There is so much redundancy in elementary school education that you can take out a large chunk of it and still teach the same amount of information. School could be way, way denser than it is. Hell, even in high school, a full year would cover the same amount of material as a single semester of one of my college classes, and my college classes only met 3 times a week (for the same exact class length as my high school classes; or fewer than 3 times a week for longer class length).

College: 25-30 hours per week of class time and homework, walks outdoors between classes, long, leisurely breaks throughout the day. Usually at most 3 early wake-up days a week, and often zero. Work almost never due the very next day. It was like a goddamn vacation, after high school.

(granted I attended a low-ranked university and I gather it's not that easy everywhere, but we were still covering material much faster and with far higher expectations for work than in high school, yet it was way the hell easier just because the conditions were more humane and there was far less wasted time—on the flip side, my high school wasn't in any way prestigious or notable either, yet still demanded all that time)

The point of most of that is not to teach you about whales (though whales are cool). It's to teach you:

* How to read and process written material.

* How to organize your thoughts and write grammatically correct sentences.

* The moral value that science is useful and nature is important to preserve.

It's the same reason they still teach cursive. Cursive matters fuck-all, but training fine motor skills in general is very useful and cursive is just a semi-arbitrary means to that end.

Sure there is redundancy in elementary education. But middle and high school kids missing out on a year of math can be fatal. Smart determined kids can make it up. But the vast majority will be completely lost.

It was really frustrating for everyone. I just wasn't in a position to basically teach them a few years of high school math from zero foundation.

And you'll see the same pattern in pretty much any of the books written over the years about the challenges the author faced in the first year of their MBA program.

Middle and high school is for everybody and college/University is for the smart 50% (or whatever).

It's natural that you cover more in less time in college/university because students that go there are already smarter than most.

If you try to apply the same standards to high school, you will push the dropout rate into 60 or more.

You don't have to lower the bar. There are other options. There is no fundamental law of physics that says a generation has to graduate at age X, so we -- the society -- should be perfectly able to delay that process for a year, instead of lowering the bar.

That said, there's something deeply wrong either with the society as a whole or with the HN audience if you read "poor kids roam the street like packs of feral dogs asking for money for food" and you say that the biggest long term problem is the lowering of the bar because kids skipped school.

Not every kid is willing and able to live with their current parent or guardian after they are legally able to either move out on their own or be evicted.

It's not a law of physics, but there are a lot of pitiable kids out there who have never even caught a whiff of good fortune in their lives, and the US lacks the social sensitivity to make them feel secure enough to add another year of high school to their pile of problems.

Yes, that's why there are "poor kids roaming the street like packs of feral dogs" in the first place, in one of the wealthiest countries in the world. That's the big problem.

So let's not pretend that lowering the bar is what's going to make those kids catch a whiff of good fortune. The US system grinds people like that into dirt and that won't change with a single decision, be that decision to add a school year or to lower the bar.

A sufficient proportion of the US is willing to let those kids fall by the wayside, rather than do whatever can be done to boost them over this hurdle. It won't be adding another school year, and it won't be lowering the bar. It might be by providing housing, food, and petty spending allowance for over-18 kids still attempting to finish their high-school diploma.

Sorry, I misinterpreted your reply. My comment was a reply to a comment about lowering the bar and I thought you were arguing that same point.

>I'm just saying that those kids are as screwed now as they have ever been, and that this particular misfortune will not play in their favor in the future, as employers, government, and nongovernment institutions will be just as unsympathetic then as they are now.

I completely agree with that assessment.

- I was in 4th grade where school was less rigorous

- I went to a private international school

- While my parents were busy working, I still had a stable home environment to count on

Contrast that to the public high school system in the US, where resources are lacking, and students may not even have the tools at home to follow through with remote learning, let alone hope to go to college, which is still 5 figures a year minimum.

Speaking from personal experience, if you did decently well academically in high school, you can get upwards of 16K a year in grants alone (Pell Grant ~6K, State Grant ~5K, University Grant ~5K) if your situation is documented poor based on your parent's and your tax returns.

My state school (UT Austin) charges tuition of about $5.5k/semester if you take >= 12 hours of classes a semester.

Of course, I realize this advice only applies to those who are demonstrably poor and perform decently academically. But college is (better than) free if you fall in this category.

If I think back to my grade school experience, I was admittedly a pretty good student but I can't really imagine any single semester being all that critical. (And, in fact, I ended up skipping 8th grade.)

