So some self proclaimed smart person “learned nothing”, and therefore school is a waste of time. At the same time, ignoring that maybe a school or system is indeed not prepared to handle some individuals (which is not good), or that maybe some teachers are bad, or maybe the system does not support their staff enough. But that can’t be the case because they learned nothing. Whole school system must be a scam.
I am sure you want to blame me for this, but somehow I went to university and got a degree in (applied) mathematics. So I doubt it was some fundamental problem with me.
Everybody is upset when someone tells them they fail at their jobs and teachers are an entire industry of total failure. In a single semester of university I learned so much more than in 12 years of school. If teachers aren't at fault, who is? By any metric I was a successful student.
I know a high school teacher with a PhD and has tutored and lectured at the university level. But they are a teacher now. Guess I’ll paint them with the same brush as all teachers.
Where did I say that the intentions were bad?
>Because you had a bad time, then the whole system is malicious right?
No. In university the expectations were drastically higher. If the goal of the school was to prepare me for university, then it failed at that for everyone. The mismatch can not be attributed to me.
>But they are a teacher now. Guess I’ll paint them with the same brush as all teachers.
We had one of these as well. Average teacher, learned basically nothing in her class.
Well duh. I don't know where/what you studied, but I did physics and yeah, it was balls-fucking hard some times. I think the vast majority of freshman physics/maths/engineering students experience a similar feeling where there's a huge jump in challenge going from school-level to uni-level.
Whether this means there is a case for narrower, more focused "elite" schools in maths, or in say music, for high-performing students in those areas, is of course an interesting discussion :)
If the goal of the school was to prepare me for university
Well it's not. You studied a narrow subject at university, but during the ~12 years of schooling you studied many other subjects. The goal of schooling is to make you a complete citizen (in an ideal sense, I'm talking :)). Not sure how the system is where you live but where I come from the first 9 years have a fixed curriculum, and it's only during the last 3 years (high school) that you pick subjects in the areas relevant to your university aspirations (or you pick a vocational course).
Some teachers start with high spirits but most turn into regular slobs trying to get to the end of the month once they realise that their job is to mind the children while the parents work.
I was lucky enough to meet just a handful of teachers that tought me some values, the rest were just ... forgetable people.
In any normal (private sector) job, if you can't perform the basic job requirements you get fired or retrained. Maybe you're moved to a different area that better suits your skill set. But you don't just sit in a position for 20 years screwing it up day after day as you see in government / lower education.
I really, truly don't know how people form this opinion. Teachers are trained professionals with certifications and a degree. They know what they're doing. It's extremely likely they're far more educated in the subject matter they teach than you are.
Now, they're not miracle workers. Some parents expect little Timmy reading at a second grade level in Middle School to magically get great scores on his end of year exams. It doesn't work that way.
And telling if time spent learning is wasted is actually quite hard - if you know something and everyone else knows something it often fades into the background and nobody notices. But it still makes a difference.
I agree that this is probably the most important thing for children to learn. My point is that sitting in a room for 8 hours does very little to accomplish that.
>And telling if time spent learning is wasted is actually quite hard - if you know something and everyone else knows something it often fades into the background and nobody notices. But it still makes a difference.
I had the direct comparison when I went to university. It became very clear that I was learning much more and faster.
To talk about schooling we first have to make clear what the goal is. Sure everybody needs to learn how to read, write and do basic arithmetic, but that is not a 12 year endeavor. Even including basic general knowledge is not a 12 year endeavor. And we should not be wasting children's time on things, just because we can't be bothered to have them do something actually meaningful.
Sure, but this should be expected. If you filtered out all children with low interest/performance/support in preschool and just threw them onto a playground, learning rate could also be much faster in school for the rest.
But if you want a solid baseline of reading/writing/math/general education for everyone in society, those twelve years are already barely enough.
I'm very confident that early discrimination/segregation ("gifted" and "idiot" tracks in school) is a net negative for society and encourages unethical outcomes on top.
