The pressure to achieve academically is a crime against learning | Hacker News Reader

The pressure to achieve academically is a crime against learning

theatlantic.com

232 pointstokenadult198 comments

I do not think the pressure comes directly from the need for higher grades. I think it come from how those grades are created.

I my academic history (highschool, undergrad, law school, now teaching) I only felt real stress where grades were incremental. Take my civpro class. We had an assignment after only three lectures, an assignment worth 5% of our grade. I had barely wrapped my head around law school and already my final grade, my scholarship, was on the line. I did poorly on that assignment, immediately chopping a few points off my final grade. On the other hand my crimlaw class had no assignments, just a big exam at the end. That class allowed me the time to figure things out and was much less stressful.

The highschool kids I talk to today are in a constant panic. ((That's how I see it. For them it's just normal.)) Grades are ridiculously high, with class averages well north of 90%. So every test, every graded assignment, requires the focus of a final exam. They cannot afford diversion or outside learning. Each week is prep for the next test and each of those tests directly impacts their grade. Have a bad week, or even a bad afternoon, and it might stick with you for years. They don't dare read anything that isn't assigned for fear of not aligning with the teacher's "learning plan". If it didn't come from teacher it isn't on next week's test and is therefore useless. Imho this constant "exam mode" is the real source of stress.

So drop the microtests. Give them the one big exam and let them relax and learn at their own pace the rest of the time.

Disagree. While I did well in the same system in law school, most people I know hated the one-and-done testing system. That said, you do have a point in situations where testing is practically constant (and affects the final grade) - there's probably a happy medium to be found somewhere...

I certainly remember many students with that view. After first year they started carefully arranging courses and boasted about how they would never have to write another exam ... until the bar. I think I had a final for every course but LRW and a bioethics class.

Yep, same here - paper classes were a real pain and always made the end of a semester rather unpleasant with deadlines looming. Just saying that system is a bit extreme, and I don't think it's universally applicable.

I took a class from Matt Might and I like how we were graded:

"Your grade is your tests grade or your projects grade, whichever is higher." http://matt.might.net/teaching/compilers/spring-2015/#gradin...

This allowed both the really good test takers to succeed and also those who did better on projects, without all the pressure.

...at the expense of people who are moderately good at both.

I believe the sentiment was more: I understand that you may have a bad day/week/month and do poorly on a project, but don't sweat it. If you really do know your stuff you can still prove it on the exams.

I think it is fair and better than purely weighted grades because it allows for momentary failure while still requiring knowledge of the material.

Not really. If you're moderately good at both then you'll get a similar score on both, and they will average out to about the same as both. So you'll still get the score you would've gotten before.

As opposed to everyone else who will get a higher score than they would've gotten before.

That means your grade will be worse than it would've been otherwise when compared to your peers (which is the only useful meaning of a grade).

People who are really good at one thing but not another are very useful in society, and this grading system would seem to reflect that fact.

That would seem to justify the commonly done separation of project courses from non-project courses. It's not a great idea to lump the two together, nearly always one or the other suffers if the project is non-trivial. But even then one can suffer, it's just spread out across all classes instead of the individual class. Project courses are tricky to integrate into a curriculum well.

i wouldn't say specialization in taking exams is a useful skill for society.

You can't do well at exams if you don't know the material.

It means your grade won't be artificially inflated by people who know the material but take tests badly.

If you're moderately good at both, in the combined grade you would have done... (wait for it) moderately.

So what's the problem?

I am absolutely against that exam culture so I like that suggestion a lot. The exam perspective is just completely artificial which has nothing to do with the real world. That project based approach mirrors the real world much better where you can compensate for almost anything just by rising the effort one is putting into something.

Yeah I actually advocate for the moderate form of what you're expressing.

My issue with single, high-worth exams was that sometimes I would screw up, have some misconception in my head, and if it wasn't cleared up until the exam I was done.

I think you should be examined on a semi-regularly basis where each exam is worth an equal amount of grade.

That way the effects of various externalities, like I was sick, had something bad happen that week, or just didn't learn the material as well as I thought could be smoothed out of a period of time.

There are things that can be done within exams to counter those issues. For instance, the exams I set are heavily scaled. There may be 200 points available to be earned across 15 short essay questions. The raw scores generally fall between 45-90, which I then scale to set an acceptable average. So you can bomb or even skip questions and still be top of the class.

Not much can be done if a student is sick on the day, but I would argue that multiple tests on multiple days only increases the likelihood of sickness during at least one test.

I have never understood scaling, exams are meant to provide employers and yourself with a rating of how well you know the subject, ideally in comparison to everyone else in the field. So if you fail, but everyone else fails too, you get an A. If yo do 'well' but a group of 5 out of 30 excel, you get a lower than representative grade (representative of your knowledge). How about making the questions worth points and the 100 points = 100%? 93+ = A, 80-93 = B etc. That's how all 3 of my undergrad degrees worked. I knew what I needed to do for a grade and damn everyone else.

Normalisation makes more sense over larger populations. If most people across a large group do much worse on a particular exam, is it more likely that everyone screwed up, or that the exam was unusually hard?

Universities I have attended have procedures to deal with those instances in which everyone performs equally badly. It is almost always an indication that something else is amiss. Your answer has not convinced me that giving an A to a student who got 55% correct on a test displays a command of the subject simply because everyone else got 30% correct.

Sure, in exceptional cases investigation is probably necessary. But there are still more marginal cases where one exam gets worse results than another.

>Your answer has not convinced me that giving an A to a student who got 55% correct on a test displays a command of the subject simply because everyone else got 30% correct.

The point is that it's just as unconvincing to say the student that got 55% is comparable to another student that got 55% in an exam where that was the lowest score. Exams are not perfectly comparable measures of absolute "mastery", so we have to use statistics to try and derive as much information as we can from their results.

If students in one cohort consistently perform worse, it's probably their fault, but if students in one exam perform worse, it's more likely the examiner's fault.

A lot of professors in my field (physics) see tests as a learning tool where one is presented with new things to be figured out. In my undergrad, exams were typically open-book and consisted of a few long, multipart problems. It does not make sense to scale such exams to 100%.

Anyway, by setting the expected mean to around 50%, you get a more accurate evaluation of people's understanding (by minimizing truncation at the limits).

How about a ton of exam opportunities that are entirely optional and are just for preparation, giving you time to understand the material with checks from the teacher, followed by two tests at the end, with the greater of the two scores being the one that decides your grade?

(1) That's a lot of work for the prof. (2) Grade inflation is part of the problem. I don't see how taking only the higher grades helps this.

Increased work for the prof should of course be balanced by decreasing work somewhere else. How many courses could have (some or all) video lectures recorded beforehand and assigned to watch as homework, thus saving the teacher lecture time and allowing the students who need extra help (and who otherwise would slow the whole class down by interrupting non-video lectures) to visit during office hours, or ask during a smaller lecture Q/A time slot of normal class, and point out exactly what parts of the recorded lecture they struggled to follow? And those who don't speak up their questions will get frequent feedback on their misconceptions anyway from the optional tests and determine if they should try harder or just drop the course.

As a prof, pre-recording video lectures doesn't save time -- it's a lot of work. And then you can't see the faces of students and react to their current state of understanding. Students "slowing down the class" are about 80% of the time providing the primary value of in-person instruction: they're creating the interaction that makes a lecture valuable.

What you suggest has essentially been done, with "book" substituted for "video". That's why all those profs wrote books -- they figured the students could read beforehand, thus saving the teacher lecture time and allowing students who need extra help to visit during office hours. That's the dream; video is simply a change in format. I point out to students often what parts of the book they should return to when they struggled to follow.

The most interesting question for me is what new technology adds or allows beyond old technologies. Analogize: what were the elements that changed from reading a serial in the paper to watching a show on TV to listening to a serial podcast to watching a YouTube series? As someone currently employed as a "prof who makes videos" I refuse to do any video unless I think it adds something beyond simply changing information format!

This is pretty much how some of the better known standardized testing regimes work - SATs and the British O and A level exams.

"So drop the microtests."

I disagree. Tests are part of the learning process.

The problem is when expectation is 90%+. When that happens, there's no margin to differentiate between minor mistakes and actual misunderstandings -- the signal is lost in the noise.

A good test will amplify the signal and attenuate the noise.

Formative or summative tests?

There's no rule that says every test has to count to your final grade.

I think the calibration of quizzes and tests is already an area of research that is receiving academic attention, it's just that there's a gulf between research and practice.

