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Why we’re working our young people too hard

124 points by ZenJosh 15y ago

Icer3107 15y ago
So many times I have complained about the horrors of Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Access and Turbo Pascal and Typing Mario (does anybody even know what that is anymore?). Education is a complete mess. There’s a particular sentence that I think needs more emphasis: "I noticed a recurring theme. Hackers would bring up anecdotes of playing around with BBC Micros in their spare time, learning C in their spare time or building basic command-line games in their spare time." How do they think they are helping us children by stuffing us with hours upon hours of mindless work, following instructions on textbooks almost verbatim, whether it’s Computer Science or Math or Chemistry or Literature? Students are only allowed to interpret a literary work as the teachers see fit, only allowed to play with chemicals on paper in their own imagination, only given dull Math problems and a few certain “tricks” to solve them, and, yes, of course, only allowed to complete computer projects that involve Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or Access. I don’t hate you, Bill Gates, but your office suite is killing me. There has to be change. Only the best of the best will be able teach him/herself the basics of IT while survivng high school (and K12 and higher education in general); the rest will just lose interests even though they have tremendous capabilities. Not to mention how it gets lonely once in a while.
- dfxm12 15y ago
  How do they think they are helping us children by stuffing us with hours upon hours of mindless work, following instructions on textbooks almost verbatim, whether it’s Computer Science or Math or Chemistry or Literature? This is because it is too hard to grade otherwise. I agree with you, it stinks, but the first step to solving a problem is understanding it. We “need” these types of assignments to gauge the progress of the students. Maybe the instrument is wrong, but all things considered, it’s the best we have. Ideally we’d have more teachers to reduce class size & these teachers will have the skills to make children explore. Instead, we have standardized tests that only really measure how well you can prepare for standardized test.
  - Wilduck 15y ago
    It's good that we've recognized many of the problems with education. However, simply recognizing them isn't enough. I think that in this post you've highlighted the next step. I'd love to see a slew of articles that talk about different testing methods rather than all of the articles we see about different teaching methods. These articles are interesting, but are accompanied only by anecdotal evidence that the different methods are doing any good. It's not that they aren't, it's just that we can't measure it.
  - drivingmenuts 15y ago
    The politicians who fund our schools demand results so they can get elected/re-elected. The numbers they need can only be obtained through standardized, modular testing. It's a vicious cycle. There are schools that eschew the standardized, rote methods of learning. But they produce people like Cory Doctorow, who is a writer/speaker/etc. and doesn't produce anything terribly useful. Well, except for thoughts, books, etc. - things that do not follow measurable standards. But certainly no iPhones, yet. We will have to flip the whole teaching scheme on it's head in order to sort this out, and it will be painful. Teachers will have to be valued more than engineers and politicians (since the teachers produce little engineers and politicians) and we'll actually have to trust them to know enough and do their job. Possibly even pay them more. Until then, it's square pegs in round holes all around. NOTE: I am not Cory Doctorow nor would I even know him if he laid a hard, sharp thought on me in a crowded room. But he did go to a liberal school in Canada.
    - anamax 15y ago
      > The politicians who fund our schools demand results so they can get elected/re-elected. You write "demand results" like it's a bad thing. It isn't. If we're not getting "results", why bother? Of course, which results we're talking about matter. I'll pay for some results but not others. > The numbers they need can only be obtained through standardized, modular testing. Not true. We tried the alternative, namely "trust the teachers". We got crap results. That said, a kid who can read a crappy standardized test is better off than a kid who can't. I mention that because we have hundreds of thousands of kids who can't read. If you can't measure it, how do you know whether you're doing it?
gatlin 15y ago
I was sucking it big time on a video game once, and my friend turned to me and said "Don't try harder; try better." We should be working young people better.
- nocipher 15y ago
  It's interesting how subtle yet important that difference is.
  - billpatrianakos 15y ago
    I don't get the difference. Can someone please explain? Seriously, I'm not kidding.
    - anigbrowl 15y ago
      Don't try to become faster or quantitatively better at something you're having enormous difficulty with; seek to become qualitatively better by trying different approaches to solving the same problem.
    - Kuiper 15y ago
      To extend the video game analogy, one activity that some video gamers have made a sport of is "speed running," or trying to completely a single-player game in as little time as possible. Sites like http://speeddemosarchive.com/ http://speeddemosarchive.com/ host videos, and people compete to get the lowest time. There are two ways that one typically goes about improving on the existing record. The first is to look at the video posted by the current record holder, dissect the run, and find all of the small mistakes that the current record-holder made. Shave off a few seconds here, a few seconds there, and by the end of your run you've beaten a game in 4 hours and 57 minutes instead of 5 hours. That's playing harder. The other way to break existing records is to start completely from scratch, map out the game and figure out if there's a different route to take that the previous runner didn't. Maybe it's doing the levels in a different order so you spend less time walking across the world map. Maybe you spend an extra 10 minutes picking up a stronger sword that allows you to save 20 minutes over the course of the game because you're killing enemies faster. These are the kinds of improvements that lead to people turning a 5 hour game into a 4 hour game. That's playing better, not harder.
steverb 15y ago
I don't think the blame can be necessarily be placed entirely on the school systems though. I find that I have to fight my own urges to over schedule my kids' free time. I am also way more involved in my kids' lives than my parents were, for better and sometimes for worse. I think it's important for parents to make sure that their kids have some time to do nothing, get bored, and find their own mischief and passions. It's a tough balancing act.
- kstenerud 15y ago