Optional programs for faster/more targetted learning are much better and can be very positive IMO, but even there you need to be careful with how you set things up to avoid problems.
In Germany you have schools for students targeting university. I was in such a school. Every student there was there to get into university.
Yes, but if half the class was not smarter than you (by whatever standard), then that segregation was too low to really hit the spot anyway.
My personal experience was the completely opposite: I learned more useful knowledge in school than in university, despite wasting like a year of math on trigonometric sum formulas and similar nonsense; but the baseline for physics/electronics, programming and math was much more applicable and necessary than anything I learned in university (frequently overspecialized and barely useful).
Sure, I also learned a lot during university on my own, but mostly thanks to sufficient free time and personal interest; university itself did not contribute too much there, and this was somewhat similar during school already anyway (most specifically with programming).
To me, it sounds like you suffered from mediocre teachers in school and learn better on your own-- but neither is universal enough to draw system-wide conclusions IMO.
I'm curious about this, can you elaborate more? My feeling is that in a class of 25 kids grouped by age being taught by 1 single teacher, it's basically impossible that the teaching pace and style is adequate for more than a handful of them. You're going to have kids bored out of their minds learning nothing and being unengaged, and you're going to have kids that can't keep up and would need extra support / a different kind of support. You're not doing either of those any favours.
By doing "early segregation" you make this more difficult because that "common baseline" no longer exists; you'd expect to get significantly more people that struggle with language and basic math as a result (in exchange for better outcomes in your "gifted" track).
Furthermore, you are sorting people into social buckets in a way that is really bad for social cohesion (inevitable, all the white kids with rich parents are gonna end up in the "gifted" schools). Everyone is gonna grow up in a echochamber, basically.
Finally, this is going to lead to restrictions on a young adults options, that I find really unpalatable to blame on the affected children: Can you honestly argue that people don't deserve the chance to study medicine at university just because their parents did not tutor, push and mentor them sufficiently? Equality of opportunity as a principle is gonna be nigh impossible to preserve in such a system.
I do not dispute that you could teach children faster and better with individual tutoring and customized programs, but that would be cost-prohibitive, and I see currently no realistic way to get there without above consequences.
Maybe AI will solve it :P
The mechanism AI would use to solve the problem is to give everyone individualized education, which would effectively be maximal segregation.
For socialization, another commenter here wrote a few months back about their experience at a school where they had more academic classes segregated by ability and more social classes segregated by age[0], which sounds to me like an excellent solution.
Your outcomes as child are also likely to plummet if you ever get sorted into the wrong bucket, which I feel is super unethical.
Personally I also really question the whole concept of pushing a grade schoolers "performance": What do you hope to gain from it? Looking e.g. at asian english tests I can see a likely worst-case outcome: Genuinely difficult and stressful tests (that even native speakers would struggle with) that just test some meaningless grammatical minutiae.
I fully agree that having optional programs and learning opportunities for talented/interested children is a very good thing, but I don't think dismantling the current system would really help at providing those (and they are always gonna be an additional cost, just like more segregation would be in practice). I also think that attempting to railroad children into (or out of!) those options is not desirable at all.
If you get sorted into the wrong bucket, it shouldn't be a huge deal. e.g. my elementary school had I think ~5 classes per grade level, so you have bands for 20%iles. Teachers can target the center of their %ile band for pacing. With a desegregated model, teachers end up targeting somewhere below the median student for everyone, so people in the top 50%ile and bottom 20%ile are all poorly served. You don't have to necessarily stay in your band either; if you do well, move up. If you do poorly, move down. If you're primarily segregating by ability, not age, then you might need to e.g. move into a younger cohort's top performing band to get onto the right pacing, but you don't need to lose much time. This is in contrast to today's system where if you're not close to the median, probably half your time in school is wasted.
