11 ms·

Most of the comments are focused on the supply of education. But I don't think the supply side is the problem, irrespective of teachers and high schools. Ther

• faangguyindia 1y ago
  not surprised you lose what you don't use, does modern world even require people using those reading and math skills anymore?
  • consp 1y ago
    Looking at the amount of contracts I have to read to even start software it should. Looking at how many people buy lottery tickets I guess the same for math.
  • dbish 1y ago
    yes, if you're in any job that interacts with a lot of people and is at least a little technical. writing for communication and math proficiency are both extremely important for being effective.
• PartiallyTyped 1y ago
  Not just education but overall intellectualism. It’s a purely cultural issue that can be observed by looking at demographics.
  • ars 1y ago
    > intellectualism It's interesting to blame anti-intellectualism because Republicans are usually labeled with that. But simultaneously it's Democrats that will dumb down classes to make sure even the worst performing student will pass. And this is also anti-intellectualism, but of a different sort. The combination is failing our students, doesn't matter the political orientation. I'm involved in education, I see this every day - I spoke with someone taking a class on how to reach students, and due to no-child-left-behind, this is actually a class on how racism holds back black students and what to do about it (answer: Make simpler, easier classes). It's completely silent on any other type of student.
    • doritosfan84 1y ago
      A Republican promoted and implemented No Child Left Behind though? Maybe I’m misunderstanding your point.
      • ars 1y ago
        My point is that Democrats are implementing it by making classes worse for everyone. Republican states aren't doing that. It's not the concept of No Child Left Behind that is bad, it's the implementation (and it's used as a reason to worsen classes).
        • Yossarrian22 1y ago
          Those states are declining too
      • BirAdam 1y ago
        That republican had stated during his campaign that he wanted to end the department of education…
        • bigstrat2003 1y ago
          Which I agree we should do, carefully. The federal government has no constitutional authorization to create educational standards for the country. Therefore, let those standards be set by the states.
          • aprilthird2021 1y ago
            What country with enviable educational results operates this way? Genuinely curious
            • jl6 1y ago
              Not sure where the UK stands on enviable results, but education is a devolved matter where the constituent countries can make independent decisions as opposed to there being a central government department that makes all decisions nationally.
  • paulcole 1y ago
    Tell us more about the cultural issue that can be observed by looking at demographics. What specifically stands out to you?
    • PartiallyTyped 1y ago
      Isn’t it obvious? Children of immigrants do way better. Children of Asian households do way better than other ethnicities, and children in impoverished areas do a lot worse. All of this is cultural and anyone who thought I implied race — which looks like you did — is a moron and a racist. IMHO this whole thing is environmental.
      • paulcole 1y ago
        This should be flagged for being a personal insult. I asked a question for details you failed to provide in your first comment. > All of this is cultural and anyone who thought I implied race — which looks like you did There’s no way this can be true because I never think before I comment here.
    • chithanh 1y ago
      One is the observation that first- and second-generation black immigrants have much higher share of college admissions than their share of the black population, despite similar socio-economic status to African Americans with longer family history in the US. https://www.insidehighered.com/admissions/article/2017/10/09/cornell-students-revive-debate-whom-colleges-should-count-black https://www.insidehighered.com/admissions/article/2017/10/09...
• eli_gottlieb 1y ago
  "Culture" is downstream of incentives.
  • deleted 1y ago
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  • soulofmischief 1y ago
    And constraints. To call this a cultural issue is insane. I have firsthand seen the structural problems with institutional education. My scholastic experience was hell and anti-intellectual from day one, and it was all institutional issues.
    • potato3732842 1y ago
      And the institutions reflect culture. The fact that these institutions can exist at the low-performing state they do is a direct reflection of the culture of the people who run them, send their kids to them, pay taxes to support them, etc. The schools can only do what they do to the degree that people aren't willing to put up with it.
      • soulofmischief 1y ago
        Institutions are supposed to protect culture, but they have failed due to the actions of a small elite class. It's like blaming a child for not having parents.
        • mensetmanusman 1y ago
          [flagged]
        • potato3732842 1y ago
          Have they failed? Or are they dutifully resisting cultural shift that threatens the "don't think critically, just go to work, pay your taxes, don't question the system, don't do drugs, go to college, get a job, lease a new car, buy a condo, cross your fingers that stonks go up enough for you to retire" late 20th early 21st century status quo "ideal citizen" and "ideal culture" that they were built to foster (and who are the kind of people who fill out the majority of the system)? The way I see it peddling blue state bullshit and red state bullshit (depending on a given school district's location) is simply a common sense adaptation districts are making to garner support from local populations who were willing to support the system so long as it provided useful education at a non-insane cost but are more critical now that the deal is worse.