I also agree with emphasizing tests more, since measuring homework is so noisy (tutors and parents double-checking homework), but I definitely don't think having one big test is the right way. One of the reasons why people might face test stress is by dealing with the stress at the last minute.

Learning, understanding & doing: real value for self Testing: external value for others

The latter is useless in both the real world and for the student. Tests/grades aren't the only way to show progress.

(disclaimer: dad homeschooling a kid)

Well I suppose that is the Oxbridge model.

And you're right. It allowed me to pursue extracurriculars (rowing) throughout the year and then adjust to final exam studying at the end of the year.

Microtests should be bonuses; they should contribute to your final grade but you should be able to get A on the final exam even with 0 bonus points. So for a person that works during the year this alleviates the final exam pressure while allowing others that for any reason weren't scoring a lot to prove they mastered what was required.

This is how it worked at my University some 15 years ago (for some classes at least). The teacher would give us optional assignments that if completed would score against the final exam. ASFAIR completing all assignments successfully meant you didn't need to take the exam unless you aimed for a higher grade than pass.

The UK system (at least when I was doing it) at GCSE (14-16) and A-level (16-18) consists of smaller module exams, but students are allowed to retake the exams each time they're administered. So if they do well, it takes the pressure off their future exams, but it's not the end of the world if they don't. (EDIT: They're also standardised, which is pretty much necessary for this to work.)

I think it's a good balance between the massive short-term stress of big exams, and the consistent stress of smaller exams.

Oxford has no exams in the second year for many subjects (and no tests other than maybe college 'collections' at the start of each term which don't count for anything, but my college didn't even do those for my subject).

Personally I really liked it as it gave me a lot of time to spend trying to really understand my subject without exams and revision hanging over me. It also helped I think that our tutors didn't generally set or mark the exams when we did have them. It did put a lot of pressure on for finals though knowing everything was hanging on how you performed over the course of eight exams in a fortnight.

Cambridge does this as well and I can't say I was a fan. In mathematics, three years of learning ends up being evaluated through five three-hour exams administered over the course of a week. All it takes is one to fall ill for that week and all of a sudden you don't get a grade. The best case scenario is you can convince the examination board your illness contributed to your performance and they might award you a DDH (Deemed to have Deserved Honours) which no one will really understand.

I went to Oxford, and this actually happened to me. I got ill during exams, and there's no mercy. I sat in the exam halls sweating, unable to breathe properly, trying to hand-compute an analysis of variance calculation. And a bunch of other trivial stuff like singular value decomposition and other linear algebra riddles.

I actually think having one big exam at the end isn't great. There's so much on the line you end up "learning" things too quickly, in a way that's focused on previous exam questions rather than actually learning stuff. And the stuff is actually interesting.

Perhaps a pass/fail system would be better, spread out a bit. The problem with the system is that incremental gains in the exam result are favoured over learning that's hard to quantify.

Yeah this is just the professors being lazy... The grief of having to write more tests and be accountable!

Immediately, you've come up with a solution that wouldn't fit my type of learning, and my comfort level. I absolutely abhor "final" exams. It's like a grand-finale that is make or break, forcing you to study a ridiculous amount of content and make sure you know/understand all of it for a single event in the future. If you fail, you have to do it all over again. No course-corrections, no motivational reminders/nudges. Nothing.

The example you cite in the beginning, your fear of the impending results of a small test. Now multiply that by 20 (as you said yours was just 5% of the final mark), and that is how anxious I would be for the entire course leading up to the final exam.

So drop the ubertests. Test students understanding using application and insight, not giant knowledge dumps that can only be tested in one long-winded sitting. (I exaggerate a little, sorry about that).

I have to wonder, if the outcome we are interested in is whether students understand the material, can't we do both? Some optional mid point tests, where the student can chose to keep the grade or bet it all on that final assessment?

I mean tests only exist to convince us that they know the material. Why does it matter how it works, beyond the test being an accurate reflection of their understanding?

Why not both? Some of my favourite classes have said, "Highest of midterms + assignment marks or final exam mark."

Now that is brilliant

Almost all of my computer science classes had two grading schemes - one "normal" one and another which was basically just taking your grade on the final exam and not counting anything else. That latter option actually saved me one time, but that's because I was astronomically lazy in that class and didn't do anything (didn't even show up to some quizzes, I think, when two quizzes added up to an exam). I definitely think that giving students the option is good, though, because if you asked me which I'd want I will always choose the small incremental tests over one huge test.

I always thought the time requirement was the breaking issue. If you could decide when you are ready for the test, would it matter which test style was used?

It's forcing students to learn on a fixed schedule that causes both issues. If they could go faster on easier topics and slower on harder ones, all this pressure goes away. You still have to learn it, but you take then test when you are ready, whenever that is.

Whether this is with small quizzes or with a final exam, I think the ability to practice and be sure you are ready would take away all the worries.

Of course, the incentive to go faster would be that you graduate sooner. But you want good grades, so you go slower. With guidance any student should be able to find a good pace.

> I do not think the pressure comes directly from the need for higher grades.

I strongly disagree, it entirely comes from the narrative instilled in all of us that we're screwed if we don't get top grades, that I am a huge failure if I can't get into an elite program. If that pressure wasn't there, neither would this problem. Some kids literally think it's the end of their life if they don't get into x,y,z school. There's no one telling them that college doesn't actually matter a fraction as much as it's built up in their head. Just get a degree, but I mean, at this point, 5 years out of college, you're not limited in the slightest by where your degree came from, not in this industry, where what skills you have and your hustle dictates all (granted a degree from an elite program gives you a marginal boost, but still marginal). My fellow Ivy League grads would get blown out of the water by some of the people I work with.

That is completely untrue. It may be true for tech jobs which rely on hard skills, but for any sort of management jobs, graduate school admissions, banking jobs - virtually anything else - pedigree matters a lot.

The majority of tech jobs here in Europe will expect a degree in CS or something similar in the listings.

At least in the UK, it is definitely not like that.

Most IT-related jobs do not mention a degree as requirement, and of those that do, many have an "or equivalent experience" clause.

This is how I remember it to be when I was looking for a job 2 years ago, but I also made a quick search for "devops", "senior developer" and similar positions in London through indeed.co.uk just now to confirm it.

yes, but that's it. be it the best UNI in europe or worst in most cases doesn't have any impact at all, in worst is a very minor disadvantage that can be easily overcomed by showing skillset.

I'm not sure what parallel reality you're living in but what you're saying is not universally true. Here in India , it makes a huge difference where you went to college. Whether it comes to jobs , opportunities or even raising funding for your startup having that top college pedigree makes all the difference. Almost all the top startups are by alumni from the well known places.

Some companies won't even give you an interview if you're not from a top place. I myself sometimes regret not being able to get into a good place.

So , even I wish that what you said was true. But sadly it isn't.

Grades matter a lot , atleast as a signalling device if not anything else and kids are making the most logical choice among the options available to them and noone can blame them for it.

My experience has been the same as OP. It's not a parallel reality, its the US. It definitely does not matter where you go. If you work hard and and keep pushing yourself into more challenging positions, you'll be a highly competitive candidate for employment no matter what school you went to. Some may argue that those who get into good schools have a greater propensity to push themselves and achieve regardless of their situation - we hope that's true. But I have never in my experience seen such blindness toward graduates of lesser schools.

That hasn't been my experience. Students at top CS schools have much more access to recruiters at well known companies, who assign recruiters to particular schools. It's a lot harder to get an internship at such a company from a school without an assigned recruiter. Good CS schools also help students to get internships earlier in college, after freshman year.

I asked a professor in charge of admissions for a graduate program about their desired gpa. His response- 'What school did you go to?'.

Students at good schools don't have some innate willpower to push themselves harder- they have better opportunities available to them. That isn't to say that students at other colleges don't do just as well, it's just takes more effort.

I guess I'm biased from my personal experience. I started working on internships in high school. By the time I was in college, the better internships found themselves. I went to a good, but not top!, LAC but I still did well. Had my choice of grad schools based on my work - not my school. But I decided to drop out for other reasons. I have since had no issues making the 6 figs... So to anyone who tells me you need a top-college degree to get somewhere or make good money, I'd say there are probably other things at play. Now maybe I won't get a CTO position without a degree, but that is not being addressed here.

Seriously, if you feel like you are in an unfair position or want to talk about this stuff, send me an email. I love talking about this stuff. It's not about the school you go to - it's about what you do (have done) with your time.

If it mattered that much, I would not have been able to find jobs in US (and I did, in big name ones). My university is a shitty, unknown (but state run and legitimate) school in ex-USSR.

