That is highly unlikely. Even at elite Ivy universities, a majority of students attended public high schools.
Public education is a lot better than people give it credit for. There's wide variation in quality but there are certainly plenty of excellent public schools available.
Old Greenwich, Cos Cob, and Riverside have great public schools because that's where all the IT professionals, quants, and middle managers move to raise their families. Those districts have access to many adults with an interest and ability to participate in the school community, and so the district ends up with a lot of extra resources.
But the hedge fund upper management send their kids to Brunswick School, Sacred Heart, and the like, and the district on the super rich and the poorer, primarily-Hispanic sides of town, has a poorer reputation.
Based on my experience in high school, the opportunities for a good education were there, but not every student took advantage of them (or was able to take advantage of them). While the public school system has its flaws, the problems with education in the US are multi-factorial. We could do better by having more teachers and funding for schools and modifying our system for educating kids, but we'll hit a ceiling unless we also improve the quality of family life for students at home as well as the US' cultural attitudes towards education.
For example: Stuyvesant is a public high school. But is it actually? There's a 3 hour test you take in order to be admitted. 900 or so kids are admitted. How is this "public?"
There is nothing wrong in segregating kids based on their ability. Public universities use tests to take the best kids and this should happen at all levels. A black kid who is smart should not be held back just because he lives in bad neighborhood. He should get into a better school if he can score more.
Yes. That is how it happens in urban India. Even for nursery admissions schools interview both the kid and parents to see if they have potential.
You are right, he should. But he is statistically very much likely not to based on his upbringing and systemic discrimination.
Schools are not all the same, you know? The only thing you can say without diving into the statistics is that it depends on when and where you went.
Second, how do you define success? If you define success in terms of money, education and intelligence play a very, very small role. The correlation of financial success to who you know and who you are related to is orders of magnitude higher than how smart you are or how much knowledge you have. The vast majority of PHDs are much more intelligent and educated that the vast majority of millionaires.
Your academic training ends late in life. And therefore you have to charge higher and higher to make up for your investments. And of course, for the student loans too.
A Law degree from a 3rd rate school on the other hand is not so constrained and outside of 'top' schools which again are a limited supply tend to have minimal benefit.
I’d also support free college, but I’d expect all wages to fall accordingly. Or for the loan situation to repeat itself, this time to pay the income taxes on tuition waivers for grad school, as a masters or PhD becomes necessary to set yourself apart in the labor market.
[1] Jon Marcus, "Germany proves tuition-free college is not a silver bullet for America’s education woes" https://qz.com/812200/is-free-college-possible-germany-shows...
Or are they a product of culture, from their parents and society at large, pushing them to accel independently of public education?
IMO, the standardized testing bugbear is at least partly a red herring. An excessive focus on teaching to the test is bad; I'm sure we can all agree. But it's worth remembering that the increased focus on standardized testing grew out of a system where accountability and metrics of any sort were pretty much a four-letter word.
Communities with a large number of parents who feel that education is their responsibility tend to still do a good job of educating their kids in their public schools. Without that parental mindset, the quality of education goes down.
And maybe it's wishful thinking on my part, but I think the situation is more subtle: There are parents who just aren't capable of taking a more active role in educating their own children and supervising their public schools. They have no idea what a good education looks like, or what their kids are missing out on. They don't have the time or resources to be "involved" in their kids' schools. In short, they have no realistic hope to offer their kids.
And the schools themselves aren't set up to be fully self sufficient without the supervision of "involved" parents (euphemism for "pushy", I'm one of them) and a supply of children who come to school ready to learn.
Might they believe that the government owes them the best possible education anyway? Sure. I believe that too, even though I'm one of those parents who has taken an active role in educating my own kids.
So I think the government is responsible, but as a last resort, not as the best possible arrangement.
These parents most definitely exist. They tend to be poor and disinterested in normal parental duties. If you don't have any interaction with them they may as well not exist to you.