• bxsioshc 1y ago
  Just look at HN. Nominally an educated crowd, but talk about physics, and you immediately see terms like "ivory towers" or "return on investment", despite the fact that most on HN doesn't understand in fundamental science works.
  • nradov 1y ago
    A lot of the complaints here about physics have to do with focusing so heavily for decades on string theory (or M-theory) which hasn't produced much in the way of practical results. At some point we have to quit throwing good money after bad and redirect funding towards other lines of inquiry.
    • OccamsMirror 1y ago
      Is the purpose of life purely to seek a monetary return on investment?
      • nradov 1y ago
        Is the purpose of theoretical physics purely to seek mathematical innovations with no connection to objective reality?
        • Yossarrian22 1y ago
          Define objective
    • bxsioshc 1y ago
      [dead]
    • nathan_compton 1y ago
      Yes, but this is cartoon shit. String theory was a major research program in theoretical physics for a few decades but theoretical physics involves quite a lot more than string theory and physics involves quite a lot more than theoretical physics and if you stacked up all the budgets you'd find that string theory is a minor footnote. And also, its been a few decades since people took it very seriously as a strong candidate for a TOE. I really don't get it. As a total amount of any budget from any perspective, string theory has always been a blip whose cultural impact is much wider than its actual budgetary one. Like this critique about string theory is just a thing that people who are physics "enthusiasts" say and even to the extent that it is true, its really been more than a decade since it was a problem.
• paulddraper 1y ago
  > However,the United States, particularly in the last 50 years, seems to have fostered a culture averse to education. !! The rate of college graduates has increased nearby 50% over that timeframe. A rather unexpected result for a cultural aversion to education.
  • Mountain_Skies 1y ago
    Do you believe the average degree awarded today requires as much rigor as the average degree awarded half a century ago?
    • anonzzzies 1y ago
      Not sure in the US but where I am from thats very much the case; they went to the paid per graduated student vs just student and students having loans vs state money (to study forever) and it turned the focus on churning out graduates from providing academic rigor. I saw the shift sharply studying and then teaching from late 90s to early 00s and as I see my nephews doing cs degrees now: it's really easy I would say, not the rigorous (not very practical outside academics) learnings I started with. Not sure if its good or bad, just an observation. We already had technical schools for exactly this purpose, but I guess the unis were running steep losses for the gov while not enough prominent research and related companies came out of them.
      • consp 1y ago
        Academia is now vocational training but done badly. You get the pretend of academia and a very expensive loan as a bonus.
    • paulddraper 1y ago
      No, and the article would -- if anything -- suggest the opposite. My point is "culture averse to education" seems a strange assertion.
  • bigcat12345678 1y ago
    [flagged]
• dzink 1y ago
  It’s culture led by phones and other screens. Most teens are addicted to the screens. The need them for school and for socialization with friends and they end up on TikTok or another network and zombie there for most of their best brain years. They lack the ability to focus necessary to learn because the brain is used to constant screen simulation. Letting your child be babysat by a screen is absolutely the worst thing you can do to ever raise an adult.
  • decimalenough 1y ago
    I'm pretty sure the same argument was made for television, movies, radio and fiction books.
    • djeastm 1y ago
      Yes and it was a fair argument then, too. It's likely only a matter of degree of distraction.
    • throwaway31131 1y ago
      That’s certainly true but at the same time, when I was a kid in the early 90s, we watched TV but cartoons ended (we did not have cable or a computer). I came home from school, ate a snack, watched TV for about an hour with a friend, cartoons were over and we went outside. With the internet and YouTube etc. you’re never “done”
      • hombre_fatal 1y ago
        I remember racing home from school to catch Gundam Wing and Dragonball Z. And then they were over until the next day.
        • KPGv2 1y ago
          yeah but you get home at 4, watch an hour of anime, it's 5pm, you do homework for half an hour, then you have dinner with family until about 7, then you have about an hour of getting ready for bed/chores and that gets you to 8pm. At most you have one more hour of studying. So 90 minutes of education-related stuff at home a day in your ideal past where kids "only" spent an hour on TV.
• userbinator 1y ago
  The decline in the last 20 years was more noticeable, and the last 10 far more noticeable.
