I despise the middle paths fallacy however well intentioned it might be.

Traditional education is just shit and evokes a poor response in most of everyone. And alternative methods are better, even for those who can tolerate the former.

In this case there isn't an equivocal middle ground. Anyone who attended public schooling can tell you that our K-12 education system is a dumpster fire.

"Anyone who attended public schooling can tell you that our K-12 education system is a dumpster fire."

My experience (public schools in Arlington, MA, class of 92) paints a different picture; I feel I received an excellent education. And though I put my teenage daughters in Montessori kindergarten (a fantastic experience that I believe continues to benefit them today), their public school education in Duxbury, MA has also been very good.

Same. I grew up in suburban-to-rural Pennsylvania, and I think my K-12 schooling was excellent, with the possible exception of year-12 calculus, where our teacher just didn't seem that knowledgeable. Consequently I had to re-take a year of college calculus, not a huge deal.

In my view, the worst thing about public education in the US is how inconsistent quality is from district to district. One public district can be excellent, well-funded, full of great teachers, while the district in the next county over is a dumpster fire. I've got a kid now so we played this game when deciding where to move. I could move to one street, which is in a great quality School District, or I can save $300K and move one block to the west, where gangs run the high school and your kid will not learn multiplication. This is a result on the US's obsession with micro-local control (and funding) of education.

This is so timely -- Arlington is on our short list of cities to move to within Boston and we've heard the exact same thing about the schools.

Cool. Feel free to DM me if you have questions about the Boston area. (Contact info's in my HN profile; I saw you're into dataviz and would be stoked to connect on twitter if you like.)

Followed you on Twitter, but can't seem to DM hmm!

Totally depends on where you are.

Eg from what I can tell, traditional German Kindergartens are just fine and most kids love them. (German schools are a different beast.)

In Germany there is a big after school business with homework help that parents have to pay. There are old disilusioned teachers that has quit school and started homework help instead, making more money and actually helping the kids.

Sweden is also getting worse, we have some weird idea that everyone should be in the normal classes, even the ones with different diagnoses. "Everyone should feel included". This leads to a lot of youth not able to get anything done in school and having to get help after school to keep up. Some of them get aggressive because of their ADHD and disturbs the rest of the class.

And the grading system has apparently completely broken down. Now the kids in 7'th grade gets judged towards the goals for 9'th grade. So someone that feels they are doing great in 7'th grade gets an E (F is worst) because they didn't get to learn what they are supposed to learn in 9'th grade. How are they supposed to know if they are doing well or not?

This is utter nonsense. Yes there are homework help businesses (and NGOs, council-run offers, etc) in Germany or Sweden but this is a fringe business and the vast majority of students never use it. If you have evidence for the contrary please provide it.

Its not like e.g. Korea where this is basically obligatory to use.

"Utter nonsens" is such a non-startar in conversations you know...

My "proof" is that everyone I know in Germany has been forced to change their kids school or use homework help or other way of paying for help in school because the parents either aren't educated enough to help by themselves or just don't have the time to help them due to working two jobs to keep up. This is ofcourse in a small area in Germany but it is one of the densest populated.

When walking in the streets I see homework business in the former shopping windows even in tiny towns. And they are visibly used by youth.

I also had a hard time believing this about Germany when I first started hearing about it 20 years ago but I have met so many parents that repeat the same thing and it hasn't changed a bit. No wonder Montessori and Waldorf schools are so popular there.

In Sweden the homework help is part of school. Our kids school has four different homework help after school that is run either by state/school or teacher students as a project. On top of that comes extra teachers for the kids with diagnoses. They always follow the student around to classes and help out where the teacher isn't enough.

> My "proof" is that everyone I know in Germany has been forced to change their kids school or use homework help or other way of paying for help in school because the parents either aren't educated enough to help by themselves

Welcome to the truth: the main determinant of a child’s education success is the socioeconomic background of their family.

> or just don't have the time to help them due to working two jobs to keep up.

This is a real problem in the English speaking world, where rents are higher than the average salary and where a kindergarten cost 2000£ per month. In Germany, where you can live pretty much everywhere on minimum wage, this is much much less prevalent.

> "Utter nonsens" is such a non-startar in conversations you know...

