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Comment by throwaway316943 | Hacker News Reader

It boggles my mind how broken the model of rote memorization to pass written tests is. School should teach you the fundamentals of how to acquire knowledge and then get out of your way. Reading, writing, speaking, logic, geometry, mathematics, and programming along with a whirlwind tour of all the good and bad ideas throughout history then pack it up. Instead we have a public babysitting service that pretends to add value when it’s probably no better than dropping your kid off at a library for the day (whether they choose to stay and read or not).

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> It boggles my mind how broken the model of rote memorization to pass written tests is. School should teach you the fundamentals of how to acquire knowledge and then get out of your way.

That's utopian and a rather unrealistic, incomplete view. Education is also about imparting a fundamental shared body of knowledge as well, and it also has to deal with a very wide diversity of ability and motivation. Your proposal is pretty lacking in specifics, but what you have in mind seems to be something that's optimized to work very well with an idealized student, which would only be a small fraction of all students, and would likely do worse on average when considering all students.

> Reading, writing, speaking, logic, geometry, mathematics, and programming along with a whirlwind tour of all the good and bad ideas throughout history then pack it up.

That's a weird list. You include programming but not civics?

It’s not particularly utopian, I’m proposing reducing the number of subjects and the duration of public education which should allow for a larger share of the current educational resources to be spent on each student. This is to enable those resources to be spent preparing the student to solve problems themselves. I limited the list to a minimum of topics necessary to consume, produce, synthesize and communicate ideas and information. Programming is in there because I consider it as necessary as literacy and numeracy since it allows you to reify some of your cognition in the same way that writing notes or performing a calculation does. Civics doesn’t belong in that list because it’s not a fundamental skill, it’s not even taught in many countries. A student who has been taught to read comprehensively, communicate clearly and think critically should have no trouble acquiring that knowledge.

> It’s not particularly utopian....A student who has been taught to read comprehensively, communicate clearly and think critically should have no trouble acquiring that knowledge.

That sounds pretty utopian. Firstly, I don't think you can reasonably assume any mass educational program will reliably produce students like that, so any program that assumes that will likely fail a large proportion of its students in pretty significant ways. Secondly, your exclusive focus what you define to be "fundamental skills" and exclusion of anything that you deem "not fundamental" seems more of a personal bias than a well-founded educational program. There certainly exist bright and highly-motivated students (perhaps you were one of them) who would build on that foundation and complete their education like you assume they would, but I'd judge they're a minority. Thirdly, there's a social aspect to education that your focus on skills misses. Things like civics need to be part of the curriculum, because even if a student would have no trouble learning the subject independently, there's no guarantee they would actually choose to do so. However, the American system of government (unlike some other systems) can't function without widespread civic knowledge and engagement.

I suspect teachers are the bottleneck. They hardly have any useful skills (except keeping children in line), so they can only teach memorization which is easy to teach/grade.

Your suspicion is incorrect.

Twenty years ago, my wife came out of graduate school where they learned about differentiated instruction and inquiry based instruction.

The education field is well aware of how to teach better. However, there are obstacles to the implementation.

1. Resources. Inquiry based education (where the children drive the study) requires a different student to teacher ratio than 30:1.

2. Inertia. You need a systemic change otherwise those fresh new teachers with their fancy up to date pedagogy run into #1 and principals, teachers, and students who are not ready for it.

3. Parents. Parents are also not ready for it. You have parents who want to be certain their child is prepared and ranked.

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