> Kids should be taught practical life skills over random trivia.
This is parenting vs schooling, ignoring the fact that many schools are really glorifed babysitting services.
And more importantly, history isn't "random trivia". While the merits of a degree in history may be debatable, if the majority of the UK had a passable knowledge in why the EU exists, and what the UK did to become an empire, the attitude towards integration with the EU would likely be very different.
> PE in my school didn't teach any theory, which is just stupid looking back.
PE is the bare minimum amount of exercise and movement a child could have without being considered "entirely sedantry". For many kids it's the _only_ exercise they get.
The discipline isn't, but the way at least I've been taught it unfortunately is... It didn't take me until I graduated to take an interest in history, when I could learn the cause and effect chains without getting distracted by rote memorization.
If I'm being honest with myself, my answer is probably no. "If only they taught _" for me, can be boiled down to "If only I was 30 in grade school"
I wonder about this type of thing a lot when I think of my experience in school. a lot of the material they taught me in lower and middle school was just wrong. not like subtly wrong, but blatantly incorrect in a way that would be obvious to any undergrad major in that subject (which schoolteachers often are). I'm sure the teachers must have realized too. why spend so much time teaching stuff that needs to be unlearned as early as high school?
the best example I can think of right now is the answer to "why is the sky blue?". my lower school science teacher told us it was reflecting the ocean. I'm sure she realized this answer didn't make any sense, but that's what she taught us. I don't expect teachers to try to explain raleigh scattering to a group of third graders, but wouldn't it be better just not to explain it at all?
Who's Rayleigh?
I can understand teaching general rules upfront with the expectation that exceptions will be covered later (eg, teaching lower school students that water boils at 212F/100C is okay, they can learn about vapor pressure later). but why would you teach that columbus was the first european to discover north america? not only is it completely wrong, but it's not a practically useful fact, nor does it create a solid basis for deeper understanding.
Even if you select for ability along some axis, you still get different interests and learning styles - and personalities.
Learning is basically industrial, uselessly abstracted [1] and commodified, when it could be individualised. A lot of talent is wasted because high school stunts the really bright kids. And given how brutal it is, it seems to damage everyone emotionally.
[1] Virtually none of the math you learn at school really makes any sense unless you're one of the small number of people who go into STEM - which is where you finally discover what it's for. Things are a bit better than they used to be, but basic financial math as a specific competence is far more useful to most of the population than even the most basic algebra and trig.
For instance: How long was WWII? How long was Vietnam? When exactly did WWII start, before or after US involvement? Knowing those sorts of dates allows students to put today's wars into context. Has the US been in Iraq longer than WWII? Longer than Vietnam? They can memorize the dates and answer those questions themselves. That makes them informed citizens, and some of them eventual informed soldiers, better able to participate in very relevant current events.
You know what is completely useless? Telling the date each happened on their respective classes, and that this knowledge will be tested.
Memorizing dates is as dull as it can be, without having motivation from knowing the context. Dull things get crammed for tests and then forgotten, with near zero retention when those people grow up and actually want to use the context.
Even if dates were more important than causes, they stick less, reducing the utility of teaching them.
in a weird contrast, we spent tons of time on the civil war and slavery (and not just the sugar-coated version either). we learned about thomas jefferson and sally hemings, and we learned about andrew jackson and the trail of tears. so I don't think it was out of squeamishness that they declined to cover more recent history.
I get that schools (especially private schools) ultimately need to satisfy the parents, but it strikes me as a massive disservice that my peers and I were able to graduate high school without learning a single thing to contextualize the two defining current events of our childhood: 9/11 and the iraq war. the film charlie wilson's war was the best explanation I got until I was in college.
Although to be fair, history textbooks are often really terrible.
While this may exaggerate the case, it will continue to largely be true so long as we relegate huge portions of our population to 2-3 jobs while the VC system sustained in part by Ycombinator rewards capital formation to a degree that is damaging to society.
Usually when people say they are working 2-3 jobs I believe they mean they get a couple of shifts a week from a couple of different employers.
E.g. 16 hours a week at a coffee shop, 12 hours a week at a restaurant and 2 nights a week as a cleaner.
