I remember this history teacher who was a breath of fresh air. He told us in advance his test where very simple. And the reason was quite genius: if you just listened and took a few notes here and there, you’d pass the test. Which freed the mind to really absorb the knowledge and have fun with the subject matter. He was also very good in discerning knowledge and teaching why a certain topic was good to know. I think I remember more from those classes than any other.

I had a software security class that was taught in effectively the same way. The professor knew they had to give grades so they just set it up such that the midterm and final accounted for the bulk of the grade and made them really easy. This ensured that almost all students would get at least a B using conventional brute Force studying methods. This removed all of the traditional grade optimizing pressures. He then made the homeworks and labs quite difficult and made them require a lot of independent research so that you could be free to try hard and potentially fall short without fear of getting owned. You would basically get out of the class what you put in. It has so far been my favorite class in my program, the one I learned the most from, and one of the most empowering classes I've taken.

Sounds good, but I could easily see this backfire with students that have been taught to hack the system: "Great, we're getting an easy pass here, let's spend zero time on it and focus on those other subjects that require rote memorising"

Right, but that same thing would happen with more intensive testing anyways. You can lead a horse to water but not make him drink and all that.

> but as long as he is in school, we have to take care that his interest doesn’t go south. [...] During school holidays, he actually starts to do school exercises for fun; those are the very same exercises he would fight against doing for hours on a regular school day. Go figure.

That does not sound like exercises themselves would be bad or that he would cease to be interested in learning overall.

It more sounds like after many hours at school, he wants to do different things that day. But when school is not present, he seeks similar activities and his willingness to learn is not deteriorated. That kind of sounds healthy and not wrong at all. In school, kids spend a lot of time learning or doing focused activities, a kid wanted to just play after that should not be sign of something grave.

The only thing that is wrong or unusual is the hours long fight against homework. I dont think that is normal for majority of kids. Only some parents I know report that much daily fights, most have fight here and there once in a while only.

My parents and teachers gave up on attempting to assign me homework and make me do it. I despised homework. Interesting assignments were great! But day to day homework? Never did it, which isn’t a good thing (and this isn’t me attempting to brag).

The only reason they stopped is I was getting top marks in every subject anyway, and the only reason I had that was I had a tutor who pushed me so far beyond high school level that I was finally interested in the topics again.

The neat part was: to learn those topics, she gave me a crash course of most of the year 11 and year 12 curriculum in 3 or 4 months or so, because I needed the base knowledge to learn the cool stuff

If the kid is doing the exactly same exercise for fun during holidays, then the issue is not the exercise is not interesting for that kid.

Most kids with good grades don't have tutor, unless they struggle a lot or it is before entrance tests for high school and college.

> it has been shown that homework is essentially useless for learning performance

I am curious, is this about some particular kind of homework? From my own experience, I would think that exercising a subject alone (which is what most homework was in my school system at least) is a very good way of understanding it better. I of course remember not wanting to do homework many times, and I remember excessive or idiotic homework assignments, but overall homework seemed to be one of the major modes of learning for me.

Also, related to Gates, Page, Brin - I don't generally think that it's a good idea to look at a small number of very successful people and try to emulate some part of their life experience - you are, în general, very likely to fall for some kind of survivorship bias, or accidentally home in on a less important detail (for example, Gates was probably helped much more by his extremely wealthy and well-connected family than any particular aspect of his schooling).

On the other hand, there are many voices saying that one of the important purposes of the public education system is to engender conformity, which is very rarely conducive to a truly out of the ordinary life. Noam Chomsky would be one of the most credible, and he has often credited his own career to his non-standard early schooling.

The homework has to be just easy enough that every kid can do it, which means that for many kids, it's mainly a test of focus and motivation. This is all the more prevalent today, when homework has turned into drill work for the questions on the standardized tests.

I've got two kids, and so I can attest from limited anecdotal evidence, that it's completely unpredictable how each kid will relate to homework.

Alternative option, tell the school he's not doing homework - they're providing a service to parents to aid with a child education, if that's not aiding then change the contract.

FWIW the UK Education Act actually enshrines this concept (parents are responsible for a child being educated), though this has been eroded considerably by Tory policy in the last decade or so. We did tell our primary school "don't expect homework from $child[0]" one year, they didn't complain. However we also wanted to do flexschooling and the head refused it, which I'm still smarting over and consider to have been a significant detriment.