> My "proof" is that everyone I know in Germany [...]

See, the problem is that other people seem to have different anecdotal experience. So that's why in an online discussion it can make sense to appeal to published statistics and other articles.

> In Germany there is a big after school business with homework help that parents have to pay. There are old disilusioned teachers that has quit school and started homework help instead, making more money and actually helping the kids.

I find this rather hard to believe. A German teacher makes way more money teaching in a school than whatever they could make with a homework help business. An entry-level high school teacher earns between 40K and 60K, depending on the region.

Netherland actually has a very diverse educational system. With common standards, obviously, but there's a lot of freedom to found schools based on different educational, philosophical or religious ideas.

The reason for this "freedom of education" is that in the early 20th century, religious parties wanted to allow religious schools, whereas socialist and liberal parties wanted everybody to be allowed to vote. They compromised and enshrined both in the constitution.

The result of this is that anyone can start a school, as long as they meet a bunch of criteria and teach the correct curriculum. So public schools, protestant schools, Montessori schools, anthroposophic schools, and islamic schools all receive the same funding and have to teach the same curriculum, but they have freedom in how they teach it. If the quality of a school drops, they have to improve or get closed.

I think the system does a reasonable job of ensuring everybody can find a school where they can thrive. I'm sure there's room for improvement, but it seems to work well enough. In recent years, there seems to have been a lot of focus on making sure highly talented kids get sufficiently challenged; my oldest son went to a special 1 day a week school for talented kids, and half a day to a talent class in the school itself, and he skipped a grade, so all of that is possible. My youngest son struggles with language (originally speaking, now reading), and gets extra support for that.

There is an awful lot of testing, though. When I was a kid, there was just a single standardised test at the end of primary school (age 12). Now there's standardised testing in every year starting in the second year of kindergarten. I'm a bit baffled by the amount of testing, but I can only assume it helps them find kids that need some extra support or extra challenge.

It's more than just students. Testing also helps to control the effectiveness of each school's teaching method which is especially important in such a diverse system.

> In Germany there is a big after school business with homework help that parents have to pay.

I grew up in (Eastern) Germany, but left in 2009. As far as I can tell, cram schools like that are rather niche.

Compared to my adopted home of Singapore at least, where you see them on every corner.

Do keep in mind that the educational system in Germany is run by the individual states. And I have only seen Saxony-Anhalt directly on a day to day basis. Though I probably still had more exposure to the other states than someone from outside the country.

I didn't like German schooling that much. But I have no clue about the other complaints in your comment.

Living in Germany, I have the opposite observation: Good grades these days seem to be handed out (too) freely - the other day I again had a college-entry-level student who did not know essential stuff (in this case: no idea about basic history), even though he had an A- average (13/15 points) in his Abitur diploma.

This may be me getting old and starting to have strong, rose-tinted memories, but I am sure many who get good grades today would have been close to failing only twenty short years ago.

It might also depend largely on where you are in Germany. My contacts are mainly in NRW.

Since German schools are a federal thing, there is no sucj thing as a "German" school. Ezperience in Bavaria is vastly different from, say, Bremen. Just to pick two extremes.

Kindergardens are pretty relaxed so. I can recommend the church run ones in Bavaria, despite the name they don't care about religion beyond some stuff around christian holidays.

Language suggestion: "federal X" usually means "it belongs to the federal government". What you wanted to say it that it is subject to Bundesland ("state") control.

You are right about education being run by the individual states. However, when looked at from the outside there are still many similarities between Bavarian and Bremen.

Just like there are many similarities between shopping at German hard discounters (despite them being run by totally different companies) vs shopping at big box stores in the US (who are also run by totally different companies).

This is just not true. Even in the original story, the boy who cried every day was outlier. It was not story about most of the kids being super scared.

There is no "our K-12 education system" for any "our" comprising more than one school district. In states where the school district goes by county or county equivalent (Maryland, Virginia, and Colorado come to mind), a school district is likely to have three education systems: one for the poor, one from the less poor, one for the upper middle class.

The fact your K12 system is a dumpster fire, doesn't mean that there is a single way to educate all children which is the best for all and where all will thrive. The method needs to incorporate the differences between the children and that's hard to do in large groups.