I understood the comment to be angry about some large injustice, I'm not sure whether they were meaning to essentially say "some people have to work for a living, it's outrageous". With (Western) Europe's extremely strong social systems, the number of people who are forced to work multiple jobs because they wouldn't be able to eat otherwise is minuscule, I believe.
As much as I agree with other points, I can only strongly disagree here. It strongly implies a condescending attitude that stupid and uneducated decided about British future. If only they could be brainwashed^H taught they would choose the “right” option.
If people at large understood what happened and why we have the institutions we currently have, they are shown to be far more likely to be in favour of them.
For serious analyses of the Brexit question by extremely well equipped academics (I rather think they 'understand') and others try https://briefingsforbritain.co.uk/
It's not condescending in the slightest, and debate around Brexit revealed that although theres's nothing wrong with being against european integration, a lot of people have almost no idea of what the EU does and does not do.
We (collectively) want all children to have a good foundation of life skills by the time they reach adulthood.
Unfortunately there is no curriculum for what a parent must teach their children.
Luckily, there is a standardized curriculum in the form of schooling.
Instead of assuming all children get good parents (which is obviously a harmful assumption), let’s just take advantage of the fact that we can pretty much guarantee all students will learn the school curriculum and use it to teach important life skills to children who otherwise wouldn’t learn.
Why not use that math class to teach personal finance, mortgage rates, basic economics, etc.
Why not couple English with a stronger focus on proper communication (especially negotiation, conflict resolution)
etc.
Teachers are given a document that says in X weeks you need to cover the following topics/units. Let's fix that document so that we can ensure everyone who graduates the public school system can confidently understand their credit card statement -- regardless of their parental upbringing.
> Let's fix that document so that we can ensure everyone who graduates the public school system can confidently understand their credit card statement
I'm pretty sure by age 14 my school math problems were along the lines of "John takes out a loan for $x, with a compounding interest rate of Y%, how much does he pay back in total?"
I agree that we could do better at teaching however!
I do not believe that having a specific curriculum is necessary to have a good foundation of life skills. In addition I would argue that the curriculum in schools is absolutely disappointing if this is the target.
> Instead of assuming all children get good parents (which is obviously a harmful assumption), let’s just take advantage of the fact that we can pretty much guarantee all students will learn the school curriculum and use it to teach important life skills to children who otherwise wouldn’t learn.
The issue here is that you are basically torturing these students that would end up learning (either due to their parents or to some other resource) regardless in order to improve the life of these that would not. I would understand your point however if school was not mandatory.
I completely agree that the physical activity is important, but then let's not pretend that it's educative when it isn't.
Due to all my previous negative experience, I chose to sort-of-quit PE altogether. It was impossible to actually quit, but you could compensate it with an equal amount of extra credit, so I happily replaced it with Arts credit.
Surprisingly, no one as much as batted an eyelid at that. The snobby attitude of "who needs PE anyway" was certainly prevalent in my age group.
Workspaces aren't educative, of themselves, but they're a pretty important facet of running a school.
It feels like PE was 2-3 years of gymnastics followed by 6-7 years of "let's just play basketball/volleyball/soccer" with a semester of swimming here-and-there. Certainly no instructions or structure to any of it.
As a fat kid, I was always the happiest when sitting out entirely (or swimming, where it turns out natural buoyancy is actually helpful).
Always getting Ds and Fs and being chosen last for any team activity led to me spend my college years on the couch.
Only through getting back pain and posture problems I found out 5 years later that I enjoy jogging and yoga and weightlifting and isometric exercise - if properly instructed.
It feels like I missed out on the years in between simply because PE at school never had the goal of helping kids be healthy - just keeping them busy in any way possible.
I think you need to face this fact to understand schooling in 2020.
And if quarantine changed anything, it is that I value school more then before. And I am not one of those people desperate to somehow making remote school and work function, thankfully we had no stressful deadlines during that time. But the kids still missed it and still learned better when in school then home alone.
It's better if school policy can be discussed admitting it has two main purposes.