I have heard this about India and other countries as well. I think the original article is mainly talking about the United States though, and as others have said, the University you attend here matters very little for most jobs. The main exception is your first job after graduation.

Completely agree with that. As someone who came from the British education system (one big exam end of year) to the American college system (a test every week), I quickly realized that in the US I had no time to read around the syllabus. If you're being tested every week, you Have to stick to plan. Essentially, it is "teaching to the test".

I much prefer the British way. You have a lot of time to explore your interests without the risk of jeopardizing your future, you are given optional exams to test your knowledge, and you can bring it all together at the end of the year with a final exam.

It think the pressure comes from globalization. The meme for success has shifted from a local scope to the global one: You are only really successful if you work around the globe in an international company. There are however, due to hierarchical centralization, there are very few positions in the global market, so you end up with a lot of people competing for a very low number of high-end jobs. That creates pressure, and in return, out of empathy teachers grade more benevolently. At the same time the education systems became more centralized too, leading to competition as well: Good teachers are those with successful students, leading also to grade inflation yet again.

I’m unsure whether this problem is solvable (e.g. with basic income or laws that penalize globalization), or whether it will solve itself with time.

Gotta disagree wholeheartedly with you there. If I have one big exam at the end, I will procrastinate and likely end up doing poorly. Instead, in my medical school, we are quizzed at least once a week - this week alone I have 2 quizzes and 2 tests. I failed yesterday's quiz, as I knew I would since was at a wedding on the weekend. But I will know the material for the test on Friday, and now I know what kind of questions to expect.

Weekly testing lets me figure out how I'm progressing, whether or not my study habits are working, and also provides a significant amount of opportunities to do well - that quiz I failed yesterday really does not in anyway hinder me from acing the course.

A much better fix would be: don't count the two worst tests towards the average. This would allow you to screw up every now and then.

The logical extreme version is to take the median score.

You don't want a scheme where you know your course mark before the final, because then you have no incentive to try, and median allows this. If your marks are 75, 80, 80, 90, then regardless of what you get on the final, your mark will be 80.

Presuming that "trying" on the final is necessarily a good thing of itself.

Generally, outside of some relatively garbage introductory classes, I found that my classes either required 2-3 papers or projects, a midterm exam and a final, or some combination of the above. The more bullshit courses, generally with the shittier professors, would impose a "class participation" component of between 5-10%, and do other garbage like clicker-based quizzes during lectures to try to get people to actually come to class, instead of just doing the reading, when exams were not scheduled.

It would be better to set grades on a distribution rather than an absolute mark so you know that an A is the top 5% of the cohort that took the exam.

I just got out of public highschool a few years ago and it was fairly easy 99% of the time. Even the final exams didn't take serious studying. Any work that was "hard" was generally more tedious than challenging. It was an easy coast to get 90s. Maybe it's not high schools in general, just specific districts.

And this is why we homeschool. Have a weird fascination with the human eye? Here's three medical textbooks, knock yourself out kid. Suck at math? No problem, we will take it as slow as we have to until you feel comfortable. There's no grades and pressure there's just things you've learned and things you're still learning.

so what happens if you suck at maths, and took an extraodinarily long time to get to the same stage as institutional schools would have? When would you know you are ready to leave homeschooling, and move to university?

I believe that when my parents homeschooled my younger brother he was still expected to pass all the state achievement benchmarks.

I'm sure any such rule would vary by state in the US, though.

The time commitment is pretty intense. I think that I'd love to homeschool my hypothetical child because I trust myself to do it right-- but I couldn't also provide for my family in the meantime.

The time commitment is actually way less than you would expect. The amount of "fluff" that goes on during the school day is obnoxious. You could probably spend less than 3 hours a day and get a better education.

You really should hear how presumptuous you sound. How are teaching your son to deal with people? How is he going to learn that he lives in a society? That sometime life is boring? that sometimes you are not the only one? 3 hours a day might be enough for the curricular material, but schools are much much more than that.

You accuse debacle of being presumptuous, but you are presuming debacle doesn't already teach his/her son how to deal with people, learn he lives in a society, that sometimes life is boring, and that sometimes you are not the only one.

By the way, school is not the only answer for any of the questions you asked.

How is someone going to learn that he lives in a society being locked in a building all day with people exactly the same age and social class as he is? How is someone going to learn how to deal with people when they're constantly supervised by a team of bureaucrats whose job is to deal with students' problems for them? [1]

I don't think anyone is claiming that the ideal homeschooling childhood consists of only interaction between parents and child, and nobody else. Neighbors, fellow homeschoolers, family, church, Scouts, camp, trips, actual adults: these are all sources of socialization.

[1]I went to public school and it was good. But I'm open-minded to alternative forms of learning.

We're going into our third year of homeschooling our two kids, and I can confirm this.

Consider that an average class consists of 25-30 students; this means that for every hour of class time, your child averages about 2.5-3 minutes of one-on-one instructor time if the teacher did nothing else but work directly with individuals. Obviously in practice this doesn't work out: there are announcements, lectures, assemblies, fire drills, time for individual reading, and of course some students will demand more of the teacher's time than others either due to behavior problems or simply because they vocalize their need for help better than other kids.

Compare this to homeschooling, where the student-to-teacher ratio is much lower, and the teacher is intimately familiar with the student's strengths and weaknesses.

Also consider the teacher's motivation: it isn't a general love for teaching coupled with sticks & carrots imposed by the school, district and state but rather a parental desire for their children to learn and succeed.

But how much time in the American 8-hour school day is actually spent on education? A lower student-teacher ratio (i.e. 1:1) can drastically decrease time required for education. (I'm ignoring time required for other things like social activities, etc.) It's definitely a tradeoff!

I think probably a better solution is some sort of combination between home schooling and public school. Homeschooling alone makes it hard for children to learn peer social skills, and it makes it more difficult for them to relate later on to the majority of people who have had 13 years of primary/secondary education in a public school environment (in the US at least)

  > Homeschooling alone makes it hard for children 
  > to learn peer social skills...

I think you meant to say "Keeping your child at home alone..."

"Homeschooling" does not exclude socialization with other children.

No, I literally meant homeschooling. Not all types of socializing are the same. The main thing home-schooled kids miss out on is being put in rooms with a diverse set of people, some of which are likely to be very different from them. The friction of dealing with people you disagree with, and the broader worldview gained from exposure to different ideas/cultures/attitudes are what I'm referring to.

Setting up playdates with the other home-schooled kids, or being on the church basketball team, etc... will involve selecting your peers, which is something we rarely get to do in "real" adult life.

The argument that the only way that children gain exposure to people with different backgrounds/ideas is to attend public school is dubious. Contrast that with public schools in the U.S. which are highly socially stratified. (Kids from wealthy neighborhoods attend schools that are populated with kids from the wealthy neighborhood... Not really the perfect ideal of "diverse".)

(edit: The argument that children educated outside of the traditional school system find it more difficult to acquire social skills is also dubious.)

Where did you find data about the social stratification of public schools? I just attempted to find this information and found nothing...

Also, I don't think public school is the only way to get this exposure, but creating it elsewhere seems to be very difficult.

Why is it hard to send a kid to a summer camp, or a community program? There are all kinds of groups children can attend.

I see zero evidence for the idea that it's 'very difficult' to expose home schooled kids to diversity. Indeed it's much easier to do so than with public schooled kids.

Those types of things will definitely help, but it is a constant concern which is why I considered it difficult. A summer camp or community program which attracts all kinds of kids would be ideal, but it is a relatively short period of time compared with the 9 months of daily melting pot sessions in a typical public school. Additionally, if "summer camp" means a highly specific camp (like art camp, or theater camp, or Southern Baptist Christian camp), the benefits will be lesser. So, the difficulty is not in finding some amount of diversity, it is matching the level many public schools offer.

What are these 'melting pot sessions' you are talking about, and how do they teach social skills, empathy, and conflict resolution?

  > Where did you find data about the social 
  > stratification of public schools?

Here's one: http://pulse.ncpolicywatch.org/2013/01/18/economic-disparity...

This was a good find, thanks.

However, one of the findings supports my case: "Public charter schools are much more likely than regular public schools to be racially unbalanced. Whereas 30 percent of regular public school students attended a racially unbalanced school (one with less than 20 percent or more than 80 percent minority enrollment), more than 60 percent of charter school students attended a racially unbalanced school. This measure considers the racial makeup within a particular school, rather than comparing the school to the county as a whole."

