[Kluny]

We can start moving toward an education system that works once we agree on some core values.

Someone else said that the goal of education is to produce factory workers. I disagree. I think the goal of education is to allow one teacher to effectively babysit up to 30 children at once. With both parents working, it simply isn't possible for them to give kids the attention they need to keep them healty and sane, let alone educate them on how to be part of society. Schools are supposed to do this instead, but the primary goal is training the children to be manageable at a ratio of 30 to 1.

Before we can do anything else, we have to acknowledge that the first goal is getting the kids out of their parents hair. This is the fundamental truth that everyone knows but refuses to acknowledge when they're debating policy. After that, we can make other decisions that make more sense. The lecture-hall format really only makes sense when the number of students is unmanageable for a single adult. If was only 10 kids per teacher, they would actually have time for more useful activities, applying knowledge, giving guidance to students who are ready to strike out on their own.

Tripling the number of teachers is going to cost some money, and application-type lessons costs more than lecture-type lessons. Some ways to deal with this - as a society, acknowledge that creating educated, well informed citizens is not a fuzzy, feel-good liberal goal, but a necessary factor for everyone's safety, including the permanently child-free. I think most people agree with that already, but since many people voting are full grown adults who still aren't properly educated, not everyone will come to the same conclusion, and therefore a massive infusion of public money for this idea isn't likely to happen. So I think a successful, disruptive idea will be one that gets around the cost problem of a much lower student-to-teacher ratio. I don't think remote teaching is going to be the answer here.

[DougN7]

I've rewritten my comment three times so far ...

My wife and I are fortunate enough that she can be a stay at home mom. I grew up the same way. Were middle class, though increasingly probably slightly mid to upper these days. We don't need the babysitter, and want our kids to be educated, so that is the focus. We help them with homework, etc. We're lucky.

So from my perspective, having both parents working is the root issue. It's an economic necessity for probably 80+% of the country, which I suppose is really the root issue.

Ultimately it all boils down to resources, time and money, and there is never enough to go around. I don't have an answer for that :(

[tsycho]

It's not just about money. Even if parents can afford to have one of them be stay at home, neither parent might want to be the one staying at home.

Being a stay at higher parent is an incredibly difficult, stressful and under appreciated job so to many well educated couples, it's not appealing at all.

[Kluny]

True that - not to mention tedious, mentally understimulating, and comes with a perceived lack of social status. Even for people who love it and can afford it, there are many downsides.

[jazzyk]

How about having one of the parents work part-time?

True, not all jobs can be offered as part-time, and working part-time limits your career growth if you work for a big corporation, but still, it is a viable option.

[TheGRS]

The nuclear family is not always going to be viable in every scenario though and we really can't control all of the economic factors that go into that effectively. But we can effectively control a lot of what happens in schools. Things like curriculum, money spent, facilities used, after school offerings, etc. Even if the incentive existed to be a stay-at-home parent, there will always be parents who would rather have dual incomes for a variety of reasons.

[eevilspock]

> having both parents working is the root issue... resources, time and money, and there is never enough to go around.

> a massive shift toward automation... in the next five years, 5 million jobs in 15 economies will be lost. (from YC post)

We don't have enough workers. We have too many workers. When will we realize that our current economic system is doing a lousy job of allocating human resources?

We can't get enough teachers, but we have tens of millions of people and hundreds of billions of dollars allocated toward things that add, to be generous, questionable value to the world.

[Kluny]

Yeah, that whole "5 million jobs in 15 economies will be lost"... it's such a weird thing to say, that a job will be lost. Some kinds of jobs have to continue forever. Other types of jobs are tasks that will eventually be complete and the workers will have to move on to the next thing.

There is TONS of work that needs to be done though. Teachers like you said, health care workers, psychologists to help us deal with the inevitable mental problems, mountain bike trail maintainers, pickers of plastic trash out of the ocean, people to design apis for distributing government transparency data, designers of infographics to help the rest of us make sense of that data, and on and on and on. There's so much to do, when you stop thinking of a "job" as something provided for you by the government or a company, and rather as value that you can contribute to the world. Another disruptive business is going to figure out how to make it possible to pay people for contributing that kind of value.