  My parents had a very laissez-faire approach to involvement in our lives. They'd have some family activities from time to time, but for the most part it was up to us to find things to do. We'd disappear in the morning and so long as we were back by dinner (mandatory family time), all was well. Sometimes I'd go check out what my father was doing in his workshop, and he'd show me how to use the tools or teach me the theories behind whatever he was working on (construction, metal work, electronics, magnetism, etc). It was up to me to decide if I was interested enough to try my own hand at it, and there was no fallout if I decided after starting that I wasn't interested after all. As a result, we've grown up to be independent thinkers. We don't depend on other people to give our lives meaning or to give us structure. And most importantly, we're all very creative. Kids will find things to be interested in so long as you don't smother them or stunt their independence.
  - nazgulnarsil 15y ago
    anecdotes are not data. you have no idea of the correlation between your upbringing and your creativity and independence. twin studies disagree with you.
    - john_b 15y ago
      An anecdote about one's own life is not just an anecdote...it's personal experience. And personal experience offers a perspective that no amount of data can. We are discussing how to nurture creativity and productive skills, after all, and inherent in that goal there is a severe measurement problem that severely limits any data-driven approach. The twin studies I'm aware of basically say that you can expose twins to identical circumstances and they will still turn out different. I'm not sure how that contradicts his main point though.
tel 15y ago
This article finally revealed to me the mathematical structure of curriculum optimization. It's a bias/variance tradeoff. If you've done statistics, you know that B/V tradeoffs are more or less an unavoidable feature of optimization or learning. If you go in with less clear goals, you depend on learning on the fly to find the best solution which means your performance varies a lot depending on environmental conditions. If you go in with very clear goals, it's likely that people will cluster around them tightly, but if you're wrong with your bias, you'll be surely fucked. How do you beat B/V tradeoffs? You put in more effort, more experience, better sharing of information. You select your biases very carefully such that they are less clear but cannot possibly be wrong. You constrain your variance such that it is less harmful to your task. Finally, there's the idea of consistency and convergence rates. Consistency means that if any person spends enough time and effort they will eventually overcome both bias and variance and find the best solution. Rate of convergence is how much time and effort it takes to get reasonably close. Consistency and fast convergence are highly valuable properties, obviously, but both are easy to hurt and destroy, especially through biasing.
firefoxman1 15y ago
It's often hard to see a bright side of something as broken as the US educational system, and perhaps I'm just a weird kid, but the mindless bureaucratic nature of school actually caused me to seek out more interesting subjects and read more books whenever possible because school never left me "satisfied." I used all of my high school "elective" blocks to attend a specialty school to study CIT (graduated high school A+ and NET+ certified!) and spent all of my free time doing IT consulting and building websites for clients. It taught me a TON, but I'm almost positive that if school was mentally fulfilling each day I probably would have just gone home and watched TV and socialized like everyone else. It is strange, though, that while most most of the messages and predictions of dystopian/Cyberpunk novels and films tend to be vastly over-exaggerated, the underlying principals and ideas seem to have come true. One of the nearly universal themes tends to be an extremely bureaucratic and systematic world and when you compare most aspects of 21st century life to 50 years ago, it's a little frightening.
- mechanical_fish 15y ago
  While consulting and building websites is a fine thing, it is not the only thing. Moreover: You literally have the rest of your life to do paying work. Unless the alternative to going to work as a kid is hardship or hunger (which would be an even more regrettable problem) I see no sense in rushing into the workforce. It would be nice if your school had been interesting enough to capture your attention with one of the hundreds of other subjects of possible study. One, perhaps, that is mind-expanding and awesome but which doesn't pay. Math and science. Art and music. History and philosophy. Languages and literature. Machine shop and robotics lab. Studying these things is what school is for. Building stuff for clients is what the remaining five or six decades of your working life are for. I find it heartbreaking that the most interesting thing you found to do in your school days was to get a NET+ certification. Obviously, everyone's tastes are different, and details matter, but my first-order reaction is to regard that as a terrible failure of your environment.
  - firefoxman1 15y ago
    Well like I said, I found lots of subjects interesting because they weren't ruined for me by school. I'm only taking a few classes in college now, yet I find myself spending every free moment in the school's library because I feel free to learn on my own terms now. So I guess to clarify, what I meant in my first comment was that school sucking helped me learn the one of most important skills around: self education. In the past few years I've become interested in several subjects that I wouldn't have enjoyed in a classroom setting. My recent interests have been philosophy (specifically Stoic and Epicurean), tea, Javascript and Node.js, Redis and MongoDB, Japanese art and aesthetics, investing/finance, Guitar, and classical music. I hated learning Visual Basic, for example, because my teacher was aweful. That's what you risk when you put your education in the hands of others. When you teach yourself a subject, the only person you have to blame is yourself if you don't learn it well.
SamColes 15y ago
TWENTY TWO GCSEs? Christ... You didn't go to a comprehensive!
- ZenJosh 15y ago
  Yes, I did. Students with upwards of twenty GCSEs are not all that uncommon anymore
  - dpkendal 15y ago
    In general, I think students from better schools get fewer GCSEs. I went to a selective state grammar school and I only got the usual ten.
    - ZenJosh 15y ago
      I think you're spot on there, better schools take fewer GCSEs, thus (Im assuming) producing a higher caliber of student not necessarily in terms of qualifications, but in terms of depth of knowledge and culture
      - JonnieCache 15y ago
        I also went to a state grammar and got about ten. I find it hard to understand how you can get 22 though. Your workweek wasn't any longer than mine, and I certainly don't remember any days off. What on earth is the point of doing 22 GCSEs? They become worthless the moment you get your A levels. I like to think I would've refused to go along with that.
        watmough 15y ago
        I did ok getting 8 back in 1983, one of the smartish kids. Then 5 highers then university at 16. I find the thought of 20 absolutely bone-chilling.
brudgers 15y ago
>"... = Better future workforce" Any educational system where that is the goal is going to be fucked from the beginning...at least for anybody who agrees with Dewey's idea that the goal of education is to make better people. A country that considers itself made up of consumers and workers rather than citizens, invites crap like SOPA, PATRIOT, and the TSA's shoe fetish.