Based on this, regular public schools are more likely to be diverse or "balanced" than not. This paragraph glosses over it, but it shows that 70% of regular public school students attend a school which has a balanced mix of students from different backgrounds. The segregated public schools are the exception, not the norm, but that segregation increases when parent choice is introduced (i.e. with charter schools where only 40% of students are attending a balanced/diverse school).

Your thesis was that home schooled pupils have a more difficult time aquiring social skills than their public school educated peers. How does this study (or this quote) support that claim?

It wasn't my claim that home-schooled students have difficulty acquiring social skills in general, it was that they miss out on a specific set of social skills, namely dealing with people who are different from them, whom they do not like, who have different opinions, etc... while maintaining productivity. Basically: learning to work together with a diverse set of peers and maybe to empathize with people who see the world differently, or to at least gain experience in coping with differences.

The study/quote supports this by giving a rough indication of how most public schools are diverse places. Obviously, this doesn't "prove" the entirety of my statements, it just offers a small amount of support in the area of public schools being either segregated or diverse.

  > The study/quote supports this by giving a rough indication 
  > of how most public schools are diverse places...

No. They study reports that schools are increasingly segregating along socio-economic lines, despite efforts to desegregate public schools by race.

Regular schooling isn't that diverse in most places. When I went to public school my entire class consisted of white lower-class children all within a year of the same age. That's not diversity.

I don't believe this is true. I attended a total of 7 different schools in 4 different cities in 2 different states during my primary/secondary education. Only one of these schools was notably non-diverse. I was very often exposed to children of other cultures/attitudes/backgrounds, as well as other ages. It is possible that my experience is exceptionally different, but it doesn't seem like it.

I tried to find some research on this, but unfortunately everything I find is an aggregate across all schools, rather than diversity within each school.

'Most' may have been an exaggeration, but even without, you still have social isolation in public schools, and no guarantee of it outside of them. The children in your neighborhood aren't going to be significantly different from the ones at your school.

Possibly, but is "socializing" children what school is for? Is a homogeneous society where everybody has a similar "socializing" experience really what we want?

http://www.sethgodin.com/sg/docs/stopstealingdreamsscreen.pd...

I always thought it was for learning. I would rather my child have an excellent education and potentially have some adult social lessons to learn as an adult than to be well socially integrated and poorly educated.

I don't think a similar socializing experience = homogenization.

I have been encouraged by a lot of my teachers throughout my life to "dream" and be curious. I have attended 3 elementary schools, 1 middle school, 3 high schools, 3 public universities, and 1 community college. There was at least one teacher at every school who encouraged "dreaming" for me.

All this talk of socialization is not meant to suggest that it is the main purpose of school, merely that there are specific types of social interactions that children encounter a lot of in public school, while very little in a home-schooled environment.

But couldn't this same argument be applied to students at private, parochial, and specialized programs like Montessori schools? All of these are types of self selection.

Additionally your argument even per-supposes non-incidental socialization. For example, my brother home schools his kids but they are rarely ever "at home." For example last week looked something like this for them:

--Monday they attended a city library survey of Shakespearean tragedies. Then they attended the community chess club that evening.

--Tuesday the university museum of modern history has a weekly K-12 program open to both public and home schooled students. They go almost ever week.

--Wednesday was the robotics club at the community center. The home school association soccer program. And a STEM program (they are doing game development and working on their robot for the club competition) through a local STEM academy.

--Thursday is back to the university where a number of the individual colleges have courses for home school students on history, science, and math (my understanding is that these programs are open to anyone, but home schooled students make the largest block of attendees, followed by elderly retirees.)

--Fridays are at home for papers, research, and computer classes.

I guess I am saying that your perception of home schooling might not be a broad as it could be.

I agree that the same issue, to different extents, applies to all non-public schools. I don't think the issue arises from being "at home" necessarily, I think it stems from the natural bias introduced by choosing activities/settings/groups to socialize in.

Home school doesn't inherently reduce "exposure" in a general sense, as you have illustrated. But it makes it easier to stick to your (or your parent's) comfort zone. If a parent is committed to not shying away from uncomfortable social situations, and enthusiastic about engaging people with different views, they can probably provide this exposure to their child. I am just saying that is definitely a challenge that should be acknowledged and accounted for. Based on many people's descriptions of home-schooling, this is a concern that is often overlooked unintentionally.

  > Based on many people's descriptions of home-schooling,
  > this is a concern that is often overlooked 
  > unintentionally.

Where did you find people's descriptions of home-schooling that describe this?

If your nearest private Catholic school is willing to provide you SES/Racial/Immigration status of their kids, I'd not be a bit surprised if it's more diverse on one or more of those grounds than the nearest public school, thanks to scholarships for low-income students, among other things. The public school will be 100% kids whose parents could afford to live in its district, unless there's busing going on, or some sort of magnet school thing. Property values will tend to follow school and district boundaries. The families in them usually have very similar income levels.

Public school peer groups absolutely are selected, primarily on an SES basis, which tends to skew race stats and percentages of low-generation immigrants, too. I don't get why anyone would think they're somehow not selected (I'm aware that you didn't advance that notion, brockers) or that deliberate selection would even typically result in less diversity, for any useful measure thereof.

This whole thread is built on a flimsy notion, best I can tell.

Home school co-ops are the answer, as are non-academically-oriented groups, such as churches, as well as sports and/or music. I was home schooled from 2nd grade through high school, and I was involved in all those things.

The old trope of all home schooled kids being antisocial shut-ins needs to die.

That still causes issues. Co-ops are still extremely insular. It isn't an issue of being anti-social, it is an issue of being exposed to a vast and diverse set of different people with different biases, backgrounds, and abilities.

Home-schooled kids aren't permanently crippled and unable to succeed or something, but the range of people they are able to relate to and understand is diminished I think.

Non-academic groups are definitely good, but many of those often involve a great deal of like-mindedness (such as church groups, or groups sponsored by church groups). I don't expect you or other people who were home-schooled to be shut ins, but I do expect some extra difficulty in empathizing with those who are significantly different from you. (Not that it is impossible or something, just more difficult)

"It isn't an issue of being anti-social, it is an issue of being exposed to a vast and diverse set of different people with different biases, backgrounds, and abilities."

School is a homogenization factory, by design. I'd be more confident in homeschoolers meeting people with different "biases, backgrounds, and abilities" than in traditional school.

It's worth remembering that schools are an incredibly artificial construct that are barely a hundred years old, and school as we know it is younger than that. It's cognitively tempting, but wrong to treat schooling as the obviously-correct "default answer" against which everything else must strive to be measured... in reality, it's a fairly new idea with at best a mixed track record, and if viewed with historically-informed perspective, one with a lot of serious problems, not least of which is the observed fact of systematic squashing of intellectual curiousity.

And remember, when observed fact and theory clash, observed fact wins. It doesn't matter that theoretically school shouldn't do that. It does.

(In fact, to the list of school's crimes personally I'd add that it has created an entire society trained to trust academic theories over observed fact. But that's another discussion.)

Further, there are plenty of people who come out of school exceedingly poorly "socialized", which can also often be traced back to the artificial social conditions of school itself, combined with the cohort system's effect of requiring each new class of kindergarteners being required to construct a new social system from scratch, which is, of course, inevitably a very childish and immature one compared to one in which younger children are folded into a richer social structure formed by children of many ages. I reject the idea that schooling as we know it produces "perfectly socialized" children. It produces school-socialized children, which isn't the same thing. It's a great deal of the reason why we seem to be infantalized at an older and older age and this failed "socialization" is one of the major reasons I believe the current school system needs to be fully replaced... the "socialization" the current system produces is not a triumph but one of its major glaring flaws.

All of these points go against both my personal experience and the results of research I've seen on these topics. I encourage you to find and post evidence for these claims.

In Meditations, Marcus Aurelius comments that he was glad to not have attended public schools.

I have a feeling that the public schools in the 2nd century Roman Empire were significantly different from modern public schools, especially in the United States.

I expect they were more similar to US schools of 100 years ago than the US schools of today are (modulo being a lot more aristocratic in their student population).

Why would you expect that (modulo wtf are you talking about).

Can you present even one piece of evidence about how public school helps students develop empathy for those who are significantly different from them?

School is a huge part of most people's early lives, to think you can replicate all of the cultural and social experiences that take place there wholly in extra-curricular activities, i think, is misguided.

I like Salman Khan's approach, which put simply is this:

Learning takes place at home, students can go over material at their own pace.

'homework' is done at school, where children are able to ask questions about the material, helping and receiving help from other students and teachers.

