[spir]

> Because now people have to spend their 20s learning about the discoveries that others made during their miracle years (the so-called “burden of knowledge”).

Maybe now people have to spend their 20s learning about the discoveries because our modern pre-post-secondary education has become so watered down and unambitious.

Personally, I get the sense that could have learned 5x to 20x as much in my teenage years if I hadn't been in an excessively mediocre public education system. And I'm not a genius :)

[spir]

I remember how slowly high school math moved. How uninspired English class was. The poor curriculum and tools in programming class. imo, there is definitely a primary and secondary education problem vs. the early-life academic environments that helped to produce yesteryear's great thinkers.

https://erikhoel.substack.com/p/why-we-stopped-making-einste...

[nerdponx]

I have become convinced that inadequate public schooling is the reason why America has come to rely so much on college to make people "ready for society".

Teachers are criminally underpaid, unsupported, and overworked, while parents are not engaged with their children's learning. It's a bad mix. Not to mention the politicization of teacher unions.

[javajosh]

>Teachers are criminally underpaid, unsupported, and overworked

My impression is that public school teachers have been un-empowered to fail out kids, or punish them for bad behavior in class.

[nsxwolf]

If they’re overworked, what is it they’re working so hard and so ineffectively at?

[mellavora]

I notice that you have perverted the meaning by adding the word "ineffective" which was not in the statement you are replying to, though you imply it was and that teachers are.

As if the only way a person can be overworked is by not being effective at their job.

And thus it is the teacher's failing that they cannot keep up with the workload, not the people assigning the workload.

It seems you have had a very rare and fortunate life. I am happy for you, though I wish you had more respect for others.

[nsxwolf]

OP didn’t say it but an overarching theme in the comments here is that traditional public education is ineffective. So if teachers are overworked, they’ve got energy to expend but they’re expending it ineffectively.

You took this a little far with the personal attack.

[nerdponx]

When you phrase it like this, you are implying that somehow the teachers directly are at fault for misdirecting their labor. So even if you are "technically correct" in some sense, you are phrasing it in an inflammatory way. Don't be a troll.

[brtkdotse]

Don’t know about the US but in Sweden teachers are plagued by mandatory administrative task, as well as a myriad of small tasks all unrelated to teaching.

[dylan604]

I hear this a lot, but what exactly is administrative tasks they are being burdened with that is not part of being a teacher?

[brtkdotse]

From what I’ve heard from acquaintances who work(ed) as teachers, there’s a lot of of documentation of the students’ progress that takes a lot of time to enter but usually is write-only.

[BeFlatXIII]

They're ineffective precisely because they're overworked.

[chmod600]

Accommodating students unwilling to learn or unprepared.

[jameshart]

One of the things that is deeply ingrained in education curricula, yet which doesn’t seem remotely justified pedagogically, is the timetable. The idea of studying lots of subjects, all at once, via daily or weekly sub-hour-long bite-sized lessons.

If you threw out all the context switching and review and catch-up, you could probably teach most year-long high school subject curricula in a week.

[ajmurmann]

I think you are on to something. At the same time I wonder about content sticking if you don't practice the subject for months. Doing math two months of the year (ignoring the math you might need in physics class) might mean you have to rehash a lot. That said, for many subjects this wouldn't even change anything. How often does learning something in history class currently rely on what you learned a few months ago? Rebec in my biology classes things rarely were connected. For a few weeks we talk about fungi and then for a few weeks about the cardiovascular system.

[shakezula]

Year-round schooling has proven this point time and time again. Students in summers-off schedules spend months catching back up to where they left off.

[BeFlatXIII]

I slightly disagree. It takes time and repetition for some things to sink in. IMO, moving to more college-like A/B days would be better. I would not expect history lessons to stick if you compressed 180 days of AP Euro into two weeks at eight hours a day. Likewise, math classes moving that fast would give students the feeling they learned a ton without any retention. That said, I feel like literature and writing could be subjects that fit into this model of intensive week-long workshops once each year.

[mellavora]

It might not have been the teachers who decided on this schedule.

I hear some tech workers complain that their days are made ineffective by lots of pointless meetings.

[pjbeam]

I was shocked to (re)discover that high school algebra is a multiyear course. And trigonometry is a year long.

What?

[nostrebored]

We send some of our worst thinkers to educate children. Trigonometry didn’t make sense to me as a kid because I was learning from someone who didn’t understand it. They could memorize a lot of rules, but they didn’t understand it. In the face of this, what makes the most sense is fostering curiosity.