The financial education and time management lines really resonated with me from the parent comment. The problem is that there is not anything resembling equal footing at home. Rich kids, realistically the top 5-10%, are going to get financial education at home and the others will have to learn in the school of hard knocks. I had to learn “tough” lessons about finance because the resources for what I needed to know didn’t exist at home. And I talk to people now who are older about how they prep their kids for the world, and it’s just a classic information imbalance. You could do a lot of good by leveling the playing field here.
Physical Education wasn't my favorite class, but never once did anyone talk about the theory behind developing athletic performance or recruiting the proper muscles for a movement or anything like that. It was just "go run" or "play a game of baseball".
But I agree that there is some lost potential in terms of building a strong knowledge base about fitness and well-being. The paper below suggests there are likely a lot of moderating factors in the benefits of PE.
https://sci-hub.tw/https://doi.org/10.1080/02671520701809817
Meanwhile they prevent my generation from building houses and rob our pensions.
Modern school systems are pretty much entirely this... only they aren't really glorified. To be fair, a society in which every adult is expected to be working needs some kind of daycare for kids, but there are probably better ways to go about it.
Which, that sentiment applies directly to history.
A study has shown that PE in schools have show it has zero benefits and only teaches some kinds to skip classes.
You'll need a slightly stronger argument to meaningfully shape this debate
As a child, and now as an adult, I've always thought homework was an insane proposition. If you had a job where you showed up in person for 7 (realistically more than 7) hours a day, but then assigned arbitrary multi-hour long projects afterhours, you'd quit, 1000%.
> In my opinion, 8AM is too early.
First bell for us was 7:18. Meaning the bus showed up at 6:30. Meaning wake up was 5:45.
Looking back, my four years of high school were probably the worst years of my life. I'm glad, at least for a brief minute, current high school students are getting some kind of reprieve.
I am 42. I had less than 9 weeks of cooking. Part of that 'cooking' was cooking once a week, a cookie contest that almost got me in trouble because I didn't cook while home sick, and how to set a table for a formal setting (i've never used this). The once-a-week cooking was in a group setting. I had "financial education" in social studies class - taught by a car salesman friend of the teacher. We got extra credit if our parents went to look at used cars. I was in 8th grade: 13 years old at the time.
I had health class, which mostly taught us the parts of the body and sex ed over and over again. PE class at one point consisted of ping-pong for 6 weeks: I didn't learn anything that I could actually use in life - how to be do cardio, stretching, weight training, nope. Nothing like that.
Not once was I ever introduced to any sort of child development classes. You see, I took AP classes and had a full college prep schedule, so they didn't think these classes were important. Some others were so much better prepared than I was.
That seems super shady. Did anyone end up filing a complaint with the school board?
There are most likely illegal policies and activities taking place at every public school in the U.S., and it's not taken seriously because children cannot vote and many parents think the schools ought to be going hard on their kids anyways.
Although in retrospect it was perhaps a bit ridiculous that my cooking class allowed only a microwave, while I worked an open forge in metalworking.
Random trivia should not be taught, but cleaning and fixing? Next you'll want to teach morals.
We always have in many ways, but I catch your drift. I take issue with schools that teach kids what to think instead of how to think.
I don’t know if it is pandemic but I’ve seen some people complain about some very controversial curriculum creeping into schools. A person I saw on Twitter recently posted some curriculum their 1st grader was being taught which tells a story through the lens of critical race theory. In essence telling the children that the white kids are racist and need to work to be anti-racist.
It was shocking to me because it is applying controversial “Theory” that is very much opposed to liberal science ideals of falsifiability and injecting identity politics into minds that can’t even begin to understand the postmodern philosophy these ideas grew from.
That's like saying you're a great natural basketball player and practice should be abolished.
It's not even about teachers being good or bad. It's about something called "illusion of competence". Basically, everything seems easy while teacher is explaining it on whiteboard, but when facing similar task on your own, outside of the classroom you are completely lost, don't know where to start. Homework helps dispell that illusion.
An excellent cowpath right? "The teachers are bad, so rather than fixing the teachers we make the students teach themselves afterhours."