This may be similar to a 'home school co-op' as you mentioned, but i dont know.

This sounds like a good model to start with, I hadn't heard of it before.

I have experience with co-ops in Texas (a homeschool-favored state) and Iowa (moderately difficult to homeschool legally). In both states, the co-ops are resources for the parents more than the children. Once-a-week classes are normal but function more as a social hour; the bulk of co-op funding (i.e. dues) goes to teaching parents how to teach their children.

I don't understand this response. Whenever homeschooling comes up, someone always says that homeschoolers are unsocialized. I don't even know what that means. Do you think homeschoolers never have friends or enemies growing up? Where did this prevailing belief come from? I say this as someone who was homeschooled all the way through highschool and attended university and grad school. Even if homeschoolers are 'less socialized' than public/private schoolers, have you noticed that there are the oversocialized people as well? I'm talking about the ones who were popular in highschool, and end up deriving their self-worth from what everyone else thinks of them. Is that not also as big a problem?

I don't disagree that socialization is an important part of growing up, I just disagree with the notion that homeschoolers are savages that live in caves until they're 18.

I didn't say they are "unsocialized," I merely said it is more difficult for them to develop peer social skills. Let's not devolve the discussion to black & white thinking.

This is an important distinction. I was homeschooled until college yet still had plenty of friends (I'm not unsocialized). But I still experience culture-shock with my peers - and they with me - because my childhood and teenage years were alot different than theirs. It's not a dealbreaker for homeschooling - but parents should beware and plan appropriately. I agree that a homeschool/traditional schooling hybrid would be ideal.

I'm curious how you interpreted this culture shock.

Was it that you regretted not having similar experiences?

Public/private schools provide environments and situations that are important for social growth, and which are hard to achieve when homeschooling: unplanned and uncontrolled contact with peers, diverse student populations, etc.

I think the big difference is not that home schoolers do not have friends, it is that home schooling does not force you to deal with diverse groups of kids. In public school you have no choice of whether or not you have to interact with people that you don't want to/don't care to.

This is not really a bad thing, but learning to deal with people you would rather not can be a good skill to learn. This is not to say that you will not figure this out elsewhere.

This is exactly the point I was trying to make. It is technically possible to recreate this exposure outside of school, but very difficult.

Good cover, but one could argue that the pros of devoted tutorship and freestyle curriculum outweigh the cons of limited socialization. In my everyday life as an adult professional, I appreciate more the limited educational breadth I received in public school over whatever street smarts I gained from it. Need exposure to a lower socio-economic tiers? Get involved in volunteer charity organizations. Overall, I think educational breadth and depth will make one a far better citizen than simply being among other public school students at the hands of the awful US education system with NCLB.

Public school doesn't teach people to interact well with people you don't want to.

Indeed forcing people to do what they don't want to do is precisely the problem with school - whether socially or academically.

It may not always teach you how to interact well with them, but it at can improve those interactions, and it at least provides exposure to those situations so you can be prepared for them later and relate to others who have been in similar situations.

All of the people criticizing homeschooling on the basis of socialization seem to advocate the "throw them in the water and let them learn how to swim" methodology.

I have to ask though what is the real advantage of this? With home schooling you can teach a child tools that help them navigate society. Give them some fundamental sociology, explain why certain kids their age act a certain way towards them. Let them read books that not only highlight such encounters but explain the multitude of outcomes possible.

With public school in many cases you sink or swim and the result could set you back decades (emotionally and otherwise). Home schooling promises a baseline of support. Maybe it wont breed the greatest multi-cultural prodigies or tortured artists but it will keep the most susceptible from disappearing into an educational gutter.

I say this as someone who attended a public high school with metal detectors and an enrollment of 3,000.

I agree with most of this, which is why I stated in other comments that probably the best solution is a mixture of home-schooling and traditional public schooling environments.

It's a two-way street. Public school yields its own social issues as well: the separation-by-age dynamic, odd social bubbles, bullying, etc. I've had a professor remark that he easily recognizes homeschoolers - they're the students who know how to converse with adults!

Indeed, which is why I said a combination is the best solution. The benefits of each can be emphasized, and the issues of each can be more effectively mitigated.

Homeschooled here. Can confirm. The issue moving into adulthood is that now the adults are my peers and it's as hard to relate with them now as it was 15 years ago.

Do you have any stats to back that up or is it just a feeling?

My own "feeling" is actually the opposite is true. My 6 home schooled friends are far and away the most socially adept people I know. Super friendly and able to talk to anyone. The 5 home schooled kids I know are similar. If they were at high school you'd expect them to be among the most popular people as they are so friendly and outgoing.

Here's another anecdote of you care to listen

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/177/a...

Here's reference to one study that claims home schooled kids are indistinguishable from public schooled kids

http://www.pbs.org/parents/education/homeschooling/socializa...

Simply "being social" is not what I'm referring to. Of course home-schooled children can still be social and have social skills. There is a specific subset of these skills which I am arguing that represent more of a challenge for them.

It is not impossible for them to still obtain these skills/exposure, simply more difficult. It also isn't life-ruining to be deficient in the specific skills I'm talking about. However, I personally think these specific skills are very important for the diverse, interconnected modern society we live in. It is an important concern to evaluate before advocating for 100% homeschooling, which is what started this whole debate.

Why don't you say what this precise subset of skills is, and present some evidence or even narrative about how public school assists students in developing them?

I have done this in several other comments/replies on this post, so I chose to omit that here to reduce redundancy.

Actually you haven't. I have read all of your comments here and the only thing you mention is 'being exposed to a vast set of people with different experiences and biases'. You do not list social skills anywhere.

Even if it is true that public school provides this exposure - which is certainly questionable depending on the school - you have nowhere explained how this exposure at school helps people to develop positive social skills.

This entire concept is completely wrong.

In the situations where it has been studied, home schooled children are actually better integrated socially than their non-home schooled peers (in the US at least).

Part of the reason this narrative persists (other than the teacher's unions pushing it :-)) is that people who haven't home schooled children or met them, sometimes believe it is a 1:1 activity, they visualize the public classroom but with 1 student and 1 teacher. The reality is that home schooling can be much more like going to university than it is going to public school. People who home school their children get together and plan enrichment activities (like going on geology field trips) or book clubs, or math competitions. Learning isn't the "bad" thing, "Oh, I have to go to school." it's a more life long thing, "Try to calculate how fast you'll go on your skateboard at the bottom of this hill given what we've learned about force and acceleration." Hard subjects are broken down into a pace that works well, easy subjects are zipped through without getting bored or waiting for others to "catch up." Interests are pursued.

It isn't for everyone, not everyone can afford to have one of the parents around to "own" the education responsibilities of the children, but it doesn't turn kids into anti-social monsters. Middle school does that :-)

This is a great comment, but it just really begs for some citations. Where can I read up on long term results of home schooling (preferably not paywalled)?

The lack of a paywall is a challenge :-) and to be honest since I did my own research in 2000 my references are out of date, but just typing 'homeschool socialization' on scholar.google.com returns such gems as this:

"Compared to children attending conventional schools, however, research suggest that they have higher quality friendships and better relationships with their parents and other adults. They are happy, optimistic, and satisfied with their lives. Their moral reasoning is at least as advanced as that of other children, and they may be more likely to act unselfishly. As adolescents, they have a strong sense of social responsibility and exhibit less emotional turmoil and problem behaviors than their peers." -- http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0161956X.2013.796...

When I was doing my research (prior to homeschooling my three daughters) one of the things I did was sit in the Stanford Library and download various journal articles on the positives and negatives. If you do the same (and I'm a big fan of people being critical thinkers) you may come to the same conclusion.

FWIW, the reason I had the impression was that the several children I knew growing up who were homeschooled did have trouble socializing. Encountering the research you mention was surprising (at the time).

On reflection, I was looking at a very weak form of evidence - it might very well be the case (I have no idea if it is) that homeschooling has significantly better socialization outcomes than regular schooling and most homeschooled students you meet could still be socially awkward if the awkwardness (or some of the reasons for it) is the reason many of the students are homeschooled in the first place.

While I'd err on the side of caution toward the benefits of homeschooling, I can also see how homeschooling might have some downsides. Perhaps a big difference for me is that my homeschooling was of the Third Culture Kid (TCK) variety, where quite likely the negatives of homeschooling were balanced out by (often) rather extreme interaction with wildly different people and cultures.

That said, you've been all over this thread arguing this point. And it seems reasonable in a common-sense sort of way. However, the counter-points also make sense to me (and are closer to my personal experience).

