Do you have kids? You’re going straight to planets huh.

No but I think I can still think like one and I can remember what would have gotten my interest back then before dropping because video games were so much more interesting.

Before I realized this world is just as interesting, but school does everything to make you bored of it before you can explore it.

Even in the most interesting fields, 95% of everything is boring work. That even goes for the individual tasks. Found a good physics problem? Well, you might be excited about it but 95% of solving it is going to be thinking about assumptions and doing rote mathematical manipulations. You are likely to get sick of it before even getting to any answer, much less the right one. There are also many important/useful fields that are not very interesting.

In a sense, the most important thing school does is to build up within students a tolerance of boredom and an appreciation of the fact that most work is potentially boring.

> Even in the most interesting fields, 95% of everything is boring work.

You can plow through boring work if the end goal is exciting. For example, when developing a game that you yourself want to play :)

Most people are not like that. Even playing video games will be boring, if it's your JOB. Much more so if you need to do hundreds of hours of cerebral work to get to the point where you can have a little fun lol...

> Most people are not like that.

Not that most people like games, but everyone has their own goal, even if they haven't discovered them yet, even if it's just to chill in a nice place and do nothing all day, they can still find better ways to be lazy! (build better furniture, explore the search for the ideal climate etc.)

What is with all this defeatist give-up-by-default attitude? There's NO fucking way that the current common system of human education, which has been pretty much the same for hundreds of years, is perfect.

I'm just being real. If admitting that life is a hell of a lot of work makes me defeatist, so be it. The current system of human education is "only" several hundred years old, but that is long enough to see what works and what doesn't for the most part. What sure as hell doesn't work to reach success and provide for society is to loaf around aimlessly as if we don't know what skills are useful for modern life.

“This is what the world is like” is a full education in itself.

Again, it doesn't have to be an info dump, like how education is now and has forever been, just reciting rote explanations to questions nobody (at that age) asks.

Just enough to get you hooked into the "game" you've just spawned into.

does this ever work in tutorials in games? People skip the explanations and then complain later that they're confused or didn't know x and y feature existed.

We already have people say they wish they'd learned how to do their taxes or balance budgets - imagine what 12 year olds might think is uninteresting that comes up later, right?

In the last 20 years or so, how much of the knowledge that we know and use in life is from what we learned in school (and remember) versus looking it up on the internet or asking someone only during the moment we need that knowledge?

"You are a human."

"Here's the refrigerator."

"Here's a cell phone."

Of course, actually yes: Expose new humans to the latest technology right away, WHILE it's still awe-inspiring to them, before it become as routine as breathing, and explain how it's made, how we got there, and how life was before then.

That'd be a much better way of teaching multiple subjects that are boring and irrelevant on their own.

You're not supposed to have phones or computers in class but you're supposed to somehow be interested in the math and other sciences that make those things possible?

You go home and your life there is much more entertaining than in school, but you have no idea how what you're being taught in school ties into the things at home.

I don't think a way of teaching has been found, that doesn't require a willingness to be at least moderately bored, and that isn't to some extent disconnected from everyday life.

Even using computers in class, which I endorse, involves acceptance that many of the uses will seem boring.

Making everything as entertaining as commercial media is too much to ask.

One just needs an exciting goal to reach, something to look forward to.

For me for example, a lot of the work in developing the game is mundane boilerplate and looking up solutions to solved problems, but I can bear through it because I really want to play the game I'm trying to make.

Education should optimize for finding such "goals" for each individual person, instead of just finding a "use" for each person to be put to, as another poster put it.

Grammar and reading comprehension are important and can be enjoyable or at least unlock the enjoyment of understanding literature ...but I seriously doubt a 10 year old is going to think to take a class in it on their own.

>and then let people be free from 10-20 to figure out their own goals instead of just funneling them into the endless capitalist churn.

This "capitalist churn" is how we get things done for society. While some exploration makes sense, the vast majority of people are not gifted in the arts or endowed with genius. They must be prepared for life with basic skills that can be put to good use. Even under communist "utopian" regimes, children are forced to do basically the same stuff they do under capitalist regimes, because people and their needs are the same under both.

> They must be prepared for life with basic skills that can be put to good use.

There are 8 billion people. Not every single one can be ""put to good use""

We have enough technology now to let people slow down and fucking chill a bit.

The point is, you have to try to encourage people to be better, and if you're lucky they will at least turn out ok. The default human condition is to be lazy and unambitious. Nobody is actually hurt by a bit of discipline in their formative years.

"You are a human."

"You are on this planet."

"This is what this world is like."

"This is what humans have made so far."

"This is what's out there."

That's basically what school is. Many of these topics can't be explained in reasonable detail and complexity until after 10 years old.