[Red_Leaves_Flyy]

The point is, likely intentionally, understated. I cannot speak for the author, but the gist I got is that our society thrusts wholly unprepared people into adulthood and we could get a lot of improvements from just making it harder for people to fail at adulting. IYKYK and if you don’t you will get fucked - repeatedly.

Basic life skills are not taught so it’s up to the individual if their family fails. Importantly, it is unreasonable to expect someone to teach another how to do something they don’t know how to do.

I’m talking about stuff like navigating health insurance, paying taxes, budgeting, managing credit, home maintenance, vehicle care. Mistakes in any one of these domains can have devastating consequences that profoundly change one’s life. Simple things like single payer health care (only complex because of greedy people demanding a tax for the privilege the laws wrote grant them), personal budgeting education, and teaching basic home improvement skills will markedly improve many people’s lives.

We could also discuss more difficult topics like the complete lack of a meaningful social safety net, and the rippling consequences of systemic injustice but that’s less on topic and more likely to get me flamed or trolled.

[sabarn01]

The outcome of this has been to make it harder to fail as a kid. We don't hold kids back anymore and we don't suspend kids anymore. At some point in time the rubber meets the road and you will be held accountable and have to be. We could improve the social safety net but we never want to match other countries that have more supervision of their at risk population.

When I worked temp jobs there wasn't a place I worked where if you showed up on time two days in a row and worked hard I wasn't offered a job. All of these places paid well over minimum wage you just had to be willing to do hard physical work. Society plays some role but I have zero trust that our institutions know how to help people.

[batshit_beaver]

> The outcome of this has been to make it harder to fail as a kid.

I'd like to go a little further and suggest that more recently there's been a trend of not holding the adults accountable either.

Instead of trying to improve outcomes for all, we seem to have decided to choose the path of collective failure.

[Red_Leaves_Flyy]

When do the greater communities need to pay their dues?

Schools cost money to run but taxpayers balk and cry over every cent increase. There are crumbling schools with toxic air and water that lack adequate HVAC paying their teachers unlivable salaries. This is the result of neglect to preserve and invest which is a condemnation of those who allowed such neglect on their watch when they should have championed such plights before they reached these new heights.

Teachers can literally be miracle workers but that makes no difference if the communities their students return to undervalue education or lack the resources to foster healthy environments to grow and learn in. Broken communities create broken school districts.

This goes back to the point I make in another comment on this page. We must invest in underperforming communities to bring them up to the average if we want to see improvements. This necessarily requires such difficult conversations like the poor Hispanic or black majority cities getting some of the education tax from rich white suburbs or something to the same effect.

[llm_trw]

Schools in the US cost more than schools in any other developed nation.

Every institution in the US has been taken over by careerists and credentialists who produce nothing of value and are a drain on the system.

For a simple example in our area look at twitter: we were told the servers would catch fire, the end times will be upon us and cats will live with dogs. Instead the servers kept chugging along just as well as they did before with a 20th the staff.

At this point everything is so bad I'd support sortition for every public managerial position. You can't do worse than what we have today.

[tatrajim]

As an anecdote on the topic of education, as a US Peace Corps Volunteer in rural South Korea in the 1970s, I routinely visited secondary schools that (at the time) were little more than drab warehouses for large (-70 students/class) using ragged textbooks and ancient furniture. Spirits were high, though, and these farm kids were successfully learning math through basic differential calculus plus a daunting array of other subjects.

Thereafter, I have only felt (perhaps unfairly) mild contempt for the perennial whining of US critics who blame low funding for educational failing in the public schools. In my opinion the blame lies elsewhere, starting with the family.

[galdosdi]

A quote I once heard applies here. "All a preacher needs is 4 walls and the good book, and willing souls"

For most of school, all you need is paper and pens and a place where to meet. A notebook costs a dollar. You can also do quite a bit of lab science prior to college at home, and music only adds the cost of the instrument.

I have done tutoring in parks and coffee shops and in some of those sessions seen more learning than the most expensive classroom.

It's about the kids and the teachers, not the campus.

If you want a really really good school at a really low price, eliminate the building and all support functions other than hiring new teachers, and redirect all of the extra money to teachers salaries. Then just meet in libraries, parks, coffee shops, and the houses of parents and teachers.

99% of the outcome comes from the teachers (being competent) and the students (being motivated).