Could you point me to research, or better explain why you seem to feel so strongly about this point? It seems to be more than a hunch or a common-sense thing for you from the way you're arguing the point, and I'd really like to know what the basis is for that.

EDIT: Let me add that I have no strong opinion about this particular argument. I consider the damage done by public schooling to vastly outweigh the negatives, social or otherwise, so even if the negatives are significant, I'd probably homeschool my kids if I had to choose.

I believe that when you homeschool your child, you are just blindee by your presumption. For one good student that comes out, you have one thousand religious zealot that believe earth is flat. It allows atrocities a la "dancing mom". It allows people to avoid vaccinations. Without mentioning the social awkwardness. I truly believe homeschooling is also a crime against humanity.

I have seen the religious zealots come out of homeschooling too. But do you have a source that has actual data showing that those are not a minority of the homeschool population?

I see no reason to believe they are the majority simply because they are visible.

I actually do. I won't be able to say much because I'd like this account to remain anonymous, but my parents are/were notable figures in the homeschooling movement. At least from the 90s-00s, religious homeschoolers were the solid majority of all homeschoolers in the US by far. Many of which are more extreme than you probably imagine.

hard to resist temptation to lower oneself to your level (and that's quite a road down there), but I'll try - you are wrong. as always, it depends on people involved.

Talk about zealot...

I just quite simply don't understand where people find the time to homeschool their children. I leave for work around 8am, come back after 6pm - by the time you cook dinner and eat it's usually 8pm. When and how would I do this? It would be financially unfeasible for either me or my partner to stay at home at the moment, we both need jobs.

Homeschooling in the simplest form requires a stay-at-home parent (traditionally the mother) to dedicate his/her time to teaching the kids. So, if you already have to send your kids to daycare, then you probably will find homeschooling difficult to accomplish.

For what its worth, Sudbury Schools [0] provide an interesting alternative to homeschooling. (TIL there is a Sudbury school in my area! [1])

Your comment points to the fact that, for at least some parents, schools amount to daycare with education tacked on.

[0] = https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudbury_school [1] = https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Sudbury_schools#United...

> There's no grades and pressure there's just things you've learned and things you're still learning.

I'm incredibly naive when it comes to homeschool, so I hope you don't mind me asking: if you don't grade what happens when you want to go to college? If you don't have any grades and didn't follow a curriculum how can an admissions team adequately assess whether you're a suitable candidate with the necessary credentials?

I have no experience with this but I assume they would just go off of everything except GPA. SAT / ACT / AP scores, extra curriculars, personal projects and achievements, and essays.

Almost all states have a required test to prove grade level equivalency for all students. As education is mandatory for "school age" children; these tests not only prove capability but that the parents are actually doing the legal duty to provide education.

College entrance is NOT an issue. After comparing SAT/ACT scores ever university I know prefers home schooled kids over most candidates, including all but the very best private school students. The academics I have talked to say that home schooled students are both more likely to graduate and do better academically than their non-home schooled counterparts (although I haven't seen any specific numbers to prove it.)

GED is a thing... plus entrance exams ( ACT, SAT ) plus a varied list of extracurriculars...

It's hard to advocate homeschooling as it's not a reasonable option for most people, either due to parents working or lack of necessary knowledge (at least at the high school level). I certainly wouldn't be comfortable teaching e.g. Spanish, French, or biology.

We made a decision to live on one income.

A lot of people here talk about homeschooling/normal schooling as a binary choice with stark trade offs. But if anyone has read the recent Reinventing Organizations book then the example of Berlin school ESBZ[1] imediately comes to mind - self managed school where the kids decide their lessons, help each other and solve problems with help and advice from the parents, teachers and children from higher grades - they are still graded normally at the end of the year so they get the basic skills but they also get so so much more - problem solving, autonomy and authority, etc. I really don't get why we don't try to get all of our schools to work like that. [1]http://developyourchild.co.uk/blog/teal-school/

Because such a system is not reasonably doable with a student to teacher ratio of 28-1

Right, and if to achieve that style of learning I have to give up half our salaries to private school, I'd choose homeschooling to get the added benefit of lower stress (on wife and kids) and generally more convenience and life comfort.

I have what seems to be a unique perspective in this thread, among a bunch of trendy libertarians. I was actually homeschooled my entire life. It wasn't great. It did not do much to prepare me for the adult world, where people don't really care if your precious ass needs extra time on something or would rather do something else, and you do have to collaborate with people you may not particularly care for. I did not anticipate the need to navigate office politics. After a lifetime being spoiled, I'm floundering. Most of the jobs I've held haven't lasted beyond 6 months. If I do have children, I would respect them enough to put aside my ideology (after all, I hate the government as much as the next HN reader) to not do them that particular "favor".

We'll make sure we don't spoil our children.

Ah, yes, this. When I went back to university after taking a break a couple of years ago I promised myself it would be out of pure interest, because I cared about the subject, not to get good grades. Of course it didn't work out exactly that way, pretty soon there's an assignment to hand in tomorrow, and exam to get points on next week... and again I found myself preparing to answer the questions I knew I was going to get, rather than delving into that one subject that seemed interesting, or reading through the proof of a theorem being used. The grades were good, the learning... maybe not so much.

Right now I'm working on my final thesis research, and I found a good subject. Everyone keeps asking what my deadline is, when it is going to be done, how I'm progressing. I don't care. I'm learning, creating and having fun. I want to be able to spend the whole day exploring a topic I don't understand, or refactoring parts of my simulation code that I don't like. I know I'll get it done at some point, and when I do it'll be a valuable contribution at least to myself and hopefully the field I'll be publishing in. That's what learning's supposed to be like for me.

I read and discussed classics at St. John's College in Santa Fe, NM, for 8 weeks per summer for 4 summers, for a master's degree; and there were no grades. (Yes, the grades are on a transcript which I could request, but haven't.) It is my understanding that the undergraduate program has the same grading policy.

It was refreshing to be able to learn without grade pressure.

I call this "Too smart to fail".

When I was a below average student, I used to have a lot less stress. The expectation was so much lower.

Once I started getting As across the board I started panicking.

The problem is we have essentially "privatized" learning.

What that means is once we started attaching money to learning via the university industrial complex and cheap credit. Your knowledge became a store of wealth like your house ( which itself is a terrible idea ).

Now their is a pervasive attitude - if you study engineering for example you pay 4X for tuition compared to humanities.

If you get As you get to go to Stanford and be 10X in debt as someone who went to a Community College.

It reminds me of the argument by Louise CK, where loans are much easier to get when you have liquidity already.

This has lead to a situation of "Too smart to fail" among students who get good grades, when in reality we should be allocating more education resources to weaker students in society and handing them the most credit, and not celebrate grades so heavily, but celebrate when that education leads to value in society.

Well there's something to be said about helping people up to a certain level, but there's also the point that we should be encouraging people to kick ass at what they are good at. So instead of having a bunch of average people we can have a bunch of people that excel at different specialised tasks and so we are better off for it.

> Now their is a pervasive attitude - if you study engineering for example you pay 4X for tuition compared to humanities.

What? If you want to be an engineer you can go to a state school, work hard and pass the FE/EIT exam your senior year for 1/4 the price of a private school.

Half of the top ten engineering schools are public: http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/...

The top ten liberal arts schools are all private: http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/...

>> "...work hard and pass the FE/EIT exam your senior year..."

Mostly agreed, except that as someone who studied drastically, overwhelmingly too much for the FE exam (which turned out to be super easy) that if you have to "work hard" to pass the FE your education has been gravely deficient.

> if you have to "work hard" to pass the FE your education has been gravely deficient.

Easier for Mechanical and Civil engineering students since more of the sections are a basic part of their curriculum.

As an electrical engineer, the EE sections were laughably easy while I had to study quite hard to get enough points in the dynamics, thermodynamics, and materials sections to pass. I did well, but I really had to work my ass off for sections that I never used again.

Whereas practically all of the other engineering disciplines simply blow off the EE section as you can pass without getting any points at all in it.

Depends where do you want to work as an engineer high end RnD (ie real world leading stuff) does place a lot of emphasis on University, grade and who your supervisor was in some cases.

yeah but now you talk about academics, thing broken beyond repair on its own

Err no was thinking of places like CERN, JET, NASA or Research based out of Universities like MIT or CIT

I don't know about the US, but at the same public government-subsidized university in Canada, Engineering/CS costs 3x more than humanities.