[sprafa]

If you account for all the money that's gone into Products that have no real human value, and add on top the fact that the companies making them avoid taxes like the devil, we begin to see the scale of the tragedy.

[Kluny]

I agree. And some men want to be stay at home dads, and sometimes both parents want to work, and sometimes there's a single parent who's falling apart trying to do everything. I wish we could agree that all those choices are valid, and allow some social safety nets that make it possible.

[3825]

> I agree. And some men want to be stay at home dads, and sometimes both parents want to work, and sometimes there's a single parent who's falling apart trying to do everything. I wish we could agree that all those choices are valid, and allow some social safety nets that make it possible.

I think it goes back to what you said first. We need to agree on some core values.

I don't want any more of my money going to people who mocked the MSNBC host[0] when she said "children belong to the collective". It seems pretty obvious to me. If we are all paying for your children, I better have a say in how we raise OUR children.

Clearly, a lot of people do not see it that way. Why should we have tax deductions for people to have children? Why should we have tax breaks for people to put money away for their children to go to college? I for one support an end to these tax breaks. Lets send a clear message: If your children are your own and do not belong to the society, then you can raise them by yourself. If you can't afford to do so, we'll simply put you in a debtor's prison.

[0] https://youtu.be/sjczwQOnMqg

[literallycancer]

>"children belong to the collective"

I grew up in post-communist Europe. In the past, we had state propaganda that told children to turn in their parents[1], among other wonderful products of that line of thinking. So I'd be very careful with ideas like this one. (I still support mandatory vaccinations and/or sane defaults.)

>Lets send a clear message: If your children are your own and do not belong to the society, then you can raise them by yourself. If you can't afford to do so, we'll simply put you in a debtor's prison.

This would undo a lot of progress that has been made on the human rights front in the past century.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavlik_Morozov

[matt4077]

I think the sentiment is better expressed by the greeks: "It takes a village to raise a child".

One possible model may be to enlarge the "nuclear family" to groups of friends. Get five couples who enjoy each other's company together, and everyone can work 80% (4 days) while two people are home each weekday for childcare/housework etc.

Many other models are possible and it would be best to make it as easy as possible to experiment. Relevant factors may be:

- a universal right to flexible work schedules, at least for larger companies (10+) where changes balance out

- Mixed-zoning housing allowing the creative use of space. Which also helps with:

- Neighbourhoods designed for street life, where you can actually meet neighbours and build these (real) social networks, and where children can explore. When I was 6 or so, I became friends with two families in my neighbourhood. One owned a bookshop which became my personal library. The other was a graphics designer and a racing car driver where I learnt computers and mechanics (and got to drive in a Formula 1 car). I was often invited for dinner at these families, or just hung out when they had guests, and I learned more from listening to adults debating the topics of the day than anywhere else.

[eanzenberg]

It's fine, let's send these people off to Venezuela to live happily ever after.

[conanbatt]

Babysitting a single child is economically very inefficient. Its something teenage girls can do while they watch tv. A full grown adult with skills is worth considerably more to society working than babysitting.

Its not an economic necessity that both parents work, the incentive to do it is extremely large and probably pure conservatism had been keeping it at bay, if at all.

[linkregister]

This perspective ignores the drastic difference in the quality between one caretaker and another. Among middle-class parents, the cost of an engaged preschool provider or nanny with a good teacher:child ratio that can match the quality of care of an invested parent meets or exceeds the median salary.

Especially for parents with multiple children, it is economically rational to have a parent at home to provide that customized 1-on-1 care with the child. The benefit is improved learning and opportunity for experiences (daily trips to museums, sports activities, classes) at the expense of less structured socialization with a peer group and a loss in net household profit.

Though the tax break afforded for day care should not be disregarded, there are plenty of situations where it makes sense to have a parent stay at home with children.

Most parents choose to have children so they can spend time with them. Maximizing this at the expense of some net household profit can be rational, given certain living situations. One could argue it is a luxury, and they would likely be right. Having children at all in advanced industrial societies is, in the individual case, usually a luxury.