- mentat 15y ago
  The goal of a country is to continue improving the quality of life of its citizens. Grouping working and consuming in that is totally bogus. Working (theoretically) produces things which should, all in all, improve the quality of life. Consuming is totally different and an essentially broken way to promote growth.
  - asolove 15y ago
    Of course, not working is a much quicker way to increase most people's quality of life.
    - DanBC 15y ago
      The (UK) Sainsbury Centre for Mental Health would disagree. They've been pushing hard on a "helping people with MH problems get back to work"; not just for the benefits to wider society but for the benefits to the individual of better mental health.
    - mqqq 15y ago
      A person without a job is more likely to be depressed, even if they don't need the job to pay their bills i.e. Rich people.
    - brc 15y ago
      I disagree entirely, for two reasons: 1) Working is all about becoming a part of society, of contributing, of belonging. Few people can take a prolonged period of not contributing without some level of depression. 2) The overall quality of life of people is determined by the application of time and labor saving devices, as well as by technical enhancements to lifestyle and health. There is no higher improvement of quality of life than low infant mortality and longer lifespans. All of these things are delivered by a society that embraces specialisation as a way of increasing productivity by everyone. Sure, you'll get no argument from me that pointless consumerism backed up by debt-based spending is not the path forwards, but that is an entirely different proposition to stopping working altogether. Only the committed hobo will get satisfaction from a life like that.
robot 15y ago
Education is broken. Everyone is different, and meant to excel at one thing they do well to make a difference, yet the standardized education forces people to be indifferent. It also keeps you locked in an idealized world of grades and exams delaying your chance to become street-smart for a mere 15 years. We then end up with people in their 30s having their first born children, whereas the biological clock for this kicks at teen ages.
- Volpe 15y ago
  > Everyone is different, and meant to excel at one thing they do well to make a difference And that one thing is genetically wired? As in their DNA was just 'Ballet Dancing' inclined? The only reason people excel at something, is because they practice it.
  - robot 15y ago
    They are not genetically wired but definitely inclined.
robfig 15y ago
This article is working ME too hard in order to read a dark grey font on a darker grey background
- ghurlman 15y ago
  Oddly, I liked it, but that's probably due to my bias for coding with a dark background. I highly recommend installing one of the many instapaper/readability extensions -- god knows with my ever-aging eyes I'm hitting that '~' key more and more often.
- mbostock 15y ago
  Agreed. To fix, open up the JavaScript console: $("p").css("color", "white").
- ZenJosh 15y ago
  Fixed. Try now.
tayeke 15y ago
I ignored English homework and taught myself jquery. Now people call me incredibly smart and are jealous of the great agency I started working for at only 21. These days kids have to take education into their own hands, because even though there are classes available in a subject; techers do not know what knowledge is most relevant in the workplace.
- firefoxman1 15y ago
  Agreed. Self-education is just so much more scalable because a self-educator doesn't need a teacher or assignments to learn. All one needs is a book or access to a knowledge on a subject. The Internet has connected us to more knowledge one every subject imaginable than previous generations could have dreamed, and yet most of my friends still take classes on something that can be picked up with a few tutorials and a well-written book. It's a lot of extra money down the drain that could be spent other, wiser ways.
  - pnathan 15y ago
    Baloney. Stuff worth knowing in academia takes dedicated effort and access to deep resources that are unavailable on the internet. Even knowing what book to read can be a significant challenge. Just cause you can read some tutorials, watch a MIT lecture, and write PHP/jQuery does not a computer scientist or a mathematician make.
    - lukejduncan 15y ago
      Taking a class and getting a piece of paper also does not a computer scientist make.
      - pnathan 15y ago
        maroons happen everywhere. But I guarantee you only the most amazing and celebrated of individuals have self-taught themselves advanced mathematics and performed at the highest level of the art. The only one I can think of the modern era is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan, who is essentially legendary for what he did. The core issue is climbing the tower of knowledge of what has gone before requires deep investment and usually a guide until you attain a deep and broad knowledge. There is so much knowledge, we must leech off of the knowledge of those who have also done the studying and have more experience. It's a pain.
tayeke 15y ago
I ignored English homework and taught myself jquery. Now people call me incredibly smart and are jealous of the great agency I started working for at only 21. These days kids have to take education into their own hands, because even though there are classes available in a subject; techers do not know what knowledge is most relevant in the workplace.
swombat 15y ago
For what it's worth, though I didn't do GCSE's (I was in Switzerland at the time), I coasted through A-levels without much effort. Other high achievers I know also spent about 2-3 days max (in addition to the required time sitting on a school chair, of course) studying and revising for each "paper". That left plenty of time for many extra-curricular activities.
mferrell 15y ago
I'm lucky enough to attend a high school where freshman are required to take the equivalent of AP Computer Science, and those who wish to can go on to take CS classes taught by teachers with PhDs from MIT and Yale - you'd be hard pressed to find a better curriculum. Despite the environment, there are very few students with a "hacker" mentality- maybe ten or so, a number not drastically higher than what you'd expect to find anywhere else. Plenty of kids choose to take the upper level (from a high school perspective) classes, and have no trouble understanding recursion, pointers, or any of the traditional hangups, but it's a much smaller number who would ever consider working on a project that wasn't assigned by a teacher. For everyone else, even among these incredibly bright students, programming is seen as the work you have to sludge through in order to guarantee a cushy $120k job. For this small percentage of self-motivated students, the free time proposed in the original post would be a godsend, used more productively than any sort of schoolwork. For most everyone else, however, regardless of intelligence, CS education, or resources available, this time would be thrown away to TV or video games, with a net productivity less than an hour spent doing the most menial busywork under the dullest of teachers. I think many of us on Hacker News, surrounded by peers who are the sort of people that start businesses, tend to forget that while students might spend lectures wishing they were elsewhere, that elsewhere is rarely 80x24. Admittedly, I don't have a solution. Increased STEM funding helps, no doubt, but not in the exponential way many of us envision. Resources in the form of state of the art equipment or funding for student projects only serves to empower those who are already driven, and this drive seems to be something determined long before students enter high school.