Parents who think it is their responsibility to educate their kids and see the public school as one of the ways to provide that education will do things like show up for parent-teacher conferences, make sure their kids complete their homework, understand what their kids are struggling with, and seek out additional help when it is needed (asking the teacher, using internet resources, etc.). I'm sure there are some teachers who would say that describes everyone in their class, but most of the teachers I've talked to say that such a classroom sounds like a wonderful dream.
> There are parents who just aren't capable of taking a more active role in educating their own children
If someone who didn't graduate adopted a high school age student, then I would see your point. However, kids don't start out in high school. They start out much younger. While I'm sure you can find some very unusual exceptions, a parent should be able to take an active role in their kid's education from the beginning. Maybe by the time the kid gets into high school, some parents aren't going to be able to fully understand the math their kids are doing, but you can still take responsibility for what your kid's education even if you don't fully understand their calculus homework.
[1] https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/international/reports/2014-piaac..., definition of 'below level 2' at https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/litproficiencylevel.asp
Arguably, many of these parents educate their kids completely independent of the public schools they send their kids to five days a week, and the school's job is just to provide that all-important piece of paper at the end.
As far as the important piece of paper, I think that is something of a myth as far as college admissions go. I've heard a lot of parents say that they need their kids to graduate from a public school so they can go to college.
All the college admission requirements I've seen are the same for public school graduates and kids who graduated from a non-accredited program. It mostly comes down to your ACT and SAT score.
Homeschooling parents love to use worst poorest least performing public school as a norm and best performing home schooled students as a norm.
The public school curriculum today was built around a need for literate men who could do arithmetic working in factories from the 1920s and on. That is why the core "skills" of public education are mastery of basic reading and math.
On one hand, reading and math are pretty fundamental to most of the world today. On the other, the original designs of curriculum were to repeat those two concepts for 12 years until everyone who graduated was certainly capable of them to insure any adult was a capable factory drone. Throw in some biased national history in social studies to create some cult patriotism and basic science so they don't blow up half the workplace floor by mixing the wrong chemicals and so they have a basic idea of how things move and that was it.
The average high schooler keeps graduating more and more capable of memorizing words and regurgitating them on fill in the blank tests. They are getting better, on average, at more advanced mathematics like algebra. It turns out generations of kids capable of doing math homework didn't dramatically improve the innovative potential of east Asian countries that focused hugely on that from the 80s and on. Japans school system is one of the most rigorous in the world, you have to pass entrance exams just for high school and getting into any university is itself often a several-year long job. But Japans economy is not seeing huge economic growth for all that laser focus on classical lecture and memorized testing.
And even then the current k-12 system does not serve those who aren't as quick to pickup on these memorization concepts and fundamentals for reading and math. Huge numbers of kids are "forgotten" in the public school system and are pushed through despite being borderline illiterate. Because grades are age based and not ability based, if you are either too fast or too slow at memorizing the material instructed at you public school will be an awful experience.
> It is about the practical use of information acquired in public school.
Primary and secondary school educations' purpose it not meant to have any practical use; that's specialization.
A productive sytem will have, as post-secondary options, a more academic education (university), and professional schools.
Some countries have hybrid secondary education options, and that's an acceptable alternative.
If a country doesn't give the options above, then there is a serious problem, but to orient public school towards practical matters is missing the point of basic education.
By the way, there are accountants for doing taxes.
In Illinois there is a business class that is required to graduate that requires you to complete your own taxes. I can't comment if you can truly pass the class with out knowing how to do your taxes but I certainly tell you they taught us how to if you paid attention.
Most of my peers decided not to take it.
Exactly so. There are some who glide into the industries in our school systems but it may be that either they are "truly exceptional," were under the tutelage of a knowledgeable adult who could steer them towards certain success, or lucked into happiness.
You may also consider social stratification around Ivy Leagues and Public Research Universities as a side-effect of a lack of a Useful School. People cannot rely upon the reputation of a school and instead resort to a set of predatory heuristics about tuition and the age of the institution.