That same primary school ditched regular style homework in favour of projects, which $child[1] wants to do, and we can decide easily to curtail the time used doing it if we want. It's a great way of doing homework IMO; very child-centric.

Worth a shot, I‘m not sure it would work legally that way in Austria, but we will check!

It's worth contemplating. We homeschooled our kids and it was a good choice for our family.

I'm sympathetic to unschooling, but I've also seen it go wrong. If you decide to unschool, don't be dogmatic about it. Feel free to be more or less unschooly if that seems to be needed. Don't get sucked into a community where unschooling "purity" is highly valued.

Your comment jumped out at me, my wife and I are homeschooling/unschooling and some of people we've met focus on "purity" and all I can think when I talk with them is, "The point isn't to completely avoid anything that looks like schoolwork, the point is to guide the children to learn more than they would have otherwise."

Yup. Unschooling has some tendency to become an ideology instead of a practical point of view, and people get stuck in it. When all your homeschooling friends are stuck in it too, it becomes hard to get out of it even when it's not working well.

"The capacity to just build things without fear of being judged is invaluable"

For me, I had to unlearn self judgement. This has helped so much over the last few years.

How did you do that? It seems to be a big stumbling block to many.

You can try a two-step exercise mentioned in this post: https://os.me/forgive-yourself/

it can boil down to "doing" vs "being". It's a topic often discussed in spiritual circles. You can consider it a thought experiment if that works for you. Or if you are Steve Jobs fan read some Yogananda.

of course then some will say there is no $this vs $that, but start somewhere.

"Self-judgement" as an impostor syndrome ?

Maybe a better way to put it is I'm more forgiving of myself.

> Btw, Gates, Page, Brin - all were not in a conventional school.

This is Anecdata^3, you probably shouldn't make rash decisions about your children based on 3 successful technical entrepreneurs.

Plus, most "successful entrepreneurs" happen to come from wealthy and politically connected families.

https://fortune.com/2015/07/17/entrepreneurs-family-money/

Especially since going to any kind of private school tracks closely with “parents have lots of money” which probably has a lot more to do with it.

Not necessarily, there are lots of private schools which do things very normally.

And many of those turn out tons of successful people you’ve heard of, too. Bet the ones that do so at the highest rate tend to be among the most expensive.

Yes it has been shown that having successful friends will make yourself more successful. Putting your kid into a school for rich people will more likely lead to rich friends later on.

True, it‘s just worth bearing in mind that deviating from the ordinary school system can indeed work.. kids will not automatically fail miserably if they don’t do tests or homework. That was the belief my mother (who was a teacher) ingrained in me, and I actually have to convince myself on a regular basis that life without the standard school system could also work out.

> The longer our son is in primary school, the more we see the deterioration of his willingness to learn anything school-related

Been there myself.

Most school systems have been developed to produce workers, not scholars and researchers.

Hence, rota memorization in prioritized.

Getting people to hate learning is not seen as a serious failure of the school system.

Also, students are never encouraged to question the information they receive or the decision around what is important to learn and what is not.

> learn anything school-related

non scholae sed vitae discimus.

Don't know about Page and Brin, but according to the Netflix documentary Gates won state-level math Olympiad at a level three grades higher than his own. So he wasn't a modal child. You can't draw any conclusions from that about education at scale.

You actually can: if he had a better level of education than everyone else, why wouldn't he do better than people taking traditional educational paths?

As someone who participated in many academic competitions as a child, the winners were consistently weighted 9:1 private:public.

No, you cannot. IQ is highly correlated with wealth and is also highly heritable. So in all likelihood what you've observed is that smart kids win academic competitions, and also happen to be from rich families. If you take a bunch of kids with an IQ of 100 (or 115, or even 130) and put them into private schools they'll do a little better but they won't be winning any academic competitions.

The available data disagrees with you on this:

https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1238041

> The available data disagrees with you on this:

> https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1238041

That article doesn't seem relevant. 'Poverty impedes cognitive function' is entirely compatible with 'IQ is highly correlated with wealth and is also highly heritable', and with the claim that private school can't make a genius out of a kid who lacks an extremely high IQ.

edit: maybe I misunderstood, and you only were only pointing out that some potential-genius kids have that potential stifled by poverty. But that doesn't seem to be the original point of disagreement.