billpatrianakos 15y ago
I take issue with the idea that there is too much structured time and students need more unstructured time to be creative. I think there's room for lack of structured time but not in school. Does this mean to give a students so,e materials and tools (materials/tools can be anything from clay or other art supplies to mechanic's tools, to computers with an IDE installed) and let them just make something? I don't like that idea. That's not real creativity. We should be teaching critical thinking skills, then giving them tools and materials along with, most importantly, a problem to solve with a set of constraints. Now that is what creativity is all about. The article is from the UK point of view so I can't speak for them but in the States here we need something more like I described. And really, students aren't too overworked. They're just made to memorize and vomit up later useless facts for standardized tests instead of being taught critical thinking or problem solving skills. Here, teachers get the short end of the stick. Especially the ones who are really passionate about teaching. I've got several friends and my mother who are all finishing up teaching degrees or have just started teaching and they tell me all the time that they aren't given the tools they need to properly teach their students. Here we're teaching what used to be middle school math in the 50's in college. I'm not sure if overworked students is a problem. At least not in the U.S.
- asolove 15y ago
  I think this is no different than the situation with programmers. Are most programmers "overworked" in that they get too much done? No. But many are "overworked" in that they are constantly distracted with little problems and don't protect enough time to think hard about any single issue. As a result, they do lots of short-sighted work and don't get enough done overall, but also feel constantly busy and hard-working. I think that's pretty close to what normal high school is like today. There are constant distractions for standardized testing, mandatory this-and-that, worry about your SAT scores, etc. And not enough sitting down to understand what this novel is really about. Or what an integral really is. I think this explains both the subjective feeling that students are "overworked" and the objective truth that they aren't doing or learning nearly as much as was traditionally expected of students.
  - ZenJosh 15y ago
nchuhoai 15y ago
jesus, please increase the contrast, i can barely read it http://contrastrebellion.com/ http://contrastrebellion.com/
forensic 15y ago
Nobody wants to admit that the concept of "school" itself was designed to church out assembly line slaves. It's not a surprise that when the system is designed to turn humans into robots... that's what you get. Anyone who comes out of school with useful skills does it despite school, not because of school. John Taylor Gatto figured this out years ago.
- pnathan 15y ago
  Can we get more citations for this besides Gatto? I.e., do we have citations to some of Dewey's works, or the early 1900s academic reformers advocating this?
  - forensic 15y ago
    Compare and contrast tradition schools for the wealthy with what became public school. A proper education comes when you put pupils in a room with a very smart person and let them question him. He answers their questions and introduces them to new ideas. Pupils guide the learning, tutors are just a resource. There are no lesson plans. This is how the great thinkers have learned and taught since the dawn of man. This is how the wealthy and in-the-know still educate themselves. When public school was demanded, the educated upper class thought it abhorrent and dangerous to give poor children this kind of free-form, liberating education. They invented "public education" and modeled it after church education where students are preached to and rigidly controlled. Church is a place where poor people go to be controlled. Public school extended this control programming to the formative years of all the children of the non-elite. Everything in public schools is optimized to create obedience, unthinking, conformity, rigidity. Tell me one thing you learned from a lesson plan that did you any good. All the great thinkers, today and in the past, learned by directing themselves and (ideally) questioning smart people. Never by being whipped into doing lesson plans, always by following their creativity and doing investigations and self-directed projects.
    - pnathan 15y ago
      That is a thought experiment, not a citation. Also, German schooling was famously rigid, and produced a sizable crop of scientists in the 1900-1960 era.
InclinedPlane 15y ago
Several factors are important here: Degeneration of K-12 education. College freshmen have to spend significant effort (up to 1-2 years on average I'd guess) just getting caught up to levels of basic mastery of reading, writing, logic, and mathematics that they should have had as a HS graduate. Increasing concentration on volume of "material" rather than on level of mastery. As the college loan bubble and the increasing reliance on a college degree as a necessary credential for most white collar work colleges have shifted towards becoming degree mills. More and more students are valuing the credential more than the knowledge, and they are pumping huge amounts of money into the system sustaining those values. This necessarily warps the institutions of higher education. And as they struggle with ways to soak up massive influxes of tuition without throwing their integrity out the window (or losing their accreditation) they've increasingly fallen back on volume and intensity of course work in lieu of demonstration of mastery of knowledge.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
compman775 15y ago
No matter how bad the problem may be, please use a lighter background and higher contrast.
Robelius 15y ago
I find this to be quite hilarious. I just came back from a movie at my school called "Race To Nowhere" that touches on the issue. I then participated in a 45 minute discussion with members of my community, including my principal and other staff at my school. I was going to go onto Hacker News and make a very detailed thread on the topic....but someone stole my thunder. I will be back over the weekend to discuss this. I obviously can't leave with just this post since it's a pretty low quality post. So here it is: We must shift the focus of education back to education. It is ridiculous to believe that a single letter can show how much work a student put in to learn the content. A "C" can be given to a student who puts in their best effort but just can't remember when to use a semi colleen. Yet an "A" can be given to a student who crams for the test the night before, yet can't think critically on any subject. We must rethink our approach to education, and shift it back to education, rather than to that test at the end of the year.

