Comment by com2kid | Hacker News Reader

Comment by com2kid | Hacker News Reader

I went to a very liberal public school, where my teachers taught me to be an independent thinker, and to distrust authority. We were rewarded for solving problems on our own, and for investigating the evidence behind claims.

My middle school history course was taught to a backdrop of Beatles music. One of my High School history courses was taught in terms of Monty Python movies, which it turns out have a fair bit of historical accuracy to them.

A common refrain was "Why do we do things this way? OLD DEAD WHITE MEN."

When I went to college, I learned who funded the American Revolution. I took a philosophy class that taught us how to deconstruct sentences into logical statements. For practice we used political speeches, which amusingly enough, when diagramed out would often times turn out to be equivalent to null.

For me, the answer is, I don't trust the government because my government provided education deliberately taught me better.

This is also why I get upset when I see people insist that schools are "just indoctrination centers for our youth". Heh. Maybe all my schooling experiences from middle school on up were just serious outliers?

All that said, I do think people's relationship with the government in regards to infrastructure investment is a bit... different. Growing up with a father who worked Union Labor, I learned that the men and women who build this country up have a lot of pride and love for their job. I also learned that everything is far more complicated than I could possibly imagine, with far too many moving parts.

Working in software I know the overhead cost of communications between different teams, within the same company and across company lines. With the number of suppliers and vendors that come together for any given public works project, I am actually impressed that work gets done at all. To a large extent, I think a huge source of problems is organizational efficiency.

Yet the public demands a certain level of accountability and transparency for our public works projects. We want open and honest bidding, and that means dealing with all the overhead of having 20 different vendors win different contracts for different parts of a project. There is an inherent inefficiency there that would not exist if we could just trust "one person" or "one company" to completely execute on a project.

Yeah, your experience was an outlier.

Do you know what the biggest meta-lesson throughout my education was? The single thing that was hammered home in every single class? Following directions. I think that says a lot.

The learning experience was highly regimented and structured. Show up on time, do your work the way we tell you, get an A.

The actual content of any given class was a bit more varied but none of the classes had much flexibility. When they set out to teach or engage creativity, it was always in narrow, controlled ways: assignments and projects with specific, detailed instructions. The creative aspect was confined to how you fulfilled those instructions—the moral equivalent of coloring within the lines.

I think I had a grand total of two truly open-ended assignments in all of high school: one in a CS class and one in a physics class. I built a single thing for both (with permission, of course), and it was easily the best thing I ever did in high school. But that was definitely the exception, not the rule; every other "project" was just a bigger homework assignment.

Maybe I'm being too harsh but, looking back, the experience absolutely did not nurture independence—quite the opposite.

> The actual content of any given class was a bit more varied but none of the classes had much flexibility. When they set out to teach or engage creativity, it was always in narrow, controlled ways: assignments and projects with specific, detailed instructions. The creative aspect was confined to how you fulfilled those instructions—the moral equivalent of coloring within the lines.

Ironically, a lot of my assignments were free form, and I hated it! I had to sit through so many poorly done video presentations other groups of students did that I eagerly wished for teachers to teach us how to make a proper presentation and make students stick to the format! There are some basic rules to structuring a presentation that I don't think ever got taught, heh.

But those were the monthly assignments. On a larger and more fun scale, both my Middle School and High School had free form graduation projects. My Middle School project was on the history of video games, my HS project was on LED lighting. A minimum report size was dictated, but we also had to come up with a presentation on our own, with no real guidelines given other than a minimum time we had to present for.

A lot of my English reports were open ended. Sure I was given a general topic to write about, but that is sort of the point of a classroom, to provide general structure for students to learn within.

I remember one middle school project were we had to design a life form. That was pretty much it for instructions, just go off and design a new life form and be prepared to present it to the class. I ended up with a scale model, a description of locomotion, vision systems, and a general outline of culture.

Another project was to write a children's storybook.

Then there was the student produced school news channel. We were given instruction on how to operate equipment, but everything else was left up to the students.

Biology class, open ended report with presentation, mine was on the quality of life enhancements that genetic engineering of humans would bring about.

Elementary school, second grade, students wrote and directed a play, we did Stone Soup, we ended up performing it at the Senior Center as well as in front of the school.

Countless classes writing poetry. Either structure or theme was dictated, rarely both.

My social studies class had multiple debate sessions throughout the year. I remember one of them, Rome vs. Greece. My team was arguing Rome, my counterpoint to their claim of philosophers was "You cannot claim the great philosophers that you killed! In Rome, even the lowliest of gladiators could rise up to be a powerful and respected man. You kill your wise men." Not logically sound, but appeals to emotion work.

I'll admit, my parents worked hard to get me into the best public schools that they could, but at all times these were just public schools! Thankfully I graduated before No Child Left Behind made testing all the rage, from what I gather, things have been going steadily downhill in regards to how much flexibility teachers have in their job.

Unfortunately, I think a majority of those who insist that schools are "just indoctrination centers for our youth" would see your post as an example of that. IMO it sounds like you got a great education, but many other people would complain that you weren't taught to have more patriotism, religious faith, and distrust of science. I wish that was a strawman but I really don't think it is. :(

"I went to a very liberal public school, where my teachers taught me to be an independent thinker, and to distrust authority. [...] A common refrain was "Why do we do things this way? OLD DEAD WHITE MEN.""

Hmmm. The cliche of dismissing Western culture as one created by "old dead white men" isn't independent, only lazy thinking to me, and it deserves criticism by itself.

The fact that you yourself refer to it as a "refrain" is quite telling on my opinion...

They were outliers

Seriously. My education was nothing like the grandparent describes.

Mine education was like that: We're evil for taking the land away from native Americans and also go around screwing up the rest of the world with military interventionism. Oh the founding fathers were fucking hypocrites for allowing slavery. This was in a DC suburb ironically.

Over time I grew to find the mindset counterproductive. Free thinking is good to a point. But it's institutions, not individuals, that get us to the moon. It's bad when the pendulum swings too far in the other direction and we give up on our institutions.

But it's institutions, not individuals, that get us to the moon. It's bad when the pendulum swings too far in the other direction and we give up on our institutions.

I agree with this, but I think it is often the case that institutions deserve to be given up on. I don't think we've figured out how to make them resilient against the internal politics of the institution becoming the primary activity of the institution.

Sometimes I think we need to figure out how to rip and replace institutions quickly and efficiently. Every human collective or institution seems to have a shelf life beyond which it gets strangled by its own bureaucracy.

Why is free thinking incompatible (or at least in the oppose side of a pendulum) with having institutions?

> But it's institutions, not individuals, that get us to the moon.

At what cost to our liberty? In the absence of something eery (e.g. communists seeking world domination) this becomes harder and harder to justify. If something can't be achieved voluntarily, maybe it just shouldn't be done.

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