In a world where the public school system prepares, by grade 12, a legally-literate scholar with a set of vocational skills, the University (It helps to think of it as One University, from which emanates the total knowledge of humankind) assumes a role of governance over the high schools (colleges) and grade schools, which are the true preparatory apparatus of the adult mind.
You are so ignorant about the curriculum that it is embarrassing. I would wager you have nothing to do with a school except drive past one at too high a speed.
The "Public University Core" in Texas is, by and large, the 2nd-level-advanced version of the basic high school graduation requirements. Those requirements aren't much more strenuous than "can do math with variables" and "understand compound sentences" and "pass a test on acid, base, solution, and precipitates." The school district where I taught didn't even have a senior-level financial education course until the year after I left and that was well into the 2000s. (But, by George, you absolutely will take a course in Texas History wherein you learn not to forget the Alamo and how Texans are fiercely independent unlike every other state in the Union and how we were technically an independent country and, depending on the teacher, we just might be one again.)
Yes, it's a gross generalization but it is true, at least in my experience, that the curricula we are teaching our kids isn't dynamic or flexible enough to keep up with modern society.
Going to college is the original "Everyone needs to know how to code" meme. You won't get a good job, they say. You need a degree, they say. When in truth, some people have no interest or business going to college. The result? Masses of debtors pushed into college education who fail out. Graduation rates are now around 52.9% [1]. Those who fail out are in really bad shape when it comes to trying to repay a five or six figure loan on an education they didn't complete.
[1] https://nscresearchcenter.org/signaturereport10/#ExecutiveSu...
As some who was not taught the alphabet by either parent but instead by the school starting in Kindergarten I hope you aren't serious. The only place I learned to read was in school.
The link is talking about formal vs play-based learning, which is a methodological question that, in the case of reading skills, is mostly orthogonal to what's being learned.
The assertion was kindergarten was valuable because it taught reading. I was pointing out that if reading was premature, then kindergarten had no educational value.
You fundamentally misunderstand the article. The article isn't advocating not teaching reading. It's advocating a play-based pedagogy for teaching reading.
> Play is available at any daycare, at home, with grandparents etc.
While this is true, that's not the "play" that the article is referring to. Not all "play" has equal educational value; playing pong all day is different from constructing silly stories based on books with Grandma during reading time.
So while this is in principle true, the reality is that educational play is a lot less accessible than your characterization implies.
"An extended period of high quality, play-based pre-school education was of particular advantage to children from disadvantaged households" doesn't describe the typical daycare.
Again, the approach is not "no education". The approach is "play-based pre-school education"
> then kindergarten had no educational value.
Similarly, the article never claims that pre-school/Kindergarten has negative educational value. It claims that formal educational settings focused on instruction sometimes have negative educational value. (Which, BTW, can be found in the involved parent's home as easily as in the typical public classroom.)
The idea that this study implies we should just have kids play "kick the can" all day until first grade is a serious and dangerous mis-reading.
Kids should be learning to read during the Kindergarten age, and prior. This study does not refute that assertion. Rather, it makes a point about which pedagogical approaches are most effective at achieving that goal. Those approaches -- both good and bad -- could be implemented in a day care, but a grandparent, or in a Kindergarten classroom.
In theory the sooner that happens the better.
Most students who go into skilled trades probably need at least 12 years of schooling. But knowing which 12 years is the hard part. Sure, somebody who knows they want to be an electrician at the age of 10 can probably be competent by 18, but we shouldn't be locking people into that kind of flat job progression.
Even if we accept that simple trade schools are the ideal, I'd still argue we should be encouraging people to study a liberal mix of arts taking 17-20 years (just with liberal arts mixing trades instead of academics.)
A better way of putting it would be to say that "Germany had a different model for education but when they lost World War 2, the standard model of education was imposed upon them by the Allies."
Otherwise it kinda comes off sounding like "if only Germany didn't lose WW2" which most folks agree would have been a poor outcome.
The GP is saying that they had a pretty conservative system, and could only change it for something that works after losing a war and having change imposed from foreigners.