124 points by ZenJosh 15y ago

So many times I have complained about the horrors of Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Access and Turbo Pascal and Typing Mario (does anybody even know what that is anymore?). Education is a complete mess. There’s a particular sentence that I think needs more emphasis: "I noticed a recurring theme. Hackers would bring up anecdotes of playing around with BBC Micros in their spare time, learning C in their spare time or building basic command-line games in their spare time." How do they think they are helping us children by stuffing us with hours upon hours of mindless work, following instructions on textbooks almost verbatim, whether it’s Computer Science or Math or Chemistry or Literature? Students are only allowed to interpret a literary work as the teachers see fit, only allowed to play with chemicals on paper in their own imagination, only given dull Math problems and a few certain “tricks” to solve them, and, yes, of course, only allowed to complete computer projects that involve Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or Access. I don’t hate you, Bill Gates, but your office suite is killing me. There has to be change. Only the best of the best will be able teach him/herself the basics of IT while survivng high school (and K12 and higher education in general); the rest will just lose interests even though they have tremendous capabilities. Not to mention how it gets lonely once in a while.

dfxm12 15y ago
How do they think they are helping us children by stuffing us with hours upon hours of mindless work, following instructions on textbooks almost verbatim, whether it’s Computer Science or Math or Chemistry or Literature? This is because it is too hard to grade otherwise. I agree with you, it stinks, but the first step to solving a problem is understanding it. We “need” these types of assignments to gauge the progress of the students. Maybe the instrument is wrong, but all things considered, it’s the best we have. Ideally we’d have more teachers to reduce class size & these teachers will have the skills to make children explore. Instead, we have standardized tests that only really measure how well you can prepare for standardized test.
- Wilduck 15y ago
  It's good that we've recognized many of the problems with education. However, simply recognizing them isn't enough. I think that in this post you've highlighted the next step. I'd love to see a slew of articles that talk about different testing methods rather than all of the articles we see about different teaching methods. These articles are interesting, but are accompanied only by anecdotal evidence that the different methods are doing any good. It's not that they aren't, it's just that we can't measure it.
- drivingmenuts 15y ago
  The politicians who fund our schools demand results so they can get elected/re-elected. The numbers they need can only be obtained through standardized, modular testing. It's a vicious cycle. There are schools that eschew the standardized, rote methods of learning. But they produce people like Cory Doctorow, who is a writer/speaker/etc. and doesn't produce anything terribly useful. Well, except for thoughts, books, etc. - things that do not follow measurable standards. But certainly no iPhones, yet. We will have to flip the whole teaching scheme on it's head in order to sort this out, and it will be painful. Teachers will have to be valued more than engineers and politicians (since the teachers produce little engineers and politicians) and we'll actually have to trust them to know enough and do their job. Possibly even pay them more. Until then, it's square pegs in round holes all around. NOTE: I am not Cory Doctorow nor would I even know him if he laid a hard, sharp thought on me in a crowded room. But he did go to a liberal school in Canada.
  - anamax 15y ago
    > The politicians who fund our schools demand results so they can get elected/re-elected. You write "demand results" like it's a bad thing. It isn't. If we're not getting "results", why bother? Of course, which results we're talking about matter. I'll pay for some results but not others. > The numbers they need can only be obtained through standardized, modular testing. Not true. We tried the alternative, namely "trust the teachers". We got crap results. That said, a kid who can read a crappy standardized test is better off than a kid who can't. I mention that because we have hundreds of thousands of kids who can't read. If you can't measure it, how do you know whether you're doing it?

gatlin 15y ago

I was sucking it big time on a video game once, and my friend turned to me and said "Don't try harder; try better." We should be working young people better.

nocipher 15y ago
It's interesting how subtle yet important that difference is.
- billpatrianakos 15y ago
  I don't get the difference. Can someone please explain? Seriously, I'm not kidding.
  - anigbrowl 15y ago
    Don't try to become faster or quantitatively better at something you're having enormous difficulty with; seek to become qualitatively better by trying different approaches to solving the same problem.
  - Kuiper 15y ago
    To extend the video game analogy, one activity that some video gamers have made a sport of is "speed running," or trying to completely a single-player game in as little time as possible. Sites like http://speeddemosarchive.com/ http://speeddemosarchive.com/ host videos, and people compete to get the lowest time. There are two ways that one typically goes about improving on the existing record. The first is to look at the video posted by the current record holder, dissect the run, and find all of the small mistakes that the current record-holder made. Shave off a few seconds here, a few seconds there, and by the end of your run you've beaten a game in 4 hours and 57 minutes instead of 5 hours. That's playing harder. The other way to break existing records is to start completely from scratch, map out the game and figure out if there's a different route to take that the previous runner didn't. Maybe it's doing the levels in a different order so you spend less time walking across the world map. Maybe you spend an extra 10 minutes picking up a stronger sword that allows you to save 20 minutes over the course of the game because you're killing enemies faster. These are the kinds of improvements that lead to people turning a 5 hour game into a 4 hour game. That's playing better, not harder.

steverb 15y ago

I don't think the blame can be necessarily be placed entirely on the school systems though. I find that I have to fight my own urges to over schedule my kids' free time. I am also way more involved in my kids' lives than my parents were, for better and sometimes for worse. I think it's important for parents to make sure that their kids have some time to do nothing, get bored, and find their own mischief and passions. It's a tough balancing act.