• liveoneggs 1y ago
  My kids don't get textbooks in public school, are comingled with highly disruptive kids (except in the limited gifted classes) and the curriculum is accelerated way past where it was when I was younger. So my anecdotal theory is that the (public) education system is optimized to the edges, abandoning the middle entirely, resulting in majority decline. They do get computers with TONS of dumb-ass apps and zero reference materials.
  • ivape 1y ago
    So, basically the general distribution strikes again? I guess the floor fell out, but what evidence do we have that the ceiling also went up? Could just be the same or lower when we normalize for grade inflation and requirement destruction.
  • sgc 1y ago
    My daughter had no textbook for Freshman physics, which is obviously the hardest class she is going to have in high school (or top 2). It was ridiculous. We wound up supplementing learning materials and paying a tutor, but it all felt like making up for piss-poor course structure. Her (very intelligent but distracted) teacher barely knew where to send me for supplemental materials. And this is in the "advanced" high school that is very hard to get into.
    • liveoneggs 1y ago
      How do they not know?! The parents at my school would gladly purchase materials for the classes if anyone bothered to ask for them.
      • bpt3 1y ago
        Your average teacher is about as intelligent, motivated, and skilled as your average American. How much initiative do you think a random office or retail worker would put into solving a problem they were presented with that they couldn't answer immediately and had no impact on their lives?
    • mercutio2 1y ago
• rayiner 1y ago
  The problem with that “culture” explanation is that white kids in America do fine in international educational comparisons. In the 2018 PISA assessment, 15 year old white american students were near the top in reading (behind only Singapore and some Chinese SEZs) and in the top echelon in science (comparable to Japan). Their weakest performance was math, where they’re around the middle, behind the top asian countries but only modestly behind Finland: https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pisa/pisa2018/pdf/PISA2018_compiled.pdf https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pisa/pisa2018/pdf/PISA2018_compi.... Insofar as the US had a “culture averse to education,” surely that affects white americans as much as it affects anyone else. But, on average, they are not the ones who are behind their peers internationally.
  • Mountain_Skies 1y ago
    Only if the US is a monoculture but we're a diverse multi-cultural society. Different cultural groups have different values and priorities.
    • 6LLvveMx2koXfwn 1y ago
      And different individuals within those cultural groups also have different values and priorities. A good education system supports everyone equally in achieving their goals.
      • bpt3 1y ago
        And when those goals are orthogonal to educational achievement, then what? The greatest predictor of academic success is the education level of a student's parents.
      • corimaith 1y ago
        Take that to its logical conclusion and we'd have individual, personalized tutors for each student. We don't have the resources for that, so some groups are going to get shafted. The question is which.
      • dbish 1y ago
• deleted 1y ago
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• Aurornis 1y ago
  > However,the United States, particularly in the last 50 years, seems to have fostered a culture averse to education. I always find it interesting that the anti-schooling mentality is so prevalent here on HN, too. It’s most obvious in threads about cheating, where a popular topic of discussion is to defend cheating as a rational reaction because school doesn’t matter, a degree is “just a piece of paper”, and you’ll learn everything on the job anyway. It also shows up in the tired argument that college is only really about networking, not learning. I’ve had some on and off experience mentoring college students in the past. Those who adopt these mentalities often hit a wall partway through college or even at their first job when their baseline intelligence runs out and they realize they don’t have the necessary foundation because they’ve been blowing off coursework or even cheating their way through college for years. I’m afraid that LLMs are only going to enable more of this behavior. It’s now easier to cheat and students are emboldened by the idea that they don’t need to learn things because they can always just ask ChatGPT.
  • harrall 1y ago
    I noticed a weird disdain for education too. I once posted in support of general education and it didn’t go so well. I suppose the people on HN are a certain demographic.
    • bpt3 1y ago
      I don't think it's a disdain for education, but a disdain for the educational system that currently exists in the US. If you have kids and experience it first hand, it's extremely underwhelming. If you were an outlier in any way as a student (and I bet a majority of people here are), it's extremely underwhelming. My wife and I have advanced degrees and place a very high value on education, and I have very little that's positive to say about the state of education in our very highly ranked public schools. They've completely lost the plot. But any criticism is presumed to be hostility to teachers (and their union) or flat out racism by a vocal and increasingly large segment of the population.
  • deleted 1y ago
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• togetheragainor 1y ago
  The cultural shift is secondary to the demographic shift. Young Americans have been squeezed at one end by mass immigration from countries with lower educational performance and literacy rates, higher crime rates, higher gang participation rates, etc., which accelerated to such an extreme that native English speakers are now a minority in our local school district. And they’re squeezed at the other end, forced to compete for college admissions, jobs, and housing against a hungry and ambitious global population vying for H-1Bs and student visas. We sold out the younger generation, our own children and grandchildren, and it wasn’t at all driven by political and corporate machinations. No, it was for some greater good, and if you dare question that you’re a fascist.