[lieut_data]

Society underestimates the long-term economic value of a child raised by a full-time, invested parent. Parenting and babysitting are apples and oranges.

[conanbatt]

No it doesn't. Otherwise, every single teacher, caretaker, would quit their jobs as soon as they had a child and would get the same economical benefit.

If it were a productive investment it would be common because those that do it would easily outclass the rest.

[milesrout]

They don't do that because they can't afford to do that. That's sad and unfortunate.

[conanbatt]

Or because its simply inefficient, and you must bear the price of doing it if you want it.

[onion2k]

Being a parent is not babysitting.

[conanbatt]

Its mostly babysitting. You can divide the effort to raise a child as nursing, teaching and babysitting. The parent is most invested into doing it, but he cannot get very good as a nurse or a teacher (if its not his profession) and babysitting is very low value. You definitely cannot spend 8 hours a day teaching a baby things, and most of the things you teach are quite low skilled (exercise, playing, reading, etc).

If the parent can earn a lot more income by delegating responsibilities he will do it, or rather, most will do it.

[fpig]

This is a fallacy inherent to the modern mentality of obsessing over your child's safety that is likely counterproductive on average.

Children of school age DO NOT need babysitting. When I was a kid, everyone's mom worked and we kids just stayed at home or played together and were perfectly fine. There were zero kids who had a babysitter when they were 7 years old. Zero. Never heard of it. This was the late 80s / early 90s during the breakup of socialism. There was even a war going on for a few of those years.

I can't even imagine the level of ridicule a child would have endured if their friends had found out they had a babysitter.

Children don't just randomly burst into flames if they're left alone.

And I seriously doubt 30:1 is a significant part of the problem. Look at countries with successful school systems. Ours also used to be, but slowly got worse with time as we adopted western attitudes towards children and parenting. The schools themselves didn't change significantly, yet the outcomes became worse.

[Kluny]

True, but you were still in school for most of the day, right? You were probably alone for a couple hours in the evening and busy doing stuff with friends on the weekends, but don't you think it would have gone all Lord of the Flies if you were alone all the time? I remember staying home alone from age 10 or so and I was fine, but I also remember that bullying seemed to be a much more serious problem then than it is now.

[fpig]

Parents would be away for 4-5 hours at most while I was at home I guess, but we'd be without parents for more than that because we'd go out and do stuff with friends even when parents were home. Parents were kind of there to fulfill your basic needs, not your social needs. I think my parents would have probably loved to spend more time with me but kids prefer to be with other kids.

To be fair, it did go a bit lord of the flies on occasion, in the sense that we engaged in "wars" with kids from different streets and so on, sometimes someone would get a thrown rock to their head or get a beating, but nothing too serious. Also we were constantly getting injured while playing from falling, stepping on sharp shit, etc but kids are incredibly resilient, they recover from anything and quickly. The important thing is to teach the kid not to fuck around in traffic, that's where the real danger is. And if there is a war not to pick shit up that might be explosive.

[Strom]

I don't think the 30-to-1 ratio is the problem. From my own experience the main problem is grouping by age. Children should be grouped by skill instead. [1] I was always top of the class in math and held back by the slow pace dictated by the national education plan for my age. At the same time there were other topics like Russian language where I didn't learn as fast as was expected of my age. This meant that as the years went by I understood less and less of the new material that was being taught because my Russian fundamentals were weak. I imagine other children experienced something similar in math. I think we could do much better if children advance in classes based on how much they've learned, not based on when they were born. Also advancement in different topics need to be decoupled from eachother as much as possible [2], because I think it's completely expected that everyone will have their own personal strong topics and weak topics.

--

[1] I think schools teach much more than just what's on the national education plan. Making friends, making enemies, dealing with puberty etc are all valuable lessons that have less friction when the group of people you're around have similar amount of experience with those things. Thus being grouped with people with wildly different experience levels in these areas can be detrimental. While the primary grouping factor should be skill, there's probably a good case for secondary range limits by age, which is a decent estimative measurement of children's experience in these social areas.

[2] I understand that full isolation isn't possible, because physics requires math knowledge, which in turn requires writing & reading skills. Still, even with these dependencies we could do a lot more decoupling than what is being currently done.