kstenerud 15y ago
My parents had a very laissez-faire approach to involvement in our lives. They'd have some family activities from time to time, but for the most part it was up to us to find things to do. We'd disappear in the morning and so long as we were back by dinner (mandatory family time), all was well. Sometimes I'd go check out what my father was doing in his workshop, and he'd show me how to use the tools or teach me the theories behind whatever he was working on (construction, metal work, electronics, magnetism, etc). It was up to me to decide if I was interested enough to try my own hand at it, and there was no fallout if I decided after starting that I wasn't interested after all. As a result, we've grown up to be independent thinkers. We don't depend on other people to give our lives meaning or to give us structure. And most importantly, we're all very creative. Kids will find things to be interested in so long as you don't smother them or stunt their independence.
- nazgulnarsil 15y ago
  anecdotes are not data. you have no idea of the correlation between your upbringing and your creativity and independence. twin studies disagree with you.
  - john_b 15y ago
    An anecdote about one's own life is not just an anecdote...it's personal experience. And personal experience offers a perspective that no amount of data can. We are discussing how to nurture creativity and productive skills, after all, and inherent in that goal there is a severe measurement problem that severely limits any data-driven approach. The twin studies I'm aware of basically say that you can expose twins to identical circumstances and they will still turn out different. I'm not sure how that contradicts his main point though.

tel 15y ago

This article finally revealed to me the mathematical structure of curriculum optimization. It's a bias/variance tradeoff. If you've done statistics, you know that B/V tradeoffs are more or less an unavoidable feature of optimization or learning. If you go in with less clear goals, you depend on learning on the fly to find the best solution which means your performance varies a lot depending on environmental conditions. If you go in with very clear goals, it's likely that people will cluster around them tightly, but if you're wrong with your bias, you'll be surely fucked. How do you beat B/V tradeoffs? You put in more effort, more experience, better sharing of information. You select your biases very carefully such that they are less clear but cannot possibly be wrong. You constrain your variance such that it is less harmful to your task. Finally, there's the idea of consistency and convergence rates. Consistency means that if any person spends enough time and effort they will eventually overcome both bias and variance and find the best solution. Rate of convergence is how much time and effort it takes to get reasonably close. Consistency and fast convergence are highly valuable properties, obviously, but both are easy to hurt and destroy, especially through biasing.

firefoxman1 15y ago

It's often hard to see a bright side of something as broken as the US educational system, and perhaps I'm just a weird kid, but the mindless bureaucratic nature of school actually caused me to seek out more interesting subjects and read more books whenever possible because school never left me "satisfied." I used all of my high school "elective" blocks to attend a specialty school to study CIT (graduated high school A+ and NET+ certified!) and spent all of my free time doing IT consulting and building websites for clients. It taught me a TON, but I'm almost positive that if school was mentally fulfilling each day I probably would have just gone home and watched TV and socialized like everyone else. It is strange, though, that while most most of the messages and predictions of dystopian/Cyberpunk novels and films tend to be vastly over-exaggerated, the underlying principals and ideas seem to have come true. One of the nearly universal themes tends to be an extremely bureaucratic and systematic world and when you compare most aspects of 21st century life to 50 years ago, it's a little frightening.

mechanical_fish 15y ago
While consulting and building websites is a fine thing, it is not the only thing. Moreover: You literally have the rest of your life to do paying work. Unless the alternative to going to work as a kid is hardship or hunger (which would be an even more regrettable problem) I see no sense in rushing into the workforce. It would be nice if your school had been interesting enough to capture your attention with one of the hundreds of other subjects of possible study. One, perhaps, that is mind-expanding and awesome but which doesn't pay. Math and science. Art and music. History and philosophy. Languages and literature. Machine shop and robotics lab. Studying these things is what school is for. Building stuff for clients is what the remaining five or six decades of your working life are for. I find it heartbreaking that the most interesting thing you found to do in your school days was to get a NET+ certification. Obviously, everyone's tastes are different, and details matter, but my first-order reaction is to regard that as a terrible failure of your environment.
- firefoxman1 15y ago
  Well like I said, I found lots of subjects interesting because they weren't ruined for me by school. I'm only taking a few classes in college now, yet I find myself spending every free moment in the school's library because I feel free to learn on my own terms now. So I guess to clarify, what I meant in my first comment was that school sucking helped me learn the one of most important skills around: self education. In the past few years I've become interested in several subjects that I wouldn't have enjoyed in a classroom setting. My recent interests have been philosophy (specifically Stoic and Epicurean), tea, Javascript and Node.js, Redis and MongoDB, Japanese art and aesthetics, investing/finance, Guitar, and classical music. I hated learning Visual Basic, for example, because my teacher was aweful. That's what you risk when you put your education in the hands of others. When you teach yourself a subject, the only person you have to blame is yourself if you don't learn it well.

SamColes 15y ago

TWENTY TWO GCSEs? Christ... You didn't go to a comprehensive!

ZenJosh 15y ago
Yes, I did. Students with upwards of twenty GCSEs are not all that uncommon anymore
- dpkendal 15y ago
  In general, I think students from better schools get fewer GCSEs. I went to a selective state grammar school and I only got the usual ten.
  - ZenJosh 15y ago
    I think you're spot on there, better schools take fewer GCSEs, thus (Im assuming) producing a higher caliber of student not necessarily in terms of qualifications, but in terms of depth of knowledge and culture
    - JonnieCache 15y ago
      I also went to a state grammar and got about ten. I find it hard to understand how you can get 22 though. Your workweek wasn't any longer than mine, and I certainly don't remember any days off. What on earth is the point of doing 22 GCSEs? They become worthless the moment you get your A levels. I like to think I would've refused to go along with that.
      - watmough 15y ago
        I did ok getting 8 back in 1983, one of the smartish kids. Then 5 highers then university at 16. I find the thought of 20 absolutely bone-chilling.