But kids in poor home situations who were already barely scraping by--if that--will basically lose the year and everything that implies. In some areas, double-digit percentages of students have basically gone incommunicado from their schools.

If any school district cares, all the kids will essentially end up repeating a grade. This is not the end of the world. If anything, it might improve student achievement. (Students who are born right after the cutoff for a particular elementary school class, in aggregate, outperform the ones born just before, the youngest in the class.)

Outside of college-bound seniors — a special case — the main price is their time, same as anyone else, and their caregivers' time.

2) the count of districts ready to have a 7.7% student headcount increase in one year (you're doing this for 13 grades at once, plus have another coming in) on top of whatever growth they already expected approaches zero. I mean, hell, think of what that would do to the teacher labor market alone if even 10% of districts all did that, putting aside things like building space and bussing.

It sounds more like you haven't thought this through.

voted +1 touché

I don't know if they'll be roaming the streets (the police in America are pretty unforgiving), but I can certainly say they will have it worse than ~2001 and ~2008 graduates.

I'm a summer child so my first year of school consisted of a two week introduction and then the summer holiday.

My best friend at school and all of the higher performing kids (except me) were born in the first half of the year so had an extra 6 months of schooling.

It may be different nowadays; it would make way more sense to have everyone start in September. I live in The Netherlands and here kids start as soon as they turn 4. They then spend two-three years in the young kids class depending on maturity.

If only there was a way we could give them access to the entirety of the world's knowledge, a million lifetimes of recorded video, and the world's best teachers for near zero incremental cost, right in their homes. If only.

We're gonna flub this one because "Netflix and chill" is the best this tech generation can muster in the face of the worst crisis in recent history.

Squandered.

I weep almost every day because our entire communications infrastructure and online experience has been tailored for our own. goddamn. greed.

Yes I'm sure many did not plan on having a snap year. Though it does seem to be the case. Looked cool in the movies, real life - not so much.

Let alone the whole financial impact upon university students whose lifelong debts they build up in education fees, will also entail the everyday costs of living as well. Most of which work summer to pay for that and now, had a real kick upon that. Now that whole aspect hasn't even been touched up and does seem to be one that needs addressing. Heck, i'm sure some parents will be impacted equally. After all if a child is effectively held back a year, then equally government support should for that child equally be extended a year beyond the normal age cut-off's.

Though I'm 50+ and no children, I'm mindful that the impact has much minutia.

May I ask you a question though - when you do get back to school after this `snap`, will your drive for learning and making the most of the class's be more, or the same as it was without this pause? I ask as I suspect many student will be more focused and keener to learn after this break as for many if you deny somebody something or remove it - they tend to appreciate what they are missing more - something we all do in many respects.

It's not. The amount of learning that happens in a typical school year is not very high. The world can skip an entire year of school, and the educational cost it will pay will not be very high.

The cost of missing a year of childcare, that school provides, on the other hand, is pretty massive.

Of course this is all "crazed cinema depicting crazed societal horror", but are we truly expecting a return to such times and activities?

We could come out of this with a generation of kids that have learned better how to play and how to let boredom cultivate creativity. Depends a lot on the home situation though.

Left behind who, exactly? Everyone is out of school.

ADDED: What I suspect happens is that most schools bend over backwards to pass everyone they feel they possibly can and adjust lesson plans when schools come back to recognize that many students didn't really learn much the previous semester.

Which subject can they study at school that they cannot study at home?

Some have parents ill equipped to assist them with school work those parents never completed themselves. (Hell, I went to college, and my kids' math work is a challenge.)

Some have no access to internet.

I saw an article the other day (I'm unfortunately having trouble Googling it up) that said some school districts have 15-20% students they still haven't managed to connect to teachers yet.

In the US we have a school system where the children are off from school for about ten weeks in the summer. Educators have tested the children at the beginning of the school year and at the end of the school year to study the effect of this.

Students with decent to above average socioeconomic factors tested at about the same level from the end of the year to the beginning of the next.

Students with poor socioeconomic factors tested measurably worse at the beginning of the next school year compared to the end of the previous year.

They also looked at the delta from the beginning of the school year to the end of the school year. There was no significant difference in outcomes when socioeconomic status was taken into account.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/000312240707200...

Given how competitive our society has become I am terrified that we will get behind.