Who are you to look at 10 year old me and say "no, let's keep this kid in votech and deny them access to higher ed"?
People in Germany do not generally make binding decisions on their specific career path until they are sixteen and after that career switches do happen.
In your particular case you might have been recommended for a vocational path at age 10 or so and then you could have disregarded that recommendation (possible at least in Germany's most populous State). If you had followed that path, you would have still been able to switch after any semester if your grades were considered sufficient. Or you would have completed that path and started an apprenticeship as an electrician. This would also allow you to enroll at any state university in a related major (e.g. electrical engineering). There are also courses that you can take to obtain the general university entrance qualification necessary for enrolling in any field of your choice.
The point I am making is that there is much more flexibility in Germany than you currently imagine. There are many who still criticize the German system otherwise (me included), because straying from the recommendation that your elementary school teacher gives you does come with some friction. Also, there is some empirical evidence that the recommendations can depend on the social class of the child (i.e. kids with rich parents are put on the academic path) in practice. However nobody is "locked in" to any career progression.
Edit: there are occasional calls to return to the previous system of the “11 plus”, which I don’t understand but which is probably relevant.
The reality of it now is that richer parents spend lots on tuition to get their kids into the grammars, which breaks the system quite significantly.
This only applies in a few areas of the country though.
I think the only UK PMs to be elected that had a state school upbringing went to grammar schools.
To clarify slightly: this system used to apply throughout the country, but in the '70s local authorities were given the option to get rid of it, and instead have 'comprehensive' schools where everyone goes; almost all did.
Well, sort of. I believe that some authorities make all children sit the exam, and then give high scorers the option of going to grammar school. More authorities give children the option of sitting the exam, again giving high scorers the option of going to grammar school. Most areas don't have the 11+ at all.
On top of that, in the '90s the government gave all schools the option to be partially selective (ie selecting some fraction of pupils somehow, not by 11+), and some took it up; the option was withdrawn soon after, but the schools which had exercised it stayed selective.
Other schools and instead allocate school places by geographic proximity - which in the presence of better and worse schools, results in de facto selection by parental wealth, because houses near good schools are more expensive.
Oh, and there are also faith schools that can select by religion.
No, this doesn't make any sense. This is Britain.
> No, this doesn't make any sense. This is Britain.
This is why my atheist father had me baptised Catholic, even though the state religion of the UK is Church of England.
It Might have been part of the Bologna Process though
There are ways out if it later on. You can do another 2 years on top of a 3 year vocational school to get the right type of final exam to apply for college. You can take extra classes to switch from a just-a-college to a uni degree. Then you’re free to go do masters and phds just like anyone who went to the right type of high school at 14.
Except now you’re older and more mature and probably likelier to graduate than all us shitheads who got in the normal way.
On the other hand, if shitheads-at-10yo stay on university route, they don't get good enough grades to get into university anyway. They'd probably be better off becoming electricians. Once they'd realise they do want education after all, then they could put in extra effort.
As a side effect, electrician-headed shitheads don't stop education-oriented kids from making progress. Which is nice too.
People talk about administration as if it were a waste of money, but really most counselor's offices are glorified registrars and can't do any actual counseling (which is really one of the bigger problems.)
There's no magic bullet, and at a high level there's no substitute for more 1-on-1 instruction (and counseling is just a little more explicitly 1-on-1 targeted at kids that need it.)
In my country (which is not Germany), the big jump is at ~15. While elementary (1-4) and middle schools (5-8) are +/- the same, gymnasiums/high schools (9-12 or 9-10) do differ. For smart kids, 15 is the age to try to get into the elite profile schools in science or art. Or jump to an overall better school. And shitheads are encouraged to go to "main" 9-10 schools which are straight way to trade schools. Although majority of kids stay in mainstream schools and do what you described. But the system offers a way out for both smart kids troublemakers. Which is nice.
Personally I wish kids were more encouraged to aim for a better school at that age. I'm still salty I didn't even try to get into the elite schools since commute seemed too long. Although I did jump to a wee better (and closer) school to escape the overall attitude.