> in reality we should be allocating more education resources to weaker students in society and handing them the most credit

Why? Turning good engineers into great engineers is arguably a much more marginally efficient use of social resources than turning average telephone sanitisers, estate agents or PR managers into good or even great ones. The engineers (or software architects, biotech researchers, Wall Street quants etc) are the ones that create innovations and companies that build on them - whereas the marginal improvement of spending the same money on weaker students is - at the very best - them not ending up in jail or doing a job well that should have been automated in the first place.

Which works better depends on if you're in a class based authoritarian society or a democracy.

Clearly we're headed back to the middle ages as fast as we can, in general, at least economically. Is it better to pretend otherwise hoping we'll change direction or at least the lies will pacify the general public, or knowingly step on the gas to get the suffering related to the transition over as quickly as possible or hoping the general public will rise up?

Suppose we have a democracy, or perhaps a freedom preserving autocracy of some sort (e.g. Singapore). How does it benefit anyone to turn a good street sweeper into a great one who vaguely half remembers Shakespeare? Could you lay out the mechanics in concrete terms?

(I.e., no vague platitudes like "a knowledge citizenry is necessary in a democracy", but instead concrete steps like "vague memory of hating shakespeare => recognizing that bushbama is lying with higher probability => voting better". Critical thinking rather than slogans.)

If you don't see the relevance in understanding Shakespeare for making decisions in your life, then you weren't properly taught Shakespeare.

tl;dr; no argument but have a platitude.

His one sentence was too long to read?

What's the most recent decision in your life for which understanding Shakespeare was relevant?

What does it mean to "understand" Shakespeare, by the way? (If I read or watch the plays, is that sufficient? Or is there more to it than that?)

If you understand it (that is, study its writer's themes, methodologies, culture, etc..) you generalize the information and integrate it with your decision-making abilities. Your question is a bit like asking "When's the last time eating ham was relevant to a decision I've made." You can't trace the source of relevance through those kinds of generalizations. You can only know your own personal history: that you've previously integrated the information.

It's the same way you can't look at someone and say "your decisions don't directly involve ham. Maybe you shouldn't eat ham anymore."

Shakespeare isn't strictly necessary for this, but there is value to be gained from studying literature, and Shakespeare is just the most accessible and popular academic literature.

Addendum: For what it's worth, I use my experiences studying shakespeare quite frequently, particularly when analyzing things like tragedy, taboo, or social conflict like drugs and politics. If there were some better way to deliver that experience, I would support it as well.

Lets approach this via another tack, since you seem to want to drop more platitudes.

Suppose you have two humans - one who integrated shakespeare, one who didn't. (Or make it two samples of humans to reduce statistical noise, if you prefer.) Beyond quizzing them on lines from plays, what measurement can you make to determine which human/group of humans "integrated" and "generalized" shakespeare and which didn't?

If no such measurement exists, I'd assert that rather than shakespeare, we need invisible dragons to breath the fire of knowledge. http://www.godlessgeeks.com/LINKS/Dragon.htm

I don't think you know what a platitude is.

> what measurement can you make to determine which human/group of humans "integrated" and "generalized" shakespeare and which didn't?

What measurement can you make to determine if someone is intelligent or not?

You solve that, and I'll get back to you.

What measurement can you make to determine if someone is intelligent or not?

Any of a variety of IQ tests, to measure directly. But that might be cheating, analogous to asking directly about Hamlet.

So instead, ask them to perform any of the variety of real world tasks that are highly correlated with IQ (e.g., "here is a device you've never seen before, figure it out"). Measure their income - the theory of IQ claims income will be higher in the more intelligent group. Measure their criminality, risky sexual behavior or drug use; these will also be lower in the high IQ group.

I wouldn't claim intelligence existed if I couldn't make claims of this sort.

Your turn.

So, being unable to trace it, you don't really know whether studying Shakespeare, or other literature, affects your decision-making at all -- and if it does, how much. I agree that much of knowledge you pick up is something you can't trace. But do you get any from studying literature?

On the other hand, I can think of plenty of ways reading books (and watching movies, etc) has changed my decision-making abilities. I could name examples. Likewise with playing sports, playing musical instruments, getting really sunburnt, interacting with old people, etc -- some of which I've spent less time doing. Studying literature, on the other hand, and finding out, oh, its themes are X, Y, and Z (because duhhh) making up some completely nonsensical psychoanalysis has not, in any identifiable way.

There are other things you could do with your time. Is it better to study Shakespeare, or to watch reality TV?

Studying Shakespeare is not "finding out, oh, its themes are X, Y, and Z (because duhhh) making up some completely nonsensical psychoanalysis."

That's like saying studying math is "finding out, oh, number can be manipulated, and making up some completely nonsensical rules for manipulating them."

It largely constitutes a controlled dataset. Like shooting at bull's eye's rather than random shit.

> Is it better to study Shakespeare, or to watch reality TV?

You have to do both to know that, don't you?

But I'm not arguing that learning how to do math is useful for making decisions later in life (aside, obviously, from e.g. financial decisions that involve making calculations).

I would argue that classes that study literature actually harm peoples' abilities to make decisions later in life. Letting people make pretend arguments without a testable standard of truth is a terrible idea. You can see people act in public today that do not care one bit about whether what they believe, or what they say, is true or not, and you can see them claim that there are "multiple perspectives" on matters that are, in fact, questions of fact. Some people are quite good at writing stuff in a way that gives them 2^n directions in which they might equivocate, should somebody argue with them. They are a product of this system.

In your penultimate sentence you have in fact, hit the nail on the head. If you want to know how the politics of a society operates, the classes and praxis you are deriding are actually a pretty good way to find out.

Learning is a beautiful thing when it happens, but it mostly does not happen in education. Learning is a delicacy, a luxury, thing which not everyone will appreciate.

On the other hand, vocational training is necessary and most people appreciate the necessity. It is time to officially redirect universal education to vocational training. Expecting education to provide learning is expecting too much. By expecting too much we will only be disappointed.

I disagree that learning is a delicacy. Learning is an innate human behavior. It's what separates us from the animals. It's how we became apex predators across multiple biomes stretching across the globe. You can see this in children, they have unbridled curiosity and depthless enthusiasm for learning. But they have a limited tolerance for tedium and bureaucracy, and those are in extreme abundance in education today. It's a system that's practically designed to beat out any hint of desire for learning, intellectualism, and reading. In some ways it's a wonder that any vestige of those things survive at all through such experiences.

I always thought it would be better to measure a student by how much they've learned not how good they are. For example one student would be on algebra 1 and another on calculus. I think it is easier emotionally to think of someone else as just farther along than better than you. Traditional in room lecture based learning required all students to be at the same point. This is a terrible assumption because many times it's not true. Assume a student was not able to focus during Algebra 1 because of a tragic event during that year, like the loss of a parent. Without herculean effort that student will be lost in geometry, trig, and calculus because they lack the Algebra 1 foundation. One year of missed learning turns into four.

I hope that MOOCs allow for this to be fixed. No longer would the assumption need to be made that all students need learn at the same pace. This means the 40% of gifted kids won't be bored, and 20% of kids who learn a little slower won't be hopelessly lost.

The other benefit to the learning being self paced and through computers is that you could test progress through small quizzes. If a student failed a quiz, she could simply relearn the material. This eliminates, the TEST, a huge unnecessary stresser in children's lives. You could also test material from several quizzes ago to make sure the important points are hammered home through spaced repetition.

Most teachers I know currently spend 80% of the year teaching to the test. Self paced materials means that you'll be able to measure performance of a kid and a teacher by how they do over a year, and not how they do on one day.

Anyway that's my dream of MOOCs and automated learning in the class room :).

My radical view on education is that everyone should work at their own pace until they have an A understanding/test scores in each topic of each class before moving on.

This completely takes the focus off the grade (its always an A) and focuses it on learning well.

It also means that nobody falls behind which is a source of a lot of stress. Slow learners get extra time and teacher attention before trying to move on to more advanced topics.

Fast learners enjoy racing through subjects at their own top speed. It is extremely rewarding to be able to skip forward as soon as you are ready. This naturally develops self-managed education habits.

I got to learn this way for one year in elementary school and it was the best experience I have ever had in education.

To do this, teachers need organized lesson plans for each class that students can follow at their own pace, and act more as self-learning mentors and a learning resource, as apposed to controlling the pace with all-class lectures. The commonality between all classes is teachers are teaching kids how to learn by their own efforts, not just topics they will forget.

There is a field of study around "mindset". The fairly famous book is called Mindset by Carol Dweck.