Some information about the flaws with that data:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/259207757_Comment_o...

Let's see: https://www.maa.org/sites/default/files/pdf/AMC/usamo/2019/2...

On the first page, the breakdown is 23 kids from public schools, 7 kids from private schools, 4 kids listing some sort of math circle / whatever Arateem is, 5 kids listing universities (home schooled/taking uni courses? No idea). Possibly a few of the private school kids are on scholarship. The 7 kids go to 4 schools.

> Gates, ... - all were not in a conventional school

wikipedia said he went to a regular private school then went to Harvard which sounds pretty conventional. Yeah he didn't finish, but worry about that later.

Theres truth to the OPs statement. Some online sources say gates attended Montessori for elementary but it's not conclusive. Brin and page for sure attended Montessori. Bezos as well. I went to a Montessori until 5th grade and honestly didnt think it was anything special. Probably because they mixed a lot of traditional school elements in as well.

Private schools cost lots of money, there is nothing regular about them.

> He hates homework (as do most kids)

I just didn't do my homework and got bad grades. Luckily in my country you can always get in via standardized tests instead of grades so I did well in life anyway. I'm not sure why homework is weighed so heavily in grades, it mostly just shows how much free time the students are willing to sacrifice. The biggest cost this had for me was the guilt that I hadn't done what I was supposed to do, which made me feel like a bad person, but in hindsight I did much better than most of my more studious peers so it really wasn't all that important.

All true known and well established. But homeschooling requires a parent to sacrifice anything else and be devoted for that. Not an easy decision. It's much easier to find a good school!

Not necessarily true. I admit it’s a lifestyle change, but it can work quite well if both parents are freelancers.

We thought the same way but it’s difficult to replace the social component. Still it’s hard to see how bad the school system is and force our kids to participate. It could be so much better.

Look for an unschooling school, strange as that may sound. Free democratic and Sudbury Valley model are some of the things to search for. There aren't many around but the numbers are increasing.

We send our son to one. It's a leap of faith; the kids essentially "do whatever". But it seems worth it compared to the damage done by middle and high school. And the kids that I've seen come out of this school seem to do well in society (and college) and generally seem much more mature than high school graduates.

Agile Learning Centers and Liberated Learners are inspiring networks of small schools in this vein (and both less dogmatic than Sudbury - in a good way, IMO).

Montessori schools as well: "Follow the child"

Be careful with Montessori.

I went to a "traditional Montessori" school for a few months when I was very young. Long story short, their educational method insisted that we needed instruction in how to play with toys before we were allowed to do so, and we needed to do so on mats, which needed to be rolled up tidily at the end of the prescribed playtime.

The problem with that was that we already knew what Legos were. But we were supposed to pretend we didn't, in order to appease the teacher.

I think this was the same school that insisted to my parents that I couldn't read because they (the school) hadn't taught me to read. My parents taught me to read. So they had me demonstrate, and the teacher decided my parents must have... trained me to pretend to read.

Not these days. There are so many home school groups that it's very easy to replace the social component.

I'm curious about Page & Brin - I wasn't aware they didn't go through conventional schooling. What was their background?

They both attended Montessori schools. [0][1][2][3][4][5][6]

The person who mentioned waldorf must have been confused. While they’re both small private schools, they are two very different approaches to education.

[0] Wiki Brin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Brin

[1] Post Article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/montessori-lo...

[2] ABC Interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0C_DQxpX-Kw

[3] Wiki Page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Page

[4] Guardian Article: https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2014/jul/23...

[5] BI Article: https://www.businessinsider.com/tech-innovators-who-went-to-...

[6] Forbes Article: https://www.businessinsider.com/tech-innovators-who-went-to-...

Montessori iirc

Waldorf/Steiner iirc

What about socializing?

That’s the big issue. We‘re thinking about Karate/swimming/chess etc courses, but ideally you would have access to a community of unschoolers. Some big cities have this, but currently not an option for us.

I think sports are pretty good at forcing kids outside of their comfort zone. I definently didnt like it as a kid, but it honestly made me grow so much.