Comment by Atreus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Atreus | Hacker News Reader

Do not judge their actions by their stated intentions. Assume that their actions satisfy their motives perfectly, and look for the set of motives that predicts the

If you do that, of course they do belong in schools, and they will stay in schools, because the US is a post-privacy state, and is staging itself to be as authoritarian as the Chinese "social credit" system.

What universe are you living in that you think modern American children want to learn? They don't. They didn't want to learn 40 years ago, or any year since. They don't look at public schools as refuge, or as empowerment. They look at it as a requirement, and sometimes a bit like being in jail for 8-14 hours a day.

> What universe are you living in that you think modern American children want to learn? They don't.

That's sad. You should spend time with some different kids. The ones I spend time with have an insatiable appetite for learning new things. Each student is passionate about something different, of course.

> They don't look at public schools as refuge, or as empowerment.

That seems mostly orthogonal to the question of whether they want to learn and whether they realize that learning can be empowering.

> What universe are you living in that you think modern American children want to learn? They don't.

Woof...

I know when I worked around the US (mostly midwest) at a different school a week, there were always some kids who wanted to learn.

There were always some that didn't.

However, they may not have wanted to learn every single thing that the school taught, but they did want to learn about stuff that could be applied to a future career.

Don't blame it on the kids - blame it on the schools and the culture.

Kids don't change, but schools and culture can. Look at other parts of the world (and particularly progressive places in the US) for evidence of this.

Thinking of schools as like jail is because schools are like jail.

That has nothing to do with whether kids want to learn or not.

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