In larger schools, you could potentially group kids into 15-10%ile bands. The tighter the bands, the less of an issue if they end up in the wrong band (assuming they're not completely misjudged). Personalized education is again the limit of this approach. The closer you get to that, the better kids will do.
As far as curriculum goes, I don't see why you couldn't have a baseline. The faster kids would just get through it faster, and maybe move onto more optional topics. The slower kids would progress more slowly, hopefully with a slightly higher end target than we set for them today.
Hopefully the thing high performing kids gain is to maintain their interest in academics instead of having it beaten out of them by moving at what is for them a snails pace. Testing them on larger volumes of meaningless minutiae is exactly the opposite of the goal. e.g. don't give them extremely tricky arithmetic/algebra problems; teach them calculus, linear algebra, mechanics, chemistry, etc. Teach the grown-up topics, but let them learn it when they're ready instead of holding them back several years.
What can I say; I like arguing. We don't actually have to choose a single goal - everyone can have different goals. If schooling isn't compulsory then you could have a mass of different people doing different things for different reasons and it all gets called 'schooling'.
If schooling is state managed ... the same interest groups exist, they just have to fight over the curriculum in parliament or the Department of Schooling. The end result will be a weird hodge-podge of compromises that nobody can confidently say satisfies them completely and doesn't have a clear goal.
It happens that we cannot say that there is a goal of schooling. Some people may have one goal, but other people may have alternative goals. There are some really tricky edge cases, like History - should Mongolian schoolchildren be taught that Ghengis Khan was a hero, a scumbag, a disaster, a triumph, a fact, a national symbol or someone best forgotten? That is not a question where a reliable and enduring consensus can be reached because real life is too complicated to take a final universal stand on something that happened 1,000 years ago.
I completely agree. If I wanted anything from current schooling it would be giving students more abilities to develop themselves. Obviously that doesn't mean a 16 year old playing videogames for 12 hours a day, but students who like doing sports should be doing much more of it and those who like learning should be doing much more of that and so on.
Kids learning how to develop themselves is a good thing ONLY if they choose the "right thing" to develop. You can get really good at video games, but as you already said probably not a good only investment (a fine hobby, but keep it a limited time hobby). There are some sports that because of injuries should really be banned (but I won't list them because as soon as I do there will be a lot screaming from people who live that sport). What we need is kids who develop themselves into something that makes them good productive adults - for some jobs we need adults to do this is boring and so kids won't do it unless forced.
The goal is wide and open ended, but there is a goal. Likely others can word it better than me, but it goes something like this: "to produce kids that grow up to be productive adults that contribute to society and make the world a better place."
We all are not the same, and even if we were there are many different needs. I need someone to haul my trash to the wherever it is handled, but my city only needs a few hundred such people (thousand?). A few other people need to ensure I have clean water. A lot of people need to ensure I have food. Some of them need to provide medical care. Thus we need to have multiple different outcomes (if you are just hauling trash you need less education than the medical doctors, while the person designing the dump needs more education than a basic nurse).
Because of the different needs in society there will and must be debate over what the curriculum should be. There is no way to teach everything. Time spend teaching one subject is time that cannot be used for a different one. There are many different ideas how to teach, and we need better science to figure out what really works.
Also, the sometimes dramatic gulf between private and public school academic rigor means that some private school students are essentially receiving an early college level education during their tween/teen years. This isn't necessarily bad, but it absolutely is more time consuming for most kids who aim for straight As and high test scores, and this in turn impacts their ability to pursue extracurricular activities with seriousness, and without impacting their health/wellbeing. The fact that many public school students are learning slowly means those same students can work outside of school, can pursue sports/arts/etc interests almost full-time, can be caretakers for family members in need, and have flexibility in their social lives.
Yes, it's unfair to paint with a broad brush but this is largely true if we're looking at the high achieving population (say, kids who might be expected to apply to Ivy League universities). No matter how suboptimal the pace of academic instruction is at public schools, it's important to recognize that kids are still developing into adults and it's not normal or fair to treat them as adults (from a brain development, psychological and relationship management POV).