One purpose of mass public education in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was to get kids out of the job market because we couldn't produce enough jobs for the adults. Schools were a way of getting kids out of the coal mines and factories to open up jobs for adults. Another purpose of mass public education was to indoctrinate and prepare them to be good unquestionin worker bees.
Now, education system and its bureaucracy has become so entrenched, a new purpose has formed - to protect teachers' and administrators' jobs. That's the major gooal of the education system.
As for colleges, since we aren't creating enough jobs, we have been trying to push young adults out of the job market by encouraging them to go to college. The loans young people are saddled with are an extra bonus - a chain around the young people so that they will work and give their prime years to corporations by being good worker bees.
But how would you know that? You can't possibly compare what you did to what might have happened. And maybe your mom is just a bad teacher?
That isn't exactly a bad idea, given how much of life is actually a test.
Where are the guarantees that this would actually work? Or just throw out an entire system with no proof.
See this comment for my comments on the NPR show I heard after posting my mildly-inflammatory comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15738275
First, lumping all public schools in the US together is not helpful. We don't have a federal system of education, we barely have a state level, and if we are generous we may have a local level. Massachusetts is a really good place to educate your kids, it's on par with Singapore in wold rankings [0]. Alabama is not. Basically, if your local schools suck, go to more PTA meetings and make them better. Bitching on the web is not a good way to do that. Getting out the message to up some tax in your local mill-levy is.
Second, getting rid of kindergarten is insane. Socializing is SUPER important to young kids. Yes, it costs a lot of cash. But so does having a stupid population. I think we all know that a stupid voter base is worse over even a 10 year time scale.
Third, classroom time is not prison for children. If your kid thinks it is, find another school or talk to the teacher and the admin. They aren't soulless bureaucrats. They are massively underpaid humans. Especially in those grades. They deal with a LOT of poop and illnesses.
Fourth, HS as community college would be a great idea for SOME kids. For the majority, you really have to force them to learn algebra and the 'boring but important as hell' stuff. You really can't have a 'major' in HS for most students. Most HN readers are not most students and probably could have a HS major. But public education is for all citizens, not just the smart ones, but the really dumb ones too. We all have a place in this society, even the dumb people, and we all have a right to be educated.
Fifth, the 'system' isn't very well constructed, so tear your's down. I agree that public education is not very well done in the US. But that is YOUR fault. Yes, you, the person reading this. If you think your local school is crappy, go fix it or move. In the US, education is SUPER local (by and large). Talking about US public education like a unified thing is nonsense. The taxes that support your local school are very local and very much something you and a few people can fix. Really, go round up all the patrons in your local bar. That's really all the people it takes to swing an election or get a new tax or measure passed. My SO works at a school that did not exist 6 years ago. The local residents just up and decided to make a new one out of a city park. They built and funded the whole thing. It took maybe 70 people to do this. Now there is a great school. They went out and fixed their local community. Democracy actually fucking works if you do too.
Sixth, no, we are not trapped. We trap ourselves. I mean, yeah, some state laws suck. So go change them. Look at fucking eric Cantor's primary sniping. That took like no money and no people to do. They upset in a primary the house minority whip. Like, come on people, this is OUR country and these are OUR schools. Don't get defeated by the shit you read online. Go make YOUR schools better if you want them to be better.
[0] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/02/15/u-s-students... (source not here, but you can get a start there, hey, it's Sunday, ok?)
I'm sorry if my comment above was too inflammatory - I meant to point out that both teachers & students are put in a difficult situation. The comment was specifically worded to target the 'education industry' (the profiteers who take advantage of student loans, which the submitted link is about), not the country's individual schools. 75 days ago I commented about an excellent teacher I had: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15181176
After I posted my little comment this morning, I took off on a road trip. NPR was rebroadcasting last Friday's show on the Ted Radio Hour. This week's episode was titled Simple Solutions [0]. Part 2 was "Sam Kass: Can Free Breakfast Improve Learning?" [1]. Part 3 was "Wendy Troxel: Does High School Start Too Early?" [2].