Practical skills: History is useful, yes, especially for governance and historical equity. If Americans didn't know history well, more Southerners could get away with the false states rights narrative for the Civil War. But, on the whole, I agree we overly focus on literature and ancient history relative to modern skills, IMO.
Professors teach, are they in that position because of some ineptitude? Of course not, the opposite.
Should the school system be designed for ideals that don't hold true, or for the real world?
Students' parents, guardians, extended cohabiting family, etc. have an impossibly diverse range of skills (and ability to communicate, etc.). Even if these people were available at all times, they remain a hugely variable source. If we're saying that practical life skills are important, we should aim to provide a consistent experience to avoid inequality in society.
I'm sure everyone has stories about how the people who raised them taught them a few things well and were terrible examples of others. Some of these will be funny, but others can have life changing consequences.
Eh, no; they're probably more available on average these days. Average working hours are down quite a lot in most developed countries, and far more people have regular scheduled employment (vs working on a farm or similar, which could frequently be every waking hour for most of the year). But the assumption that most parents either know these things or are good at teaching them is... optimistic, to say the least.
Sometimes YouTube (or online courses) can help: https://www.youtube.com/c/DadhowdoI/
But sorting good information from bad is a skill on its own. People come up with all kinds of heuristics with varying efficacy.
I was cooking some of my own meals from when I was 14 or so - Ok this was only simple stuff
A big problem with school for me was that very little of it was framed in a way that made it seem useful. In subjects where I either understood the value (math for example, as I learned to program in my teens, so saw value in it to do things I wanted. While many of my peers followed the “it’s only useful if you want to be a math teacher” philosophy) or had some kind of extra interest in, I did well in, but even in subjects I chose to do, liked and was good at (eg German), I struggled trying to find the motivation to do any homework. Being forced to didn’t help, I would rather stare into space for an hour than actually spend the time on homework.
A big part of it, I think, was I needed downtime. I had already spend many hours in school and now was being told I needed to spend my time doing more school stuff? No thanks!
Even now, a couple of decades later, I need downtime to process the things that happened during the day. I’m a huge believer in Hammock Driven Development because of how important I feel thinking, reflection and downtime is.
EDIT: hell, I did really bad on one subject I used to be great at because of the homework: the homework load was too high so I dropped to the lower level class instead, which was the start of my downward spiral: it was too easy so I didn’t do much in it, the teacher didn’t push me and a few years later I struggled and never recovered. If the homework load were less, I would have stayed in the higher level class and, while I’m not certain, I’m pretty sure I could have at least maintained my ability instead of it deteriorating. I still believe I would have done better in my final exam at age 13 than I did at age 17 because of this.
In the school during lesson, there is less privace as people look at you struggling and plus there is always someone to instantly nudge you.
I strongly believe that tests are an underutilized way to teach. Many seems to believe that you can't learn anything during tests, that they are only there to evaluate kids. However actually sitting and thinking about stuff is really important and tests helps with that.
Tests are not place for individual problem solving nor for figuring stuff out, they are for when you already learned that stuff and is proving to others that you did.
It all boils down to not wanting to put any effort in the end.
Would you also say that programmers writing code on computers instead of pen & paper just "don't want to put any effort in"?
An entire essay on the subject: https://www.alfiekohn.org/article/getting-hit-head-lessons/
I do agree that's a useful life skill, but that is really scraping the barrel for reasons why homework works.
The problem there is we can find examples where there is no homework and a functional, thriving society behind it [0]
The Montessori Method of Education, developed by Italian physician Maria Montessori, is a child-centered educational approach based on scientific observations of children. The method views the child as naturally eager for knowledge and capable of initiating learning in a supportive, thoughtfully prepared learning environment. It attempts to develop children physically, socially, emotionally and cognitively.[1]
To me school is mostly about teachers checking on students instead of them actually explaining things. Once I was on a summer school in the Netherlands during university and I remember one of the professors saying that during the first 2 semesters they need the students to unlearn destructive behaviours from school. E.g. admitting when they don't know something and to ask. I'm from Germany but to me it seems like a problem occurring in many countries.