[Red_Leaves_Flyy]

See my highest level comment for a discussion of why blaming the family is intellectually lazy.

[trogdor]

> sortition

Cool, I learned a new word. Thanks.

[Red_Leaves_Flyy]

These are bold claims that smell like dog whistles but I’m unfamiliar with any specifics. Got sources or what?

[llm_trw]

If you keep hearing dog whistles everywhere you may be a dog.

At any rate a quick google search give you all the answers you need: https://www.mercatus.org/research/data-visualizations/k-12-s...

[monero-xmr]

As a counterpoint, Boston spends more per student than every other city ($31.3k in 2023 dollars):

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2023/05/30/metro/boston-now-spen....

But the outcomes are quite poor.

How can society justify spending more on the same institutions that have miserable outcomes?

In the private sector, less revenue forces belt-tightening, purchasing software and tools that enhance productivity, and ultimately bankruptcy if it can't work. Where in the public sector is anyone held accountable for failure? When will we accept that simply throwing more money down the pit won't solve what is a multi-faceted issue that primarily isn't about money?

[Red_Leaves_Flyy]

The families need money. Kids from impoverished and broken homes make poor students that ruin the experience for the everyone in the school. Their misery is contagious. Throwing it at schools won’t solve it because teachers are doing everything they can to support kids but teachers have no control outside the school day. Increase foster care budgets and social welfare programs. If America can afford Musk naziposting on Twitter we can afford to eliminate poverty, hunger, homelessness, and untreated /under treated medical conditions.

[sabarn01]

My wife's family fostered and the only thing that happens is the kids eventually get sent back to the families. Even families who have abused the kids multiple times. We don't have an answer to kids from bad families. The state can't overcome bad parents.

[monero-xmr]

There is no amount of money you can pay someone to make them genuinely love a child. Employees do a job, you can throw money at the same employees, or more employees, but children need better parents.

Maybe we should be investing ways to get parents to go to church? They would turn into better people.

[sabarn01]

My kids school is terrible and they get about 22k per student per year in a rich area. The system is failing because it's designed to fail.

[ZhadruOmjar]

There are so many teachers explaining how and why kids don't fail anymore and that leads to issues from grade 1 to graduation. At some point people just need to _do the thing_.

[makeitdouble]

Answering:

> I’m talking about stuff like navigating health insurance, paying taxes, budgeting, managing credit, home maintenance, vehicle care.

With:

> We don't hold kids back anymore and we don't suspend kids anymore

is a truely weird logic to me. Is it related ? Or are you offering to let kids get credit lines and suspend them over their mismanagement ?

That could actually be a great idea TBH. And while we're at it, adults could also get suspended or have to attend additional courses, instead of getting thrown into debt spirals.

[jandrese]

I went to primary school in the 80s and 90s and even back then it was pretty hard to be held back a grade level. Typically it only happened when a kid missed a lot of school, like they were hit by a car and spent 2 months in the hospital. Failing grades alone didn't usually cause it, at least the kids who seemed completely uninterested in school still somehow managed to graduate.

[lynx23]

"Everybody is a unique snowflake" attitude is causing way more problems then we publically admit. Setting boundaries is important. As is seeing the consequences of your own actions. I was held back in school for a year. Looking back, this was one of the most important things in my school time. I am glad it happened.

[I_o_IllI__o_I]

>"Everybody is a unique snowflake" attitude is causing way more problems then we publically admit

like what problems?

[lynx23]

Like, systematic lack of resilience.

[awwaiid]

I think ... right ok, I guess harder-to-fail but really it is easier-to-fail, easier to remain in a failure state, as a kid right? Same thing eh?

[chefandy]

> We don't hold kids back anymore and we don't suspend kids anymore.

Does that contradict real data that shows holding kids back and suspending them makes them more successful?

[Red_Leaves_Flyy]

Real data on holding kids back is actively harmful.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03055698.2014.93...

The same holds for suspensions.

https://edsource.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Noltemeyer_W...

[sabarn01]

In both cases the point is benefit the system at the expense of the child with the issues. One kid should not be allowed to ruin a class. My kids school has emotionally disturbed kids in the classroom making it impossible to have regular lessons.

