[arel]

Very valid points!

It smacks of transplanting a rose-tinted view of 1950s academia into schools.

Teaching students in a modern school environment is a world apart from academia.

Also, entirely predictable down-voting, I imagine from engineers who have no experience of teaching.

[Ericson2314]

At least in America, these views are necessary to push against for-profit faux trade school blather. The Krishnamurthi stuff referenced in the leading comment which is quite similar has been actually studied; there is evidence it is a better curriculum.

Perhaps we need trade schools too, but primary education should not be that.

Also, it's not all abstract nonsense without computers. Learning to hand-evaluate functional programs is perfectly reasonable, and no more tedious than long arithmetic by hand. I've seen students treat the implemenation like a black box, when the interpeter algorith is not complicated, which I highly doubt is good for pedagogy. (Though, as I have not studied education, I've leave that at "highly doubt".)

And finally, completely separate from the above, it's good to avoid computers for focus/attention reasons in many classroom settings. Even if they somehow could speed up learning, until we've worked out all the psychological effects of bright fast moving screens and stuff, I can't say I mind the good ol' paper and pencil that every teacher knows well.

[dboreham]

Careful there: long arithmetic probably isn't a great example, since it has no purpose to someone with a calculator -- it would be better to spend the time teaching number theory, no? And, I believe it's important to convey that "this method really only makes sense if you have a computer". Nothing turns students off like mechanical wrote method learning.

[Ericson2314]

Everyone should know how to hand-substitute lambdas and do arithmetic slowly. We should skip all the rote crap to make people faster.

[dang]

"Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."

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

[hogFeast]

But commenting about commenting on voting on comments is interesting?

Law firms should hire from this site. Utter goldmine.

[dang]

Well, the moderation comments are a special case. They're out-of-band feedback signals. In case it helps, they're even more tedious to write than they are to read. Yes they break the guidelines too, in the way that many medicines are toxic, but one uses them when there's no better alternative.

Alas, the system doesn't fix this without moderation. It hasn't yet become self-correcting [1], which is why I'm still doing it [2].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7605892

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7505041