Kids learn at different speeds so a good education system takes that into regard. Systems should be transient that slow starters can catch up at a later time and reach higher forms of education.
We need more teachers and smaller groups. Eating healthy can be a course, but you quickly loose all the pupils that already learned that from their parents.
Mental health is hard to teach and there is little certain knowledge here, it only works individually. Aside from really hard cases, I think children have quite resilient minds.
I believe the reluctance to do physical exercise has other sources, not really lacking education. But PE is vastly to be preferred to medicating "unusual" behavior.
Typical response By admin is to ignore the the Issue or minimize it.
I cannot honestly condemn teachers that disengage though. Classrooms get bigger, bullying happens digitally and out of reach, teachers and parents are critical of each other and pupils are the first to notice if they have free reign and know pretty well how to profit from such conflicts.
THIS !
Cooking, Nutrition, Medicine, Drugs & Vitamins, Finance, Basic electronics etc. Practical stuff needed every day.
The curriculum broadly is determined by the school board.
The school board tends to be made up of more "well off" people.
They will prioritize the types of classes that they took to get them where they are.
If you are on the school board, you are most likely not a house wife, not a mechanic, not a seamstress, etc.
So you get a prioritization on classes that lead you down the "four year degree, rise to management" type of life.
Schools mainly get funded through local property taxes. If you compare curriculum in towns that are generally middle and upper middle class with towns that have a larger lower middle class population you’ll probably see different curriculum. More AP classes, electives, life planning, etc.
The town I live in has pretty high taxes but it’s mainly to fund the local school system which ranks high. Just about everyone with kids uses the public school system because of this and it’s a big selling point to new residents home-shopping.
But we pay for it.
Also, not sure 15 year old me could have imagined something less interesting than finance lessons where I get to figure out how to manage all the money I don’t have.
We had health class for a few years at my school.
> Finance
We had some basic finance, but I would have liked more. We covered writing a check and balancing a checkbook. I'd have liked to see more about calculating compound interest, as well as a primer on how taxes work. I can see the tax lesson failing, though, if it was too long before I got an actual job.
> Basic electronics
This was covered in college, but not high school. I'm not sure this is very practical for most people, either. People need to know how to use computers, but not necessarily how to design a circuit board.
I did in the 1970's computer programming at my comprehensive and we started with adders, half adders and machine language programming BTW this was for the CSE stream (this not going to university)
Do you think this was an issue of not being aware of the offering, as opposed to it being difficult to get help for one's personal issues because of stigma or feeling like you can handle it if you just try a little harder?
I would also say that something needs to be done regarding bullying and teachers that are power-tripping.
How much does a year at an American University Cost ?
As for psychological help, maybe those who consulted them just didn't talk about it?
Absolutely agree on your last point though.
That's also probably only going to work for highschool aged kids. The reality is that they're probably capable of getting themselves to school if you have to leave early
Everything on your list except housework was part of my required curriculum in High School in 1990s California (and the housework stuff was offered as an elective called Home Economics). Now I wonder if it's still there.
School is for education and culture, that is those "random trivia".
Fixing things, cooking, and cleaning can be taught in a couple of classes (e.g. shop) or taught by their parents...
Oh and massive grade inflation
However, 08:00 local astronomical time does seem too early and most European time zones are ahead of local astronomical time, sometimes ridiculously so, making 08:00 even earlier. So I don't disagree.
That said, abolishing HW is great too. It’s become a crutch for bad teachers.
I used them, they were great for scoring high quality drugs. All I needed to do was memorize a list of symptoms, regurgitate them and get referred to a specialist and do the same again.
Which is why as an adult I find the whole area of psychiatry to be bunk. And that's supposedly the harder of the psychological sciences. If you can't deal with false positives you have no place in medicine.
If I came in to a doctors office and demanded they reattach my missing leg, while clearly having two legs I'd be met (rightly) with skepticism, somehow when it comes to the mind it doesn't work that way. Surely someone would have figured out a way to measure the missing serotonin by now?
