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Comment by amyjess | Hacker News Reader

When I was in third grade, we spent half the second semester learning about different kinds of whales. This is material I forgot pretty much as soon as it was over. When I graduated high school, my mom and I went through all my old elementary school material to see what we'd like to keep for sentimental value and what we're okay with throwing out to make room in the garage, and we were just overwhelmed by the sheer massive volume of paper that came out of that whale unit.

There is so much redundancy in elementary school education that you can take out a large chunk of it and still teach the same amount of information. School could be way, way denser than it is. Hell, even in high school, a full year would cover the same amount of material as a single semester of one of my college classes, and my college classes only met 3 times a week (for the same exact class length as my high school classes; or fewer than 3 times a week for longer class length).

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High school: 45-50ish hours per week of class time and homework, waking up at 7:00 every friggin' morning to rush out the door, stuck in a building with little exposure to sunlight for hours on end. Work often assigned one day and due the very next.

College: 25-30 hours per week of class time and homework, walks outdoors between classes, long, leisurely breaks throughout the day. Usually at most 3 early wake-up days a week, and often zero. Work almost never due the very next day. It was like a goddamn vacation, after high school.

(granted I attended a low-ranked university and I gather it's not that easy everywhere, but we were still covering material much faster and with far higher expectations for work than in high school, yet it was way the hell easier just because the conditions were more humane and there was far less wasted time—on the flip side, my high school wasn't in any way prestigious or notable either, yet still demanded all that time)

I attended a low performing inner city high school and went to an ivy. I still feel that way.

> we spent half the second semester learning about different kinds of whales.

The point of most of that is not to teach you about whales (though whales are cool). It's to teach you:

* How to read and process written material.

* How to organize your thoughts and write grammatically correct sentences.

* The moral value that science is useful and nature is important to preserve.

It's the same reason they still teach cursive. Cursive matters fuck-all, but training fine motor skills in general is very useful and cursive is just a semi-arbitrary means to that end.

Conversely, when I was in 6th grade, I begged and pleaded with my parents to try a new distance learning pilot program our state was doing. They allowed me to do it for 7th grade, and the lack of oversight and discipline led to me being a complete year behind in mathematics when I went back to regular school for the 8th grade. I never recovered, and ended up dropping out 2 years later.

Sure there is redundancy in elementary education. But middle and high school kids missing out on a year of math can be fatal. Smart determined kids can make it up. But the vast majority will be completely lost.

Missing any math in any year is a disaster. There is a real continuity in math teaching starting from addition through high school. I've seen so many people who gave up early on, and they have _no hope_ of making it up later on.

And it continues beyond. I tutored in a graduate business program. And math was absolutely the stumbling block for the students I was tutoring. It was all pretty simple stuff. Graphs for economics, solving equations, very simple differentials to find maxima or minima (didn't really need to understand calculus because these were such simple cases), etc. They were pretty much all totally lost.

It was really frustrating for everyone. I just wasn't in a position to basically teach them a few years of high school math from zero foundation.

And you'll see the same pattern in pretty much any of the books written over the years about the challenges the author faced in the first year of their MBA program.

The thing is, you can 100% learn the gap if some is missed. The problem comes when the gap isn't filled at all and then the prerequisites for future material aren't there. I don't think that will be the case with the current situation.

I took a bunch of communication college classes while I was in high school. High school and K-12 are essentially glorifies day care and much less about the education. I was learning a lot faster with the condensed college classes than the high school classes which dragged on for the whole year.

Elementary school is not just about learning academic stuff but about personality development as well. Unless a child is very gifted, it will also get bored extremely fast.

Middle and high school is for everybody and college/University is for the smart 50% (or whatever).

It's natural that you cover more in less time in college/university because students that go there are already smarter than most.

If you try to apply the same standards to high school, you will push the dropout rate into 60 or more.

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