When I was kid we had people that brought guns to school and were kicked out it seemed reasonable to me. I also think alternate school is a reasonable answer for kids who are violent or have been otherwise expelled. I was suspended for fighting and it seemed like an appropriate punishment.

[Red_Leaves_Flyy]

You’re continuing to argue based on your predilections. I’m using wide ranging academic studies. Your experiences are not relevant to the discussion because you’re not bothering to evaluate your experiences in the context of the literature. Bad faith is looking likely, low effort is certain.

[chefandy]

> One kid should not be allowed to ruin a class.

The only thing I ruined for other students when I was in class was forcing them to look at my stupid haircut. My punishments were for truancy. I went to school, but spent all of my time in the computer lab because with severe ADHD without any academic support rendered class pointless. One crusty old Korean War vet teacher flat-out told me he "didn't believe in IEPs," and the administrators refused to even address the problem. I never once started a fight, brought drugs to school, or had a gun. While people found me pretty intimidating looking at first, I had a genuinely warm, mature, and mutually respectful relationship with damn near anybody I interacted with. No students really had a problem with me, but the adults actually enjoyed interacting with me more. Most teachers, administrators, librarians, etc would stop me for a quick chat to catch up, talk about current events, or whatever if we passed each other. I didn't ruin shit, and neither did a hell of a lot of other kids that were punished because the school didn't hold up their end of the bargain for academic accessibility.

> When I was kid we had people that brought guns to school and were kicked out it seemed reasonable to me.

Whoa there straw man. It's completely ridiculous to lump academically struggling kids or kids with run-of-the-mill behavioral problems in with kids that bring deadly weapons to school. Nobody is arguing that kids who bring guns into school should be sent on their way after a stern talking to.

Also, nobody said that alternative schools weren't on the table. I, myself, graduated in a night school program designed for failing high school students who'd been successful at work, and it was a phenomenal experience. They gave us a lot more leeway and expected us to do schoolwork mostly independently while working at least 20 hours per week, and we'd fail the entire term for all classes if we missed a single assignment. It was precisely the lack of patronizing meddling you're advocating for that allowed hundreds of kids to graduate through that program.

> In both cases

Kids are generally held back because they're struggling with the material, not because they're being disruptive. How exactly does holding a kid back help the system if there's any expense to the child?

> I was suspended for fighting and it seemed like an appropriate punishment.

I'm glad you think so, but that doesn't actually counter any of the data presented.

[sabarn01]

We are talking past each other. Kids that need help should get help. One form of that help is holding kids back so that they get a second chance to master material they need for the next year. If you progress kids that are not ready you burden the teacher the next year as they have to provide more differentiated instruction. We should reduce the stigma of holding kids back by doing more regularly. Its cheaper than the wide array of tier 1 and 2 interventions.

Kids that have violence/social issue should be removed from kids that are ready to be in school. I know teacher who have kids who have been disruptive and they can not discipline them. Suspensions/ Alternative / Expulsions should be used when appropriate for the benefit of everyone else.

I don't know if you have kids, but mine are in a very liberal school in a very rich area. Very unlike where I grew up, and they cannot run an elementary school. Both my kids are Add/Dyslexic. My wife observed a class and the teacher had no ability to create a calm learning environment. There were emotionally disturbed kids in the same class who screamed / ran out of the room. 2x this year my son was asked to go fetch a kid who ran from the room because the kid that ran likes my son. We had a 504 plan which could not be implemented because there is no bandwidth.

We need to look at how we teach kids fundamentally because what we have been doing for the last 30 years hasn't worked.

[chefandy]

As someone subjected to both of these actions, plus expulsion, in lieu of anybody bothering to try and figure out what was wrong, that certainly rings true. However, people just really really love a) nostalgia, b) validating their compulsion to inflict the same pain they experienced as children on young people, and c) watching people in out-groups get punished. It's a lovely thought, but I'll believe that there have been real changes, rather than overblown facets of moral panic about abandoning those bad habits, when I see them.

[sabarn01]

If you have a kid that is fighting other kids/teachers what is the school supposed to do.

[chefandy]

A) Suspension is a great way to pretend you're addressing a problem while sweeping it under the rug. If the administrators aren't willing to mediate conflict among students, they should find another line of work. The school has a responsibility to educate their students. If they fail to do that for a student without finding alternate placement better equipped to handle whatever problem they face, they failed in their responsibility.