brudgers 15y ago

>"... = Better future workforce" Any educational system where that is the goal is going to be fucked from the beginning...at least for anybody who agrees with Dewey's idea that the goal of education is to make better people. A country that considers itself made up of consumers and workers rather than citizens, invites crap like SOPA, PATRIOT, and the TSA's shoe fetish.

mentat 15y ago
The goal of a country is to continue improving the quality of life of its citizens. Grouping working and consuming in that is totally bogus. Working (theoretically) produces things which should, all in all, improve the quality of life. Consuming is totally different and an essentially broken way to promote growth.
- asolove 15y ago
  Of course, not working is a much quicker way to increase most people's quality of life.
  - DanBC 15y ago
    The (UK) Sainsbury Centre for Mental Health would disagree. They've been pushing hard on a "helping people with MH problems get back to work"; not just for the benefits to wider society but for the benefits to the individual of better mental health.
  - mqqq 15y ago
    A person without a job is more likely to be depressed, even if they don't need the job to pay their bills i.e. Rich people.
  - brc 15y ago
    I disagree entirely, for two reasons: 1) Working is all about becoming a part of society, of contributing, of belonging. Few people can take a prolonged period of not contributing without some level of depression. 2) The overall quality of life of people is determined by the application of time and labor saving devices, as well as by technical enhancements to lifestyle and health. There is no higher improvement of quality of life than low infant mortality and longer lifespans. All of these things are delivered by a society that embraces specialisation as a way of increasing productivity by everyone. Sure, you'll get no argument from me that pointless consumerism backed up by debt-based spending is not the path forwards, but that is an entirely different proposition to stopping working altogether. Only the committed hobo will get satisfaction from a life like that.

robot 15y ago

Education is broken. Everyone is different, and meant to excel at one thing they do well to make a difference, yet the standardized education forces people to be indifferent. It also keeps you locked in an idealized world of grades and exams delaying your chance to become street-smart for a mere 15 years. We then end up with people in their 30s having their first born children, whereas the biological clock for this kicks at teen ages.

Volpe 15y ago
> Everyone is different, and meant to excel at one thing they do well to make a difference And that one thing is genetically wired? As in their DNA was just 'Ballet Dancing' inclined? The only reason people excel at something, is because they practice it.
- robot 15y ago
  They are not genetically wired but definitely inclined.

robfig 15y ago

This article is working ME too hard in order to read a dark grey font on a darker grey background

ghurlman 15y ago
Oddly, I liked it, but that's probably due to my bias for coding with a dark background. I highly recommend installing one of the many instapaper/readability extensions -- god knows with my ever-aging eyes I'm hitting that '~' key more and more often.
mbostock 15y ago
Agreed. To fix, open up the JavaScript console: $("p").css("color", "white").
ZenJosh 15y ago
Fixed. Try now.

tayeke 15y ago

I ignored English homework and taught myself jquery. Now people call me incredibly smart and are jealous of the great agency I started working for at only 21. These days kids have to take education into their own hands, because even though there are classes available in a subject; techers do not know what knowledge is most relevant in the workplace.

firefoxman1 15y ago
Agreed. Self-education is just so much more scalable because a self-educator doesn't need a teacher or assignments to learn. All one needs is a book or access to a knowledge on a subject. The Internet has connected us to more knowledge one every subject imaginable than previous generations could have dreamed, and yet most of my friends still take classes on something that can be picked up with a few tutorials and a well-written book. It's a lot of extra money down the drain that could be spent other, wiser ways.
- pnathan 15y ago
  Baloney. Stuff worth knowing in academia takes dedicated effort and access to deep resources that are unavailable on the internet. Even knowing what book to read can be a significant challenge. Just cause you can read some tutorials, watch a MIT lecture, and write PHP/jQuery does not a computer scientist or a mathematician make.
  - lukejduncan 15y ago
    Taking a class and getting a piece of paper also does not a computer scientist make.
    - pnathan 15y ago
      maroons happen everywhere. But I guarantee you only the most amazing and celebrated of individuals have self-taught themselves advanced mathematics and performed at the highest level of the art. The only one I can think of the modern era is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan, who is essentially legendary for what he did. The core issue is climbing the tower of knowledge of what has gone before requires deep investment and usually a guide until you attain a deep and broad knowledge. There is so much knowledge, we must leech off of the knowledge of those who have also done the studying and have more experience. It's a pain.

tayeke 15y ago

swombat 15y ago

For what it's worth, though I didn't do GCSE's (I was in Switzerland at the time), I coasted through A-levels without much effort. Other high achievers I know also spent about 2-3 days max (in addition to the required time sitting on a school chair, of course) studying and revising for each "paper". That left plenty of time for many extra-curricular activities.

mferrell 15y ago

I'm lucky enough to attend a high school where freshman are required to take the equivalent of AP Computer Science, and those who wish to can go on to take CS classes taught by teachers with PhDs from MIT and Yale - you'd be hard pressed to find a better curriculum. Despite the environment, there are very few students with a "hacker" mentality- maybe ten or so, a number not drastically higher than what you'd expect to find anywhere else. Plenty of kids choose to take the upper level (from a high school perspective) classes, and have no trouble understanding recursion, pointers, or any of the traditional hangups, but it's a much smaller number who would ever consider working on a project that wasn't assigned by a teacher. For everyone else, even among these incredibly bright students, programming is seen as the work you have to sludge through in order to guarantee a cushy $120k job. For this small percentage of self-motivated students, the free time proposed in the original post would be a godsend, used more productively than any sort of schoolwork. For most everyone else, however, regardless of intelligence, CS education, or resources available, this time would be thrown away to TV or video games, with a net productivity less than an hour spent doing the most menial busywork under the dullest of teachers. I think many of us on Hacker News, surrounded by peers who are the sort of people that start businesses, tend to forget that while students might spend lectures wishing they were elsewhere, that elsewhere is rarely 80x24. Admittedly, I don't have a solution. Increased STEM funding helps, no doubt, but not in the exponential way many of us envision. Resources in the form of state of the art equipment or funding for student projects only serves to empower those who are already driven, and this drive seems to be something determined long before students enter high school.

