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Comment by qntty | Hacker News Reader

You might argue that kids not knowing anything when they graduate is a symptom of the focus on professional skills. I found that the more people tried to teach me what they thought I "needed" to know rather than the things I was interested in, the less I learned and the less useful the stuff I learned was.

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If we allowed kids to choose what they wanted to learn, they would all be playing video games all day.

We really shouldn't care about what a 13 year old thinks they should be learning.

You can learn many of the most important sorts of things that a 13 year old would want to learn by being into video games. Computers, math, history, how to tell a good story, how to organize a group of people to accomplish a common goal.

Of course, you can't let 13 year olds teach themselves, because they don't know what's out there and they don't know the best way to spend their time. But that's not the same as not allowing them to do things that they're interested in. Incidentally, I don't think that we shouldn't have any sort of required education, just that they should be a small part of the whole educational experience.

We already tell all children what they should be learning, and apparently a huge portion of them end up without basic literacy and numeracy. That's as bad as it gets. It's hard to imagine how these adults would have been worse off if they hadn't gone to school at all. Perhaps they would have stumbled across something that interested them and learned something.

Being highly motivated by something is a prerequisite to great self-learning. Video games (especially?) can be a great launching point to learn about math, programming, writing, design...

Being motivated by nothing means students will not learn or retain knowledge.

So yeah, I think letting a bunch of 13 year olds play video games all day would actually provide better results than keeping them locked up an a pseudo-prison like environment teaching them things that they're not interested in learning and for the most part wouldn't need to know anyway.

Yeah, I think you're spot on about a lot of kids not being interested in the subjects that are taught and I agree that it has a big impact on total learning.

On the other hand, I don't really remember being taught many professional skills in school, and in any case, it's still practically unfathomable to me that kids could make it through 13 years of any kind of education at all and not end up literate and numerate.

More of the funding needs to go towards teacher salaries, in the first place. They start on $18 an hour here, you can make more in a call center with no responsibilities.

Also, we spend a lot, however it's extremely unevenly distributed making it much more likely the scenario we're discussing comes about (someone making it through school without a useful education).

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