In a single semester of university I learned more than in 12 years of school.
It takes people twelve years to learn to read and write at a 12th grade level.
You could study it for another 4 or more years at university if you wanted to develop your skills further.
> What made me good at reading was reading books outside of school.
This is your personal experience. I learned to read and write quite well at school and was well-prepared for university.
I understand Spanish only goes up to a 5th grade level while Japanese to 9th. This is a reflection on how complex the writing systems are, and not the kids, intelligence, or school systems.
The years after you have your basic reading down are used to learn other skills that are of general use in life for everyone.
I am saying that language arts can be, and often are, taught beyond basic proficiency.
Nah. You are mixing up the skill 'writing glyphs on a piece of paper and retrieving that information via optical means' with 'being well-grounded in a wide array of subjects so you can express an idea in a way that is mentally stimulating to a potential reader'.
Neither takes 12 years to learn. The first, we teach within a year, at most. The second we do not teach at all, and the best 'writers' often are those who were challenged outside of school, by parents who gave them a rich, intellectually interesting environment, not within it.
Just because you, and other's, did not pay attention or were not good writers, does not mean we don't teach that. We do, for years.
The uni taught you more real-world expected skills but I‘m certain you learned more before uni.
Was that not offered at your school? It was at mine.
University level courses do presume you have some basic skills. But in many places, schools do offer university level courses for those who are prepared.
I think it would have been theoretically possible, but obviously logistically difficult as I would have had to skip multiple classes in other fields to attend.
It's also not like I was particularly interested in mathematics at that point in my life. I essentially chose my field of study based on what I had the best grades in. Only during my studies, when the material actually became difficult, I started to be interested and engaged in the subject.
> Only during my studies, when the material actually became difficult, I started to be interested and engaged in the subject.
Many schools solve this by having different difficulty-levels of courses. My school, in the US, had three.
I learned more in a single year on the job than I did in 3 years of university. That doesn’t make university useless
You keep saying this but I have a hard time believing this is true; in fact I'm not even sure what "more" means (objectively) in this context.
Let's see, in the 12 years of schooling you've learned at the very least: how to read and write, how to interpret texts, how to read literature, how to compose an essay, how to speak, read, and write a second language, a ton of mathematics from basic arithmetic to I guess something like calculus and trigonometry and algebra and some discrete maths, several topics of physics and chemistry, biology, geology, and other natural sciences (in more or less detail), several years of history, and mandatory physical exercise to top it off. What magical university did you go to that in a single semester you learned more than that :D Unless I'm missing something.
In university I actually had to study, take notes, research the subject, study for many hours, etc.
>a ton of mathematics from basic arithmetic to I guess something like calculus and trigonometry and algebra and some discrete maths
Hilarious to say this. As it turned out, my first semester of university mathematics was spent on learning everything I did not learn in school. And it made it extremely clear to me how badly school had prepared me.
You would think that school would put me in a position where university mathematics were just a continuation. Nothing further could be from the truth, nearly everything taught in school was taught in a way which made it useless for actual mathematics.
In school we learned nothing about: Sets, logic, deductions, Axioms or Proofs (which turn out to be really important!), we did however spend years solving integrals, which turned out extremely unhelpful for actual mathematics.
Do you honestly believe that is you were sent to University (or some other educational institution) with absolutely zero school knowledge, not even literacy and grade school math, you would be able to learn everything you learned at school in less than one semester?
Really unnecessary snark, I'm trying to understand your position (unless you're just doing justice to your username!).
Two things:
1. You're not the only person in school. I sympathise that you understood the material quickly and wish you had been presented more advanced stuff (I do so too, it's a valid criticism!). But at least around me I noticed that most people were just barely catching it or even actively struggling. So yes, perhaps more "adept" students should be given more challenging material and students that struggle should be given more support so they're not left behind (interesting discussion to have; this has been touched on elsewhere in this thread), but it's important to realise that unless education is based around a 1:1 teacher–student ratio (unrealistic), this will always be a problem that is hard to work around.
