Personal attacks will get you banned on HN, so please make your substantive points without that, or name-calling.

And please don't post in the flamewar style to HN generally. We're trying for something different here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I do not feel I called him a name. I called out his pedantry, which I felt was an accurate use of the word given the wording he chose (specifically the "by hood or by crook").

He edited his post and added a lot of words that made it seem a lot less pedantic after the fact.

The original post I received was pretty bare bones originally and gave me a completely different impression than what is written now.

But I definitely overreacted to what was written, even originally.

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"As bad as you make it sound, they are teaching kids stuff, even at less-than-wealthy school districts.

https://nces.ed.gov/datapoints/2019179.asp

By hood or by crook, or by underfunded inner-city/rural public school, we're teaching a hell of a lot of kids to read and write.

I attended elementary through middle-school at a district too poor to offer a high-school chemistry class, and still learned my times tables and how to write a paragraph."

Calling names can mean different things, of course. The sense in which we use the term just means using pejorative labels. The phrase "your pedantry" in "that's a lot of words to support your pedantry" combines a personal pronoun with a pejorative, which is bad.

Don't worry about it too much—we appreciate your good intentions. It's just best to review one's comments and edit out anything that might come across as a swipe. (That's what I do.) Remember that comments are 1000x more likely to sound that way to readers—especially the particular reader being addressed—than to the person posting the comment.

Fair enough dude. I'm sorry you feel short-changed by the public school system. I'm sorry you weren't able to see the point of my anecdote. I'm sorry this conversation has become so confrontational. I don't think it needed to go that way.

Best of luck.

Yeah that went south... but anyway, I think a better response is that you have no way of knowing if you succeeded because of public schooling, or in spite of it. And the same can be said of almost any human... we just don’t know how effective our current school system is compared to the vast diversity of alternative models that could exist. Sure, kids generally learn to read and perform arithmetic, but at what cost?

Absolutely, 100%.

I don't think our system is the best, most effective, or even, in many cases anything above the bare minimum. There are probably a lot of interesting alternatives out there, and I would love to see some sort of change because I absolutely despised high school.

But, the bare minimum is good enough to get kids prepped to continue within the public higher-education system, and they can more-or-less take it from there.

Even if you go to a terrible high-school, it is generally functional enough for you to enter a community college, no SAT required. From community college, you can transfer to a good state school. The mechanism exists to take kids from mediocre schools, get the ones who are interested up-to-speed in a less chaotic environment, and put them into a state university, without them being super-geniuses or 1,000% intrinsically motivated or something.

It's not perfect, but it's a government program that gets millions and millions of kids who'd rather be playing Fortnite or hanging out at the skate park to at least learn the bare minimum in a somewhat standardized way.

The socioeconomic limitations on kids trying to progress through that system is a different thing, and that's a hurdle that I don't know that we have functional systems in place to deal with.