Your teachers not understanding material doesn’t matter if their role is prompting you to ask the right questions and find areas of interest.

I highly recommend that anyone else who feels the same way look into Acton Academy. The model is based on project based work, self guided learning, and Socratic discussions. There are locations all throughout the U.S. My six year old may not recognize all the material for a standardized test, but he’s fascinated by laws of physics, engineering for space, growing plants, and conservation. At home he wanted to start a project on simulating landing a Mars rover with a small programmable robot. He’s playing around with the idea of cushioning the landing versus building a parachute. And all of this is something we can tie back together to make interesting for him — because he has interests! How could we collect a plant seed after landing for example.

His approach to his other interests is similarly curious. He doesn’t want to be told how to fish by an authority, he wants to experiment with different techniques and think about how he can improve iteratively.

We stomp curiosity out of children in public schools. We need to stop.

[vostok]

> We send some of our worst thinkers to educate children.

I wonder if this is the sort of thing that could be fixed by paying teachers more. Why would a smart person become a teacher if a professional industry job will pay $300-500k and a teaching job will pay $100k? Is paying teachers so much even palatable to the general public?

[mellavora]

You'd be lucky to find a teaching job paying 100K. According to this: https://study.com/academy/popular/teacher-salary-by-state.ht...

salaries top out around 70K. That's ending salary, not starting salary.

And yes, this could be fixed by paying teachers more. And treating the profession with some respect.

[nostrebored]

The difference is starker than that. Principals make close to the amount that you’re estimating for teachers, and by structure most teachers will never be principals.

I wanted to go into teaching but stopped after I realized what that would mean for my long term earnings. Even with time taken off as a stay at home parent and time spent working in the developing world, I’m getting close to the lifetime earnings for teachers who progress in their careers. In less than a decade of working.

[BeFlatXIII]

It's not just pay. Teachers will willingly take pay cuts to teach at private schools. Why?

1. Students with chronic behavior problems are easier to throw out

2. Parents are less likely to go on idiotic crusades about the content of the curriculum

3. The school board (or, more likely, the state legislature) isn't going to make irrelevant changes to appease voters

Private schools are more likely to treat their teachers as independent professionals rather than glorified babysitters or McEducation employees.

[pjbeam]

I don't think pay would necessarily solve the problem though either (edit: I do support paying teachers quite a bit more just don't think that is a magical solution). I'm not a teacher, don't pretend to understand the nuances but there seems to be a nasty conflagration of political barriers to holding some combination of children/teachers accountable for outcomes. Probably something related to withholding finding or other perverse incentives. I'm sure I'm not the only person on HN who has left a very high paying job for a different one because of bad culture factors.

[javajosh]

I learned algebra in middle school, in one year. What is this insanity of which you speak?

[mattkrause]

“Algebra” by itself is meaninglessly broad. You could certainly teach “solve [some simple kinds of] equations for an unknown” in a few months; you could also have a whole mathematical career as an algebraist.

[javajosh]

The term is not meaninglessly broad here in the US. We use the term "abstract algebra" to describe the more general subject, usually taught in college-level courses in groups, fields, and so on. Mere 'algebra' does indeed mostly mean "solving for an unknown", although I'd argue there's an important, more general concept of 'equation' introduced. From what I've read the concept of 'variable' is tricky for a lot of kids.

[pjbeam]

https://www.fcps.edu/academics/graduation-requirements-and-c...

Here's the HS math sequence options from my local school district in VA. Can't speak to many other places but this is what my above comment is based on.

[ianbutler]

Only one of those options will even leave you remotely prepared for college level mathematics. The fact it stops at Algebra 2 or Part 2 for most of those options is criminal.

[dylan604]

The thing that makes public schooling so frustrating is how they lump everyone together and then teach to the lowest common level. If you're in a school system that can afford to offer AP courses, some students have a chance of not being bored. The rest of the students have to deal with that fact that some of the students are only there because they haven't dropped out yet and the state requires their presence.

[nightski]

That's amusing, you are doing exactly what the article talks about. But really though, I've relied very little on education institutions for much of my learning. Saying they held you back is just an excuse, it's likely you held yourself back. I know that in my case any failings are definitely largely my own.

[low_tech_love]

One thing that the current education system has not managed to grasp yet is the paradigm shift in its role: until recently (maybe 15-20 years ago) the role of the school was to give you as much information as possible; now, it is exactly the opposite: to filter away the noise as much as possible and help you focus on what matters the most for you. But we are still information hoarders and it will take a while for this shift to sink in.

