Comment by TamDenholm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TamDenholm | Hacker News Reader

  A year in school from ages 4 to 18 inside this insanity costs $30K to $40K a year.
  People are spending $500K on their kid’s education -- before college! Insane!

I'm dumbfounded by this. I went to a state school (well 4 actually, parents moved a lot) in the UK, left at 15 years old and haven't had any formal education since. I consider myself reasonably intelligent, i'm an autodidact and i only started real learning after realising there was a difference between education and school, after that epiphany i began to love learning.

In the 10 years since leaving school, i've done pretty well for myself, i'm financially stable, know my shit in my chosen field and earn a good wage when i choose to work.

While i'm not arrogant enough to think i've got everything sorted, i've always wanted to be a mentor to others and hopefully show them that school and education are different, i know i'd have done better if i had a mentor when i went through my learning experiences. Although, i suppose its still not too late for me to find some.

The prices he mentions assume that everybody's sending their kids to private schools prior to college. That's really not the case. In cities, you'll see a higher percentage of it because city schools tend to be worse environments for learning and are stretched thinner budget-wise, but the vast majority of students in small towns and suburbs go to public schools paid for by their taxes and do not incur the kind of pre-college expense for education that he's talking about. Sure, the taxpayers are still paying towards their education ... but it's spread across the entire community, whether they have students in school or not, and not coming directly out of the pockets of individual students' families.

This is just what happens when you have a lot of money. Money is spent inefficiently because its all relative to the revenue you're taking in.

I'm in the UK and neither my wife or I went to private school (in fact I went to a school that consistently appeared towards the very bottom of the league tables in Scotland, before they stopped producing such things). However, our son has been privately educated for the last nine years and probably has another six years to go - and I have never regretted it, the quality of everything is qualitiatively better than state schools (even good state schools).

One thing that is particularly noticeable in private schools is that the emphasis is not purely on academic performance (although that is important) - they are excellent in providing a very rounded education.

My only regret is that the same level of education is not available to all children - regardless of the parents ability to pay (which is obviously the main selection criteria at the moment).

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