2. You conveniently left out the parts where I mentioned subjects other than maths (I assume you studied maths in uni or an adjacent discipline). School is not just there to teach you whatever you end up needing in your academic or professional life when you're 18 years old. I'm glad I was forced to study history, and read literature, and learn a 2nd and 3rd language, and do physical exercise at least 2× a week, because while I might be curious and study science on my own I sure as shit wouldn't do any of these of my own volition as a kid.
Citation needed. I've heard it repeated a lot, but never by someone with actual historical credentials. It varied from society to society (and many societies were sexist so boys and girls would have different results). Likely most is correct, but also misleading as it appears many societies were very literate even among poor people.
From what I understand (recognize I'm not a historian!), Jewish boys have long had a right of passage of reading the bible in the local synagogue. Most languages are not that hard to learn the basic phonics of and thus read and write. You wouldn't be good, but you could do it.
Historians have told me that most of their references for is literate were from time/places where literate meant Latin. The common person know much Latin (despite going to mass in Latin), and couldn't read/write it. However they would have had more education in their local language which was never counted.
Not necessarily causative, but we'd want to be very sure the educational fence isn't contributory before we tear it down.
Not my experience.
>But yes, it is possible to slack through it all if you want to slack.
I was a good student though and did really well. I never learned for anything though and was bored in basically every subject.
There never were any expectations on me which I didn't trivially meet.
Overwhelming majority of people is not like that, they do not get highest grades, they do not get into gymnasium without effort, don't pass tests without effort.
- learned something -- aced the tests
- had the opportunity to learn something -- didn't ace the tests but somewhy you still claim that you were bored
Of course I did actually learn the material of the tests, but the actual learning outcome of my schooling is far worse then it could have been, given the 12 years invested.
No? I obviously had to put in a lot of work in university, but during school I never did, which was quite common, at least among my friends.
Even for the semi-standardized test at the end of school I tried learning, but I didn't know what to do, so I gave up.
Bavaria, Saxony, Baden-Württemberg? Preferrably Gymnasium? Preferrably a state school, not a city school? Hell, you have good chances!
Any other Land? Something on a lower tier? Nah, easy going. There are schools in Germany which are famous for breeding 16-year-olds who can barely read.
Disclaimer: Writer is German, Württemberger, visited a state gymnasium
Do you think that was because their methods were bad, you didn't bother and they couldn't force you, or that their methods were not adapted to the way you learn?
Also, I'd find it surprising if you really learned nothing. From what I know of German schooling from people who went through it, you certainly learned at least a bit about the depths to which humans can go to and how to prevent them (Holocaust and wider Nazi atrocities). Also, you probably learned social skills, basic project management and collaboration, and some knowledge which is probably useless other than maybe as a basis of understanding the world and various things you might encounter. I don't recall much from my biology or chemistry classes, but I recall vague outlines, which is enough.
It was because they had nothing to teach. I still remember trying to learn fractions from a teacher who clearly did not understand fractions either.
Just to be clear, I did very well in school. Given their standards I would be considered a "successful student" and I went on to get a university degree.
>Also, you probably learned social skills, basic project management and collaboration, and some knowledge which is probably useless other than maybe as a basis of understanding the world
None of that I learned while sitting in class. I learned it despite the school activities I had to do.
School is about more than the part where you sit in class. The social skills, time and project management navigation etc. is all stuff you learn and do because of school but outside of class.
See Germany-Palestine relations. One third of weapons used in the Gaza war are paid for by Germany, and the remaining two thirds by the USA. Other countries contribute negligibly.
Really doesn’t help you make a point.
It certainly did not appear to me that way, here in Germany. There was a lot of time spend sitting in a room and "learning", yet I basically learned nothing. For the other things you described I do not think they were ever considered.
All around school was a giant waste of time.