS

School is a training and proving ground for the stress you'll encounter in the workforce. The signal embedded in academic success is "this person was a given a shit ton of difficult work to do under a tight deadline and was successful, many times." That's why (some) employers care about it.

I think we'd do children a great disservice by jerking their worlds from "trivial mode" to "impossible mode" at 3:01pm on the last day of high school. Easing into it is a reasonable idea.

Of course, it'd be nice if we didn't have to face extreme competition for the opportunity to put in long hours on stressful workloads in order to provide for ourselves, but that's the larger economic system more than the schools.

> School is a training and proving ground for the stress you'll encounter in the workforce. The signal embedded in academic success is "this person was a given a shit ton of difficult work to do under a tight deadline and was successful, many times." That's why (some) employers care about it.

I agree with you, but once again this is treating the symptoms of a fundamentally broken society, in this case by abusing children. Not acceptable at all IMO.

You had been downvoted into the grey, I suppose you should watch your language, this being about school and all, because actually that sentiment of disregard [1] seems to have resonated well and is exactly what I expected to come to conclude before even reading the piece. It's just ironic you would misbehave [3] like that in context of schooling, letting politeness and courtesy common to and required for HN discussions slip like that.

1: I mean appeal to empathy[2] and subsequent opposition to sanctions is so ironic, I am lost for words.

2: I mean the call to action in face of neglect.

3: "screaming" in all-caps, implied curses, exaggeration.

Can we please stop promoting this stupid meme that education is entirely about controlling people and making them docile? It's not. It's about education.

The idea that children 'do homework until midnight' is similarly stupid.

> It's about education.

It's education when at the end of school the students have comprehensive education. Right now curriculums are skewed waaaay too far in the direction of "only what the economy will need", but stuff like basic life skills - e.g. cooking (only taught in the lowest-grade school track in Germany), basic house maintenance (how to operate a power drill, what wall plugs to use for which wall type, how to unclog a sewer, how to properly secure and wire lighting fixtures), doing a tax return or the core concepts on how to start a company, or what insurances exist only to rip you off ("vet insurance" comes to my mind out of own experience, most do not cover operations which can get really expensive really fast) - falls down.

> The idea that children 'do homework until midnight' is similarly stupid.

It's not an "idea", it's reality, and a nightmare. Especially when additional tutoring before tests is involved. Then it's learning even over the weekends. (source: know a tutor, and she could likely tell you more horror stories than I could submit here in a lifetime)

>It's education when at the end of school the students have comprehensive education.

And then you go on to list a bunch of things that have absolutely nothing to do with education. Cooking, house maintenance, etc. are (and should be) taught by your parents. Nobody needs to 'do a tax return' unless they actually start a company, and it's not exactly difficult. The vast majority of people will never file a tax return, why would they? That's what PAYE is for.

Starting a company? Again, this is something that is very easy. You do not need to have a high school course on how to start a company. It's a very easy thing to do, and completely and utterly irrelevant to the 99% of people that will never start a company.

>It's not an "idea", it's reality, and a nightmare. Especially when additional tutoring before tests is involved. Then it's learning even over the weekends. (source: know a tutor, and she could likely tell you more horror stories than I could submit here in a lifetime)

No, it isn't. Stop assuming that everywhere in the world is California.

> Cooking, house maintenance, etc. are (and should be) taught by your parents

lol, how are parents supposed to do this when they're either both working two jobs to make rent, or actually too incompetent? Kids shouldn't suffer for their parents being stupid.

> Nobody needs to 'do a tax return' unless they actually start a company, and it's not exactly difficult.

In Germany it's next to mandatory to make a tax return, at least you can save really huge amounts of money by doing so. Once again the failure of schools to teach this primarily hits kids with incompetent parents.

> You do not need to have a high school course on how to start a company. It's a very easy thing to do

It's not, and the only thing that's easy is to mess up and land yourself into mountains of debt.

> No, it isn't. Stop assuming that everywhere in the world is California.

I'm German. And you should stop assuming that parents are competent enough (and especially, have the time!) to teach their kids everything that the hypermodernized world requires.

> Cooking, house maintenance, etc. are (and should be) taught by your parents.

My parents were better positioned to teach us calculus than cleaning.

Read UN human rights list.

It states right there that schools should be mandatory and mandatory teach about the UN. And in another section of the document it says rights are "universal" to people that aren't against UN interests.

Many countries happily follow these "guidelines" in the school sense... how is that education?

From my personal experience school was just a indoctrination tool, to make people subservient to state, employers and the UN. All useful stuff I learned, even decent basic maths and language was learned outside school (example: my parents taught me maths, my grandmother taught me how to read and write, I learned English, Lua, C, etc... on my own, learned physics and chemistry by reading books)

> example: my parents taught me maths, my grandmother taught me how to read and write, I learned English, Lua, C, etc... on my own, learned physics and chemistry by reading books

Which proves only one point: that you had the advantage of an extremely interested, caring and knowledgeable family.

Many people, especially PoC and "poor people", do not have this advantage (be it because parents or other family are locked up in jails, or because parents have to both work two jobs in order to make rent) - public schools are the only education resource for kids in these families. We as a society must not let them down or we will face the harsh consequences in the future.

Right. Public school is just some worldwide conspiracy. I'm sure the Trilateral Commission had something to do with it. By all means abolish them. It would certainly drastically reduce my property taxes. </s>

Education should be mandatory, and should teach about the UN just as they should teach about all recent 20th century history. The UN is very important to the state the world is in.

>From my personal experience school was just a indoctrination tool, to make people subservient to state, employers and the UN. All useful stuff I learned, even decent basic maths and language was learned outside school (example: my parents taught me maths, my grandmother taught me how to read and write, I learned English, Lua, C, etc... on my own, learned physics and chemistry by reading books)

That's because you have convinced yourself that it's all just indoctrination, man.

> The idea that children 'do homework until midnight' is similarly stupid.

It's not an idea. It's commonplace fact (at least in the US). When I was in school, it was very commonplace for teachers to assign an absurd amount of busy-work to take home, and for kids to have several extracurricular activities immediately after school.

The average schedule for a student at my high school consisted of a 7 hour block (including 30min-1hour lunch), then 2-3 hours of whatever sport (or other organized activity) they were a part of, then (if they actually did it) 2-4 hours of homework.

It may be about education, but the totalitarian system that has been created is very controlling, and very stressful.

Right, so you're continuing to make things up by pretending that education anywhere that isn't the US is the same as education in the US.

I made no such assertion, in fact, I explicitly mentioned that my anecdotal experience was in the US, and nowhere else, just to clarify that fact.

You are continuing under the assumption that I am taking about any education system outside of the US. Even so, looking through the comments here, I see very similar sentiment from someone in Germany, so it seems likely to me that we are not alone.

If I take some bricks, put sauce and cheese on them and call them pizza, they're still not pizza. State education is similar: it's called education, and it has some teaching moments, but it's still not about education.

The idea that some children do homework until midnight is fact. The idea that all children do was not suggested anywhere here.

The idea that children should do homework until midnight is stupid, and instances quite arguably a bug report against the educational system in question. No one has asserted that that is all systems.