billpatrianakos 15y ago

I take issue with the idea that there is too much structured time and students need more unstructured time to be creative. I think there's room for lack of structured time but not in school. Does this mean to give a students so,e materials and tools (materials/tools can be anything from clay or other art supplies to mechanic's tools, to computers with an IDE installed) and let them just make something? I don't like that idea. That's not real creativity. We should be teaching critical thinking skills, then giving them tools and materials along with, most importantly, a problem to solve with a set of constraints. Now that is what creativity is all about. The article is from the UK point of view so I can't speak for them but in the States here we need something more like I described. And really, students aren't too overworked. They're just made to memorize and vomit up later useless facts for standardized tests instead of being taught critical thinking or problem solving skills. Here, teachers get the short end of the stick. Especially the ones who are really passionate about teaching. I've got several friends and my mother who are all finishing up teaching degrees or have just started teaching and they tell me all the time that they aren't given the tools they need to properly teach their students. Here we're teaching what used to be middle school math in the 50's in college. I'm not sure if overworked students is a problem. At least not in the U.S.

asolove 15y ago
I think this is no different than the situation with programmers. Are most programmers "overworked" in that they get too much done? No. But many are "overworked" in that they are constantly distracted with little problems and don't protect enough time to think hard about any single issue. As a result, they do lots of short-sighted work and don't get enough done overall, but also feel constantly busy and hard-working. I think that's pretty close to what normal high school is like today. There are constant distractions for standardized testing, mandatory this-and-that, worry about your SAT scores, etc. And not enough sitting down to understand what this novel is really about. Or what an integral really is. I think this explains both the subjective feeling that students are "overworked" and the objective truth that they aren't doing or learning nearly as much as was traditionally expected of students.
- ZenJosh 15y ago

nchuhoai 15y ago

jesus, please increase the contrast, i can barely read it http://contrastrebellion.com/ http://contrastrebellion.com/

forensic 15y ago

Nobody wants to admit that the concept of "school" itself was designed to church out assembly line slaves. It's not a surprise that when the system is designed to turn humans into robots... that's what you get. Anyone who comes out of school with useful skills does it despite school, not because of school. John Taylor Gatto figured this out years ago.

pnathan 15y ago
Can we get more citations for this besides Gatto? I.e., do we have citations to some of Dewey's works, or the early 1900s academic reformers advocating this?
- forensic 15y ago
  Compare and contrast tradition schools for the wealthy with what became public school. A proper education comes when you put pupils in a room with a very smart person and let them question him. He answers their questions and introduces them to new ideas. Pupils guide the learning, tutors are just a resource. There are no lesson plans. This is how the great thinkers have learned and taught since the dawn of man. This is how the wealthy and in-the-know still educate themselves. When public school was demanded, the educated upper class thought it abhorrent and dangerous to give poor children this kind of free-form, liberating education. They invented "public education" and modeled it after church education where students are preached to and rigidly controlled. Church is a place where poor people go to be controlled. Public school extended this control programming to the formative years of all the children of the non-elite. Everything in public schools is optimized to create obedience, unthinking, conformity, rigidity. Tell me one thing you learned from a lesson plan that did you any good. All the great thinkers, today and in the past, learned by directing themselves and (ideally) questioning smart people. Never by being whipped into doing lesson plans, always by following their creativity and doing investigations and self-directed projects.
  - pnathan 15y ago
    That is a thought experiment, not a citation. Also, German schooling was famously rigid, and produced a sizable crop of scientists in the 1900-1960 era.

InclinedPlane 15y ago

Several factors are important here: Degeneration of K-12 education. College freshmen have to spend significant effort (up to 1-2 years on average I'd guess) just getting caught up to levels of basic mastery of reading, writing, logic, and mathematics that they should have had as a HS graduate. Increasing concentration on volume of "material" rather than on level of mastery. As the college loan bubble and the increasing reliance on a college degree as a necessary credential for most white collar work colleges have shifted towards becoming degree mills. More and more students are valuing the credential more than the knowledge, and they are pumping huge amounts of money into the system sustaining those values. This necessarily warps the institutions of higher education. And as they struggle with ways to soak up massive influxes of tuition without throwing their integrity out the window (or losing their accreditation) they've increasingly fallen back on volume and intensity of course work in lieu of demonstration of mastery of knowledge.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

compman775 15y ago

No matter how bad the problem may be, please use a lighter background and higher contrast.

Robelius 15y ago

I find this to be quite hilarious. I just came back from a movie at my school called "Race To Nowhere" that touches on the issue. I then participated in a 45 minute discussion with members of my community, including my principal and other staff at my school. I was going to go onto Hacker News and make a very detailed thread on the topic....but someone stole my thunder. I will be back over the weekend to discuss this. I obviously can't leave with just this post since it's a pretty low quality post. So here it is: We must shift the focus of education back to education. It is ridiculous to believe that a single letter can show how much work a student put in to learn the content. A "C" can be given to a student who puts in their best effort but just can't remember when to use a semi colleen. Yet an "A" can be given to a student who crams for the test the night before, yet can't think critically on any subject. We must rethink our approach to education, and shift it back to education, rather than to that test at the end of the year.