  • myrmidon 1y ago
    > We sold out the younger generation [...] for some greater good, and if you dare question that you’re a fascist. I think this is a very flawed argument. Immigration was tolerated/encouraged because it kept demographics stable, labor affordable and economic growth high. Pretending now that the previous generations did this for some "greater good" or out of misguided kindness is disingenuous.
• hintymad 1y ago
  > There is more and cheaper education available than ever before. The real issue isn’t the availability of learning materials, but the healthy pressure and right push from experienced teachers. People tend to overestimate how self-driven most students are. The truth is, most students aren’t naturally motivated to learn. They need society to give them a sense of purpose, and they need teachers to challenge them with problems that keep them just outside their comfort zone. Sadly, the U.S. school system provides neither. Take my kid as an example: even though he’s in a decent public school, he thinks his schoolwork is tough and the SAT is challenging. Yet the SAT wouldn't even measure up to the high-school graduation exam in my country, let alone the college entrance exam. In the end, it’s the broad middle of students who suffer from low standards. With the right motivation and push, they could learn so much more, but instead they end up wasting precious time in high school.
  • legacynl 1y ago
    > The real issue isn’t the availability of learning materials Well, some people claim in these comments that their children don't get textbooks. Not saying that you're wrong, but it's gonna take a lot of 'healthy pressure and right pushes' to account for the fact that they don't have educational material.
    • bpt3 1y ago
      In my kids' schools, the textbooks haven't been removed due to cost, they have been replaced with even more expensive online material that no one properly consumes. Educators have been brainwashed into believing "computers are the future!" and don't seem to be able to even contemplate that reading something on a screen is a poor substitute for physically interacting with something (a pen and paper, a book, or the actual thing being described in a video). I regularly have to tell my kids to stop doing math and science problems on their computer and get out a pencil and paper to do the work so they can organize it and understand it. They argue at first because their teachers tell them not to (so they say), but stop when they actually see it working.
• heresie-dabord 1y ago
  > seems to have a culture averse to education Nay, not "seems", but has indeed subverted education. Hofstadter's Pulitzer-winning book was published 62 years ago [0] and now, in 2025, even the highest office is unrecognisable. [0] _ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-intellectualism_in_American_Life https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-intellectualism_in_Americ...
• wnc3141 1y ago
  I don't know about this. In my community atleast, most kids want to do the best they can in school and feel more pressure than ever for admission to top schools - who are more selective than ever. Particularly since competition for knowledge economy jobs is tighter than ever.
• tw04 1y ago
  In my community, it’s both. The referendum to continue funding the teachers who supported the advanced math and reading classes didn’t pass. The referendum didn’t pass because a large swath of the community saw no value in having advanced math and reading classes. I have no doubt there was a lot of “I didn’t go to advanced classes and I turned out just fine, that’s a waste of money” thought process.
• notmyjob 1y ago
  That’s one hypothesis: American culture is degenerate. I offer an alternative hypothesis: corporations influence policy. Corporations would simply prefer to import skilled workers than to have to pay taxes to educate Americans. Evidence for my hypothesis can be found in Vivek et al’s endorsement of the lazy Americans hypothesis. It is a narrative the GOP gets from corporate donors and not from Joe Sixpack fox tv viewers who make up the base.
  • deleted 1y ago
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• etempleton 1y ago
  In the US there are a few obvious things, but everyone acts as if we are powerless to solve them: 1. Cell phones in classrooms. I don’t know how or why they were ever allowed. They should have to be in a backpack or in a locker and off during class. 2. Not removing students with bad behavior from classrooms and schools. The current thinking on how to handle a student who is seriously misbehaving and potentially violent is to remove all of the other students from the classroom versus just removing the problematic student in question. This is because there have been instances where a child has been physically removed and has gotten seriously injured. The thinking on expulsion is that it should essentially never happen because kids who get expelled have bad outcomes later in life. But the net effect is that one bad student can hold an entire classroom hostage and there is nothing the teacher can do. This is obviously detrimental to all of the kids who are compliant and behaving. It also causes burnout which leads me to the next major issue facing public schools. 3. Good teachers are quitting It isn’t worth it to teach in America. You need a lot of expensive education. You get paid very little. You have no power to remove a student who are major disruptions and make it impossible to teach. And, in many districts, teachers are being accused of trying to indoctrinate children because we live in a politicized world. 4. Too many parents aren’t parenting The number of kids who are not potty trained by kindergarten continues to rise. This is an issue of parents not wanting to do something that is hard and takes patience. 5. Lowering Standards When faced with kids failing the solution should never be to lower long held standards. The kids are the same, they are just as capable, it is all of the above that is different. Bonus. We feed kids junk in schools This has been going on for decades. Why is it so hard to make fresh food for kids? It could probably cost about the same if done properly. The answer is it takes some effort and people have to think about it.