This infographic summarizes the ideas very well.

http://i.imgur.com/HGBY1tW.png

My attitude had always been "if it is grades people want, they will get it" i.e. to get good grades that will help me go up the ladder academically while at the same time keeping in mind that the grades are not going to help me in the real world.

This pushed me to learn continuously because at the end of the day, it is what you know and what you can do that counts rather than your grades.

I'm all for teaching kids curiosity and how to learn and how to prepare to be ready for a future years hence. Surely we need to question methodology and results thereof.

Yet for all of one child's failure there are many other successes. So it's more a matter of what methodology gets your educational system the greatest results for people entering adult society years hence.

Any system will be a disservice to some. Perhaps for some children tailored or perhaps less structured home schooling or other alternative forms of education would be more beneficial to them in the long run.

On the other hand, it's not as if east Asia and south Asia are doing poorly economically due to their focus on achievement. On the contrary they are very vital economic engines, china due to surpass the us in ppp GDP. So, its not clear that this model is that detrimental. Any model will incur casualties, it's up to us to seek better alternatives with fewer casualties but proof of the pudding is in the eating.

Total GDP is meaningless. China is nowhere near the US in PPP GDP per capita.

> ....for our willingness to put their long-term developmental and emotional needs before their short-term happiness. For our willingness to let their lives be just a little bit harder today so they will know how to face hardship tomorrow.

Isn't decreasing the pressure to be a perfect student the exact opposite of letting their life be a little bit harder today?

Not if the preferred way to become a "perfect student" is to go only after the easier/safer challenges. And to quit whenever the chance of getting any less than an "A-" grade seems uncertain.

The whole article builds the argument that since adults are only concerned with the kid's results but cannot be bothered on how those are achieved, all kids eventually learn to fake it and end up sacrificing their intellectual curiosity for the sake of self-worth validation from their parents/teachers.

Therefore, making the student's life a little bit harder today means to push them to tackle real challenges and making peace with the fact that they might spoil their perfect record in the process.

> Not if the preferred way to become a "perfect student" is to go only after the easier/safer challenges.

That's nowhere near becoming a perfect student and it isn't even high on the scale of parental pressure.

That's what the article said, no how I think things should be.

With my own children, I've never make a fuss about bad grades (which thankfully have been few and far between). I do care about them giving their best effort, and let them know in no uncertain terms.

But I know plenty of parents that are minimally involved but nonetheless demand "good grades" from their kids. Fooling those into believing their kids are raising academic stars would be extremely easy.

Although I think the whole "the fear of failure has destroyed learning" thing is rather dramatic, I realize there is a basis for that perspective that I think lies more in that academic achievement destroys exploratory, off-script types of learning that lead to fulfillment. America is rather innovative and we are arguably innovation leaders, but the quantitative success factor overlooks the qualitative measure of living life.

Innovation in the USA in particular seems to largely focus on chasing some sort of target and/or be driven by some paranoia based anxiety. A perfect example of this whole issue is something I heard the other day, that technology could be used to solve earth's environmental problems. It's so schizophrenic if you start even barely thinking about it ... we're going to invent solutions to problems that we are causing ourselves, at this very moment? It strikes me as a similar strategy as growing yourself out of net loss. It's really kind of mind boggling and quite similar to obsessive compulsive disorder; just clean those hands one more time to make sure they are clean, just clean those hands one more time to make sure they are clean .... innovate our way out of the problems that our last innovation caused, innovate our way out of the problems our last innovation caused ... and on and on.

The issues raised here are side effects of the discontinuity between how humans evolved to learn, and how we are taught today.

Fundamentally, the problem is similar to the problems of mass production. The need is to produce greater volume, with standardized results and less variance in the end product. But this is exactly opposite of how humans evolved to learn. We're evolved to learn primarily from our parents, secondarily from extended family and then from the larger group. This is why children in general have a desire to please their parents, and parents have both anxiety about struggling children and and pride when they do well. There is another force for learning, curiosity, that is the underlying factor for children's increasing knowledge and innovation, and which drives persistence and resilience. In a prehistoric environment, teaching and learning were highly personalized. 2 parents may have to nurture 2 or 3 children at a time. Prehistoric children also learned quite a bit on their own, in their own way, at their own pace when no teacher was paying attention. [0]

In today's world, the amount and type of what has to be learned to function far exceeds what parents and family can teach. Even with homeschooling, advanced topics may be learned from texts that the student reads, rather than from tutoring by their parents. Most parents don't have homeschooling as an option, so we invented schools, which are by their nature, not personalized. Instead of ~1 teacher/parent per student, we have 30+. Teaching is not personalized, which goes strictly against human nature.

[0] http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/07/02/spoiled-rotten

My gut feeling is that some of the top universities could change this with no effect on employment, but positive effect on actual learning and related exam stress.

You could give the kids internal assessments that don't count. "Here's some questions that should be easy if you understood the linear algebra course. It's up to your own conscience to decide how well you know it."

And then have a pass/fail line that is external. "This kid went to Harvard and did these courses and passed. All our kids are smart, and there's not much point in you, as an external employer, trying to figure out who is better based on a GPA."

I get the feeling a lot of the grade stress is unproductive. Kids divert their attention to exams, which employers have no idea how to assess. Some kid gets an A in math. How much of a predictor of business success is that really, for your average consultancy/bank/whatever? The result is the kids end up spending their energy on something that isn't all that important in the grand scheme of things.

I think it's pretty telling that most courses outside school aren't structured...

Course: Math, Grade: A-F.

...but...

Course: Math E, Grade: Pass/Fail. Course: Math D, Grade: Pass/Fail. Course: Math C, Grade: Pass/Fail.

...etc.

I think the former mindset unfortunately can be quite common in the tech industry. "We need an A grade programmer". When what you really are looking for is a "C grade programmer with A grade ruby, B grade security, B grade network knowledge".

Here's an idea. Drop exams entirely, and examine at the point of job application. If a person learning understand the material, encourage them to move to the next thing. If they're still addressing subject matter, let them continue.

This is a sort of a hamster-ball problem. You have a school that is severely underperforming, an children are not learning at all. You have a big achievement gap in the classroom, where a good chunk os students are illiterate. Then we try to solve this with grades, as a way of holding teachers and students responsible and provide a feedback loop. Then the grades inform the learning process, changing everything.

It's an example of a wider problem that I think I've heard it called "legibility." It can exist police departments, for example. You know that half the cops are lazy, so you measure arrests and such. Then cops' job becomes arresting people rather than maintaining peace. All sorts of damaging dynamics play. Even if a measure (eg arrests) might be good at telling you who's a good cop, optimizing for the measure does not necessarily make cops better. It's demoralizing to the good cops, who are now judged by stupid measures.

Schools have this problem and lots of others too. Lets start with the fact that a 6+ hour schooldays for 8 year olds is nonsensical. More hours does not result in more learning. You could halve the hours (double the teacher/student ratio for the same price?), but schools need to be babysitters too. A big group of kids of equal age is an unnatural environment for juvenile humans to interact and learn in, causing (among other things) emotionally turbulent self judgement constantly. Everyone is your yardstick.

Overall, these are problems we hit as we create institutions. I think it's a problem all over the modern world. Our anemic & sanitized work culture isolated from our home life, and the split personality people develop living in these two worlds. The anonymity and isolation of the oversized and transient "communities" we live in. We develop "unnatural" institutions to deal with life in these inorganic world. Formal reviews and targets in a company instead of the normal peer pressures you would find in a more organic setting like a family farm with a dozen workers (or a hunting party if you want to take it that far). We replace school discipline, grading and such with children's innate desire to learn and discover.

I have a hint of a grand historical theory floating around in my mind that I don't understand well enough to articulate:

It's becoming very clear that technology is developing much faster than culture and psychology. Comment trolling and the even more common emotional overreactions and general emotional idiocy of our online selves are an obvious example. But, I suspect it might go much deeper and longer maybe to the paleolithic revolution.

Early civilizations were (we think) these slave societies with god kings and terrible oppression. They had seeds in our natural (even prehuman) instincts for dominance, status, subordination. But, they were really pathological worlds where people couldn't thrive. They built institutions like slavery and priesthood out of the existing "natural" dynamics (say tribal shamans and chieftains) but most of the brickwork was this clunky new stuff barely holding together this new way of doing society: slavery, cast hierarchy… When we think of the "Charles Dickens World" of street urchins, poorhouses, filth and urban poverty we're seeing people living in a newly constructed industrial world with cobbled together institutions and culture.

Organic cultural takes time, generations. The alternative is an engineered culture with its legible, formalizable logic and none of the nuance.

It's particularly sad though, when it comes to small children.

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