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Comment by bonoboTP | Hacker News Reader

I am in shock if that's not exaggeration... But then again this might be one of those things - which do happen a number of times - where an American whom I actually meet in real life tells me not to believe what I read about the US online.

I mean, there are tens of millions of schoolchildren in the US, and they seem to be "fine". Therefore it cannot be THAT bad.

But I do remember from American "highschool movies" (OK not that good of a source) that the students were always on the way to a class, just grabbing things from the lockers, but almost never just chilling, sitting around or similar (except while watching some school sport game).

But how do you even concentrate without taking breaks? That's not even good for standardized test scores. Your brain will just not take up any more info if you don't take breaks.

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Everything does vary a substantial amount between districts and even individual schools since at the national level there are only a few guidelines(although standardized tests have crept in since No Child Left Behind), so even with the public system the schools vary between feeding the "school-to-prison" pipeline where students walk through metal detectors and have little breathing room, and "magnet" schools that soak up all the academic achievers and give them back-breaking workloads.

In general the school schedules are arranged for the benefit of the faculty more than the kids, though. The days start too early for most teens, and there's a lot of rushing between overly-short classes, to the point where I recall witnessing some students being marked persistently late simply because one teacher ends the class late and the other starts early. The upside of that is that you do tend to have a break because every single class has a few minutes of administrative work before it can really start.

So when I was in primary school in the US in the 1980s, we had recesses. That is the golden age of those "highschool movies" -- and they were to some extent of course "fantasy" portrayals of high school even then, although not about the time between classes and recesses necessarily.

We also biked to school ourselves unattended. And we had maybe two half-days a year spent on standardized tests, one test each. The insanity of American schools is a more recent phenomenon.

It can vary between school districts though. Generally the wealthier and whiter the neighborhood/city/school, the better the kids will be treated. Although it's pretty shitty even at most of the "good" ones.

What you are reading isn't much of an exagerration though. It is a good reminder of how insane it sounds to you, because IT IS INSANE.

And you say we seem to be "fine" in the US? Have you even been paying attention to what's going on in the US? I don't know how much of it can be blamed on the eductional system... but you know, probably a chunk of it. The schoolchildren and former schoolchildren of the US are decidedly not "fine" though. This place is fucked up.

What's up with the pressure to perform so well on standardized tests though? Are they pushed because the school wants to look good to attract rich families? Or do parents push it so their kid can get to college?

In Hungary we only have standardized tests for school admissions, both high school an university. (so you write one test and can apply to many places with the score). Otherwise every two years there's the PISA international test, but that's only for statistics, it isn't graded. All our other tests are just prepared by the teacher. Of course this means different schools have different standards, mostly depending on the percentage of Roma students. Where they are the majority there is not much learning happening and then non Roma families rather make their kids take a 1-2 hour bus ride to the next town.

I think whole books could be written on "what's with the standardized tests". (and probably have been) As a subset of "What's with wanting to measure _everything_ quantitatively and make evaluations based only on quantitative measures, in our society in general?" For various reasons people wanted an "objective" and numeric way to measure student learning and compare it nationally, so they had to create more things to measure...

But it's not generally the parents that are pushing them. Except maybe to the extent that parents want to know "How do I know if a school is good or terrible?" and someone can give them a "score" built in part on standardized tests...

I think (and this may not be a popular theory), it is in large part a disfunctional reaction to the extreme social inequality in the U.S.. Going back to the days of legal segregation, some people had _terrible_ schools others had good schools. Even once we have legal equality, somehow some schools are still pretty terrible. If only we had an 'objective' way to determine which schools are effectively teaching, and reward those doing well and punish those doing poorly...

In fact, though, it's still the poor and not white who bear the brunt of all this terribleness. I know someone who is a teacher who was at a meeting where the principal was explaining why it was "only fair" to the poor students to have every minute of the day regimented and disciplined, because they too deserved the best education... while knowing the principal sent her OWN kids to a "sudbury school"!

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