  • 1970-01-01 1y ago
    Point 5 has been a thing for a very long time with respect to sports. The kid is marked-up a few points on tests if they're the reason the basketball team is winning.
  • atwrk 1y ago
    Re point 2: In Germany, among other countries, you have social education workers (a college-educated job) in school for these situations. Such behavior has underlying causes, e.g. problems at home (fresh divorce, drugs, poverty-related stress) recent trauma (accidents, death of a loved one, abuse), mental illness (AHDS etc.). Treat the cause and the behavior changes.
• Mallowram 1y ago
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• alphazard 1y ago
  > However,the United States, particularly in the last 50 years, seems to have fostered a culture averse to education. There's good reason for this. Not everyone enjoys learning for the sake of it. The pitch for forced education is that it will help you sustain yourself as an adult. If adults are finding their time in forced public education to be regretted, then they pass that information onto the younger generations. Maybe there are better ways to acquire useful skills. I'm always a little surprised to see the HN crowd so in favor of education. The median commenter writes programs for a living, and probably acquired that skill mostly on their own. They might enjoy learning for its own sake, but surely they can look at their own situation objectively and realize their marketable skill came more from free time, computer access, and internet access, than an educational institution. If the strategy was to bet on what already worked for oneself, and hope it works for others too, then they would want to pull money out of schools and put it into libraries, computer labs, and internet cafes.
  • HankStallone 1y ago
    That's all true, but this crowd also leans heavily progressive. Progressives have a great faith in processes and systems. Get the right top-down systems in place, and everything will be good. Naturally that includes the school system, especially government schools. It might be okay that I was self-taught, because I'm special; but we can't let regular people be doing that sort of thing.
    • alphazard 1y ago
      > It might be okay that I was self-taught, because I'm special; but we can't let regular people be doing that sort of thing. That's an interesting theory. It definitely explains a lot of what we see. I don't know if anyone self-describing as progressive would sign off on it as their own thinking. Phrased the way you put it, it also seems like a kind of cognitive bias almost like the gambler's fallacy. Assuming that the concrete data you have is not representative, and instead the opposite is more likely to occur. The correct reasoning would be "this definitely worked for me, assume I'm not special and try to make the same path easier for others". The reason I think it might be a strawman is that the ideology your talking about does want to help others, and that thinking would make them less effective at that goal.
• breakyerself 1y ago
  It's easy to blame culture. It's kind of a thought terminating cliche. Once you've assigned blame to a general attitude among the public there nothing much to be done. We could examine the common differences between US education and other high performing nations and try to reform towards something more effective, but really culture is the problem so let's all pack it up and find something else to worry about. I think the one way that American culture does prevent progress is that Americans tend to be averse to evidence based reforms. They like to atomize responsibility for everything down to the individual. Homelessness, drug addiction, poor education outcomes, poor health outcomes, it's all just individuals making bad decisions or perpetuating bad culture. If we did anything that actually helped it would somehow be condoning/encouraging the badness of these individuals. Regardless of how effective it would be it's somehow worse than allowing the problem to fester.
• commandlinefan 1y ago
  Also, high schoolers who see their advanced degree-holding parents out of work for months or years at a time may begin to wonder if the effort is worth it - education is a lot of work for comparatively little benefit.
• dathinab 1y ago
  but it being available "on the internet" doesn't mean it' available to a child! it also misses the important aspect that for children you need to nudge them into the right direction of learning it also misses that children today often get bombarded with a non stop stream of skillfully engineered distractions and dopamine loops, that makes it much harder to nudge them in the direction of educating themself. oh and all the fake news, fake education etc. isn't helping either,
• apparent 1y ago
  You're sort of not allowed to mention culture in the context of education. Otherwise people might realize that different cultural groups have very divergent education outcomes. For example, Asian students study 2x as much as white students and 3x as much as black students. It is likely not unrelated that Asian students have much better educational outcomes, regardless of class. For example, Asian students whose parents have no HS degree perform better on the SAT than black students whose parents have a doctoral degree.