Apparently little things like improving the odds that all students are fed and rested can dramatically improve students' school experiences. But that doesn't fix the structural problem, which is...
> For the majority, you really have to force them to learn algebra and the 'boring but important as hell' stuff.
No no no no no. My dad's high school friend taught shop class. Some of his students loved his class, others would have rather been anywhere else ("Baking"), but shop was the only class that fit in their schedule. Forcing children to take "important" classes that they don't care about is a good way to elicit apathy.
I think John Gatto said "nothing of value to the individual happens through force." Gatto has some good insights. See my earlier comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15693047 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14425760
> Third, classroom time is not prison for children. If your kid thinks it is, find another school or talk to the teacher and the admin.
School was a prison for me, and I was good at it.
Thanks for your post.
[0] https://www.npr.org/programs/ted-radio-hour/564577402/simple...
[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/sam_kass_want_to_teach_kids_well_f...
[2] https://www.ted.com/talks/wendy_troxel_why_school_should_sta...
https://mises.org/library/education-free-and-compulsory-1/ht...
I saw one of your posts mentioning progesterone: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12709510 . What is the source/brand of progesterone that you would recommend ? Email is on my profile : https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dennis_jeeves
https://www.brookings.edu/research/the-effects-of-investing-...
Children are learning machines. I've no doubt that kindergarten radically changes learning, but I don't think this is in a good way.
> Or what is the replacement?
For parents who need kindergarten as day-care (so they can work), some sort of structured activities might be appropriate. I don't have children, so my interest in this topic stems from being punished with boredom for my entire school experience. Some of the alternative education systems might be better, but I've no experience with those. Someone replied to my earlier comment, "Sudbury and Montessori schools offer a model that seems to encourage students to learn at their own pace" [0].
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15693370
To quote myself, "John Gatto says it's better to skip as much of the early years of schooling as possible: some children learn to read when they're 2, some when they're 8, and by the time they're 12 you can't tell the difference. I met a man a few months ago that was traumatized by not being able to "read" on the teacher's schedule when he was in 1st grade. He learned to read eventually, in spite of his school's efforts to force him to read before he was ready." [1]
But yeah, first and second grade are basically prison, especially for boys. I'd cut 'em back to 3 hours per day.
Soon if not already, jobs for once high school graduates are now for college grads for the simple degradation of education.
John Gatto and John Holt have both written extensively on the corrupt nature of compulsory schooling. I linked to some of Gatto's works in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14425760
This is backwards. The school is a jobs project because people have to work to earn money. If that wasn't the case we could let them get busy with creative work full time.
The other part would be ridiculous, do you really want to be spending your entire childhood and teenage doing thing that has 0 return on investment at the end.
Public schools work only for Asians and white because they live in good neighborhoods and take responsibility of their children's academic performance. For Blacks and Hispanics the situation is very very bleak and these people are simply be defrauded by the government.
Washington's constitution states that It is the paramount duty of the state to make ample provision for the education of all children residing within its borders.[1] It is interesting how this manifests in practice.
[0] http://www.k12.wa.us/GATE/Truancy/default.aspx
[1] http://leg.wa.gov/LawsAndAgencyRules/Pages/constitution.aspx
We home/online school, people treat us like we're crazy. My kids are getting a way better education than I or my wife did. Once you are ejected from the Matrix only then can you grasp what a prison it is.
"Really just screw public school in general. The whole place was 95% waste of time followed by a 'congratulatory' piece of paper." -https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14047919
If a politician was courageous, and didn't care about getting re-elected, they'd point out that the system could be fixed by getting rid of Kindergarten, replacing 1st and 2nd grade with structured activities instead of 'classroom time' (prison for children), replacing high school with something more like community college, and allowing the remaining years to be much more flexible - conducted for the learner's benefit, rather than the system's...
But school has been transformed from an important social institution into a jobs project. Children & teachers are both trapped.