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Comment by namenotrequired | Hacker News Reader

You don't choose. It's decided for you based on your ability.

Edit: not disagreeing that it's harsh, just wanted to clarify that point.

That is not entirely true.

At least in Germany it depends on the state you are in. The teachers make their recommendation, not entirely based on your grades in school, but also based on your general approach to learning and understanding as they got to observe you for a few years. Depending on the German state, this recommendation is binding, but in some of the states the final decision is with your parents.

This is not correct. It depends on the Bundesland (state) you live in. Some have mandatory assignments to a type of secondary schools, in others it’s up to the parents.

That said, switching from one type to another during secondary education is far from impossible, but also not always easy and smooth - it depends a lot on the school you leave and the school you enter. On the other hand, it’s very easy to start an academic education when you have finished your vocational training. More than one third of college students don’t have the „Abitur“ (graduated from Gymnasium)

That's even worse. I can't imagine what you're able to do at 10 has that high of an impact on your abilities the rest of your life.

It gets worse than that. Some of your life outcomes are determined by your genes and by your pre-ten-year-old lifestyle

And with increasing understanding of epigenetics, even the lifestyle choices, and crises, of one’s grandparents could potentially influence life outcomes.

Yeah, but we're talking about school systems here.

I wasn't surprised at all as a ten year old who got a recommendation for gymnasium and who didn't. It is a recommendation by the way, parents can chose to enter their kids in whatever they wish to. This leads to kids with high income / social economic status entering gymnasium and struggling mightily and kids from worker families who might make it not going to gymnasium.

It might be a cultural-ideological reason that you think this way. Not every place in the world has those same assumptions and taboos. There are more blank slateist cultures where the only polite thing is to assume that any child can become anything. In other places people take it for granted that there are differences in abilities, talents, aptitudes, personalities that are fairly clear by age 10. In the US, this topic is too similar to how racists talk about blacks, so the whole thing is taboo. In places where the topic of innate talent does not have racial connotations (more homogeneous countries), people more readily accept it.

If you think modern Germany is homogeneous, well... :-)

If you think parent ever said then then we'll... :-)

It's not the rest of their life, just until they do it better. This is just the simple path. There are a dozen different paths in Germany's education-system.

> You don't choose. It's decided for you

I does sound great I must say. I've also found those Gammas are quite happy people on average. Some people call them 'cogs' but those are haters and deltas.

'based on ability'.

Or rather, academic test scores, which will be perfectly correlated with parents financial status, status and employment.

There's no doubt that a highly conscientious and thoughtful trades-person could raise children to compete with the bankers kids, but it's just so much harder.

So you end up with an institutionalized classism.

That said, the same thing ends up happening in the US/UK, probably by more systematic than institutionalized mechanism.

The dark truth is that in some ways if functions better, because broadly speaking highly conscientious parents raise highly conscientious kids, but it also makes things more stringent and unfair.

(Germany:) " Children from rural areas, pupils from lower socio-economic backgrounds and boys in general have a significantly lower probability of being selected to the most academic school track even when their ability is similar to that of their urban and better socially placed counterparts." [1]

The other thing is that Anglo culture is just more open.

PISA testing shows that when accounting for economic factors, immigrants to US/UK/Can etc. perform just as well as local kids. (i.e. immigrants are poorer, but they do just as well as those with same economic background)

On the Continent, immigrants fare considerably poorer, especially in Germany and ironically the worst in Finland which otherwise has one of the top education systems in the world. [2] (See page 28)

A lot of this might be a function of language: English is something many migrants might already speak whereas German and Finnish are that much harder to pick up.

That said from the rest of the PISA paper it doesn't seem that Continental Schools stick out that much otherwise and Germany did successfully make some 'big reforms' in 2000 that seemed to move the needle overall, though this could also be a function of unification leap forward.

As far as copyright in 19th century - I wonder if the UK's lack of progress in publishing was also a function of super classiest social hierarchy where they didn't see a point in that much education for the plebes?

As for 'modern lessons' I think this analysis applies mostly to 'knowledge' more so than much else. I don't think progress is hampered because 'Thor' is copyright and by and large, information is mostly accessible. I think this analogue might apply to the current issue of copyright of Scientific papers, but not much else.

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/242221851_Inequalit...

[2] https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...

Correlation is not causation. Testing objective ability (as opposed to essays and extracurricular engagement and volunteering) is the best thing for talented but poor kids. The alternative is cultural class markers that Anglo-style "holistic" testing selects for. That's much harder for a working class kid to acquire, compared to learning math and physics well. Saying this as someone with peasant and working class ancestors who could never set me (or my parents) up with all the fancy credentials and cultural experiences that my richer classmates had (foreign vacations, sailing, skiing, horse riding competitions, networking in high society etc). But I could study in school and could pass the objective tests.

The causation between wealth/status etc. and test scores is fairly well established.

I also provided you with scientific evidence that the 'scoring' German approach systematically underrepresented those otherwise equally capable, which is further evidence of that.

Finally, the fact that migrant children perform so much more poorly in Germany compared to US/UK, while indirect, does provide more evidence for the pile.

'Test Scores' are not 'the best thing' for poor kids by a mile - they are merely an 'outlet valve' for some special kids from special families.

I remember being at the home with a woman who married a Latino migrant in California. She was a cleaner. I asked the teenage children 'what university they were going to' and they balked, they literally had not given it a thought. In their 'family / lifestyle / education / community' - University was for 'rich people'. The daughter was helping out part time with the mom at the cleaning company, I'm pretty certain she will grow up to be a cleaner and that's that.

What's 'best' for kids are good schools, good teachers, good mentorship, quality peers, and some semblance stability at home i.e. parents with stable jobs, not in jail, not evicted or homeless, not caught up in the drug world. Only with those things do 'tests' start to have some kind of meaning.

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