The total failure of positivism in clinical psychology is what resulted in the current state of affairs, pushing for more of it won't bring about any imagined golden age of psychology, only further `the pandemic of mental anguish that afflicts our time' [0]. Positivism is a flawed doctrine and at this point should be considered nothing but dangerous dogma -- at least in the case of psychiatry.
[0]: I believe it was Mark Fisher that said something to this end but I digress.
By any objective standard - suicide rates, lost days of work, self harm, substance abuse, murder, etc. - we are worse off or no better today than in 1960 when we were supposedly emotionally stunted and oppressed. Every extra dollar spent on psychology/psychiatry since then has been a waste.
That's not even touching on the crisis of reproducibility that has made a mockery of the entire field and put it somewhere between catholic confessionals and recreational drug use in terms evidence based outcomes.
You brought very little in defense of positivism, so I'm at a lose as to what I can respond with there. What I will say is that, by relying on a macroscopic outcome and declaring that any increase must be caused by the psychiatric field, you ignore the very obvious fact, something positivism constantly struggles with, that the world has changed since the 60's. Is the rise of social media the fault of psychiatry? Is underemployment? How about Fortress Europe?
By most microscopic measurements, clinical psychology is a cure that does help the majority of patients. Both in the long-term and short-term.
That is where we disagree.
Clinical psychology makes people feel better about themselves in the short term, long term there is a distinct lack of evidence of positive outcomes. And a lot of unrepeatable experiments that show positive trends which disappear when looked at more closely.
They wake up that late because they're staying up late. They should be waking up when the sun tells them to, and go to sleep when their body tells them to, which doesn't happen because they're surrounded by light that messes up their circadian rhythm. This has a huge impact on things like anxiety.
Consequently, there can't be one time that is optimal. Why do we work the hours that we do, year round? It doesn't make sense biologically, it's an artifact of industrialization.
> “Research to date has shown that the circadian rhythms of adolescents are simply fundamentally different from those of adults and children,” said lead author Gideon Dunster, a UW doctoral student in biology.
> “All of the studies of adolescent sleep patterns in the United States are showing that the time at which teens generally fall asleep is biologically determined — but the time at which they wake up is socially determined,” said Dunster. “This has severe consequences for health and well-being, because disrupted circadian rhythms can adversely affect digestion, heart rate, body temperature, immune system function, attention span and mental health.”
Seen similar information from other sources, but this came up first after a quick search. Of course screen light probably makes the problem worse, but there do seem to be significant biological factors.
The one thing that disrupts the circadian rhythm dramatically is light. This is well-established and also mentioned in the article you linked.
Secondly, I probably don't disagree all that much on the (lack of) merits of the public school systems. Having said that, you can live a life within that system and not make it actively worse for yourself, no matter who is at fault. That's personal responsibility.
Regardless of our opinions, I think the goal of this entire thread is to discuss the shortcomings of the system and how we can make it better and not just blame the kids for not coping well with it?
The point is that no matter how injust "the system" is, no matter who is to blame for your predicament, there's always a way for you to make your situation worse still.
If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.
- Homework should be abolished
- School should start at a reasonable time. In my opinion, 8AM is too early. Kids that live far away have to wake up at 6AM, which is not a normal time judging by when kids wake up during summer break (9-10AM). 9AM would be acceptable. Not sure how much it would affect teachers' lives though.
- Kids should be made aware of the psychological help they can receive if they have personal issues. We had a psychologist at school, but I don't think anyone consulted them.
- Kids should be taught practical life skills over random trivia. Housework (fixing things, cleaning etc), finance, time management, how to actually learn/study effectively, mental health awareness, working out with correct technique and not ruining your body, how to eat healthily are all things that I value more than knowing the intricate details of how the European Union came to be (knowing history is useful and interesting, but I'd have rather spent that time on the aforementioned things). Of course, a lot of kids are going to complain many things in this list are boring, but they will value them once they grow older. PE in my school didn't teach any theory, which is just stupid looking back. Our body is with us for the rest of our lives, we should have the knowledge of how to take care of it.
Also, certain degree of freedom is something that everyone wants and values in their life. It would probably be expensive and hard, but if possible, I'd try to give kids a way to choose a small part of their study path.