[jotm]

I learned most of it in libraries and later the Internet. Car repairs (to work in an auto service), audio technology (for building custom speakers and amps), computer hardware (for myself), programming (still shit at it), marketing (was fun), psychology (was kinda useless), English (very useful), lots of stuff. So kids these days have it easy :D

I probably could've specialized better if I had done that in school, but who knows. My attention was trash and still getting worse.

Of course you're learning about others' crown achievements, there's no need to reinvent the wheel. And things got way more complicated, there's so much to know that it's hard to remember. Especially if you use social media, always some shit there that you'll shove in your memory instead of useful things heh.

Most new things are a spin on the old, it might've been easier to discover/stumble upon something genuinely new 100+ years ago.

[paulryanrogers]

Public education is a baseline. Literacy, civics, a bit of math and biology are things that can help no matter what vocation people end up with.

Without it folks might end up pigeonholed into whatever their family does or a narrow selection of trades within the local community.

[csa]

> Public education is a baseline. Literacy, civics, a bit of math and biology are things that can help no matter what vocation people end up with.

All of which is usually covered by 8th grade in the US.

HS is a waste for most people attending.

[Banana699]

This common way of thinking is flawed in several ways.

1) The baseline is extremely low, and getting lower by the year

I will take math as an example. High school, at the best possible setting, leaves you knowing single variable calculus.

Is this enough? no, it's nearly zero. To be able to understand anything about math in the modern age, you have to know :

- Formal logic

- Linear Algebra and Differential Equations at 4x courses or more level

- Probability and statistics, 2 or 3 courses.

So all in all, in order to even think intelligently about a field like math, in order to have any chance at all of even comprehending the slightest inkling of what all those scientists and engineers and ML practitioners who impact your life massively even do, you have to know easily 10x of what high school, in the best possible scenario, teaches you.

Then one year passes, science, math and engineering get more complex, and high school curriculum and budgets get lower and lower, and the race to the bottom continues.

You can repeat this exercise for any subject : Ask a specialist what's the bare, absolute minimum for anyone to think or reason effectively about their subject, compare their answer to the K12 curricula for that subject, and laugh at the sheer mismatch of the two.

2) The baseline is redundant and wasteful

The sheer waste is mind boggling, all of my K12 education could be easily compressed in 6 years of study. Lessons are repeated over and over again each year, irrelevant subjects like the agricultural policy of Brazil and Nigeria are stuffed in overweight geography curriculums for no apparent reason (my country is neither of those 2), the English language's way of annotating verbs with tenses is rehashed for the 7th time this year.

There is no concept of opportunity cost, there is no awareness of a notion of "What could I teach this kid this year instead of yet another rehashing of the names of the world's most popular rivers and mountains?".

3) The baseline is low quality, low relevance and low impact

Programming is memorizing visual basic's or php's basic syntax, math is learning a formula and repeatedly applying it over and over again to questions with parameters varied, biology is memorizing the reasons of why various phenomena happen.

It's not only that what gets teached is a pathetically small subset of what needs to be teached, and not only that it's teached in 2x the time needed with metric tons of mindless repetition and rehashing. It's that even this small subset that is teached and re-teached, is teached in the most boring, unmemorable, uninspiring, useless and actively harmful way possible.

It's not a good baseline, people leave it not knowing a single worthwhile thing about anything or - even worse - actively thinking those subjects are useless pontifications and navel-gazing. It does an awful lot of harm and virtually 0 good, when you divide by the time and resources it consume .

[paulryanrogers]

The baseline is meant to serve the greatest number of people possible. Diff. Eq. is far beyond the average person and less useful for them to know for their lives than basic statistics and critical thinking.

I'm not saying US K12 is perfect. Rather that it isn't trying to cater to 90th percentile, independent learners. For those hopefully the parents will recognize greatness and seek a more fitting alternative.

[Banana699]

K12 education is a crime against humanity. I want this institution to violently die.

[ianai]

Agree. Society basically introduces its newest members to society through something closer to a penal system than knowledge transfer.

Granted, children are not necessarily trustable to figure it all out on their own. It’s more the bullying, anti-intellectualism, and generally not considering their needs that needs checking.

[rogersbacon17]

Author here, see heresy 12 - https://rogersbacon.substack.com/p/20-modern-heresies?s=w