B) If a student has a consistent enough problem with antisocial behavior that they require constant intervention, they should be in a non-mainstream classroom or school that can address that problem while still fulfilling their responsibility to educate them.

C) There's a whole lot of punishment doled out in schools for non-violent conduct violations. Caught skipping class? Caught vaping in the parking lot? Dress code violation? Caught copying someone's test? Caught using a phone multiple times when you're not supposed to?

You seem to be deliberately implying that questioning any suspension means you support violence in school, which is completely ridiculous. Everything in life can be turned into a black-and-white issue if you ignore enough details and context.

[chefandy]

Happy to address any counterarguments from the multiple downvoters.

[mortify]

>making it harder for people to fail at adulting

That has been the direction school has gone and, at least from my perspective, it seems worse. It has lead to a loss of agency among now so-called adults who expect to always be in a situation which guides them toward success. They struggle without a guidebook.

Learning to fail, and crucially, how to handle failure and recover are better approaches.

[internet101010]

This is how you end up with people that are "book smart" but do not how to create something from vague instructions or connect the dots. The easiest way to weed these people out of the applicant pool is if they link to their github and it is just projects from online courses.

[coopierez]

The things the above poster suggested are largely man-made, artificially complex things seemingly designed to trap people. Things like paying taxes and handling healthcare are pretty much automatic in most European countries for example.

[mbesto]

> navigating health insurance, paying taxes, budgeting, managing credit, home maintenance, vehicle care

The self-perpetuating lie in American life is that all of these get solved by <insert market good/service here>. Silicon Valley has only made it worse because these solutions are just monkey-patching poor "source code". Why learn how to balance a checkbook when Chase online can do it for you?

Our parents' generation had it different. They had fewer health provider options, a smaller tax code, fewer financial products, simpler home setups, engines that didn't have planned obsolescence built into them, etc, etc. We assume that things like 6 different options for MRIs or 2,304 different credit cards mean better products/services, but what is ignored is that these have only made for more complex and yet brittle systems that are harder to navigate and create much greater analysis paralysis.

[SoftTalker]

I learned out to fill out a basic Form 1040 tax return in middle school (late 1970s).

Banking now is WAY easier. Balancing a checkbook? All your transactions and your balance are available 24/7 on your phone. Your paycheck appears in your bank account automatically. You used to have to get a paper check at work and then take it to the bank (open 9-5, maybe a little later on Fridays, and 9-12 or maybe 2pm on Saturday) to deposit it. Paying for stuff at the store today? Tap your phone. You used to have to carry cash, or a checkbook (if the merchant would accept checks) and hope you had figured your balance correctly.

I don't remember a lot of lessons about managing credit but we did study simple and compound interest in math and talked about how that can work for and against you depending on whether you're borrowing or saving.

Home maintenance and vehicle care --- covered the essentials in home economics and driver's education. Most people then and now paid others to do that, or went to the effort to teach themselves what they needed to know.

Cars back then were much less reliable than today. Today's cars will go 100K miles easy with little more than oil changes and maybe a new set of brake pads and tires. Cars then needed regular tune-ups and generally started having more major problems after only a few years.

Health care does seem worse now. You don't have as many family doctors with their own or small group practices, where getting an appointment was pretty easy and they actually knew you. But overall daily life is way more convenient now than it was 30 years ago.

[Red_Leaves_Flyy]

You focus on banking, I’m talking about budgets. Do you track every cent in and out and have a quarterly updated forecast of your financial position a decade out? How close are you to that? If your answer doesn’t include a spreadsheet of some sort you’re not budgeting but taking a shortcut on faith your intuitions are correct.

Did you get taught how credit applications work, how banks determine credit worthiness, how to depreciate an asset, how to calculate lifetime cost of a vehicle, how to draft a bill of materials for a project? All things everyone should be able to do. It’s the lack of these skills and the cost of living crisis that creates ripe markets of ignorant people to exploit for profit through their financial mistakes.

Your school offers home ec? Mine dropped it forever ago. Only the trade school kids learned anything more hands on AP chem.

Cars are more reliable sure, but less maintainable in a home garage. I didn’t bring them up because the best argument I have for cars is repealing cafe and taxing cars annually with a multiplier for wheelbase squared x miles.

[SoftTalker]

No I don't budget to that degree. Neither did most people 30 years ago.

I put a percentage of my income into an investment account automatically every payday and forget about it. What I have left is my spending money. That's very simple and tends to work for me.

[Gigachad]

My bank app does that stuff automatically. They have identified and classified pretty much all merchants so the app can breakdown spending and tell you exactly how much you spend on essentials, restaurants, alcohol, etc.

You get the same info as your spreadsheet, but without any work.

[mbesto]

Exactly. If you are taught to balance a checkbook, it inherently forces you to budget.

[saltminer]

> Today's cars will go 100K miles easy with little more than oil changes and maybe a new set of brake pads and tires. Cars then needed regular tune-ups and generally started having more major problems after only a few years.

Yeah, getting your engine rebuilt used to be a fairly common occurrence. Now, unless you own a vintage car, it's quite rare.

> You don't have as many family doctors with their own or small group practices, where getting an appointment was pretty easy and they actually knew you.

Very true. The US health insurance industry is to blame for a lot of the consolidation; it's getting harder and harder for independents to survive as time goes on, with smaller providers being less attractive for insurers to begin with and the ones who will deal with them squeezing them more and more. The increasing documentation requirements by insurers are also much harder for independents to meet.

[Red_Leaves_Flyy]

Society is consciously created by the active participants in that system. Government fails to hold them accountable for directly creating unwanted outcomes. Task companies with robust interoperability and let’s see how that goes.

[gentleman11]

If you say the problem is social class and poverty, and not having available role models to show how adult life actually works, you’ll get flamed and trolled. If you say the problem is racial issues, you’ll get upvotes. I’ll just sit here and await my downvotes now

[bccdee]

Role models are kind of a non-answer to the question. It's like saying the problem is "bad luck." Role-model-based policy solutions are, if not impossible, at least deeply impractical. Childcare subsidies and other forms of welfare, including simple direct cash transfers, have been shown to be strongly beneficial and are much simpler to implement. What people dislike about those is that they involve starting fights with lobbyists. Hence non-actionable perspectives like "the problem is role models" or "the problem is personal responsibility," which are not solutions so much as excuses for collective inaction.

[Thorrez]

> 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

[harimau777]

Is it possible that the issue is both and that the two are interrelated?

It seems to me that there can be both a problem with lack of role models and problems with racial issues and that both should be improved.

It seems to me that lack of role models could be exasperated by structural issues (mass incarceration, parents having to work too many hours) and in turn the lack of role models could exasperate the structural issues (unattended kids getting into crimes, kids struggling to get into college since their parents don't have time to tutor them).

[6510]

The pattern I've noticed is that the poor and the poorly educated have no career expectations from their kids. If the kids with wealthy and/or highly educated parents showed up at home with just one poor grade all hell broke lose. Grounded for 6 months, allowance cuts, no more TV or video games etc One kept his kid at home during the holidays to tutor him himself, screaming 90% of the time. The other parents would look at the grades for < 1 minute and compliment the single thing they did well. Later on, when the other kids ended up in their first factory job the mantra was if only my parents gave me a good kick in the but I wouldn't be here right now

I would send all 13 year olds to the factory for a good few months. Earnings to be paid when 21. I would also introduce Sunday school if your grades are crappy, 8 hours every week until you are no longer behind. And finally, call in the parents regularly just to annoy the fuck out of them. You don't seem very involved mr Jones. Could you be so kind to explain these grades?

[emmo]

I hope you're never in a position to make any of these decisions.

[6510]

Which one(s) and why?

A few months in the factory is nothing compared to your entire life. Stories are no substitutes for experience. Those who go on to get degrees and nice jobs would also benefit from the experience.

Sunday school because if you are sufficiently behind on the material you will never catch up. Never is a long time.

Getting the parents to show up and explain why the grades are bad will force them to consider why that is. I had lots of friends with parents who absolutely loved them but couldn't be any less interested in grades.

I appreciate how anecdotal this all is. How do you see it?

[OccamsMirror]

> screaming 90% of the time.

Well isn't that just awesome parenting.

[6510]

I'm not suggesting it is a good idea, it was just to illustrate the difference. He did learn grammar and went to university.

I'm pretty sure he is equally stubborn and hot headed as his dad if not more so. Now that I think about it, he even believes in pulling oneself up by the bootstraps. ha-ha