Your child's education is usually an honorable exception to this in that it's totally government run and borderline volunteer-run, but funding for that is not adequate to the point where you can reasonably expect it to continue as usual in the midst of a global pandemic.
The sooner you can come to terms with this, the better will be the outcome for your child. I recommend looking up resources on sharing childcare and teaching with other parents in addition to your kids' teachers.
> Your child's education is usually an honorable exception to this in that it's totally government run
It is sad that this is the case
Pre-retirement: I don't take any personal responsibility for healthcare. It’s not an option. My employer provides me with a menu of more-or-less completely standardized options. Those options even specify how often I should go to general checks-ups and strictly police my access to specialists. I have very little power to control my own consumption of healthcare, aside from the things that almost all countries delegate to individuals: attending my regular check-ups and avoiding the obvious vices. At least in Germany I could get access to a specialist without first finding a doctor who is expert at interacting with automated processes at some actuarial firm. The biggest choice I can ever make is “do I take on a bit more risk so that I can stow away money pre-tax in an HSA”.
Post-retirement: Medicare.
> retirement
All Americans pay into SS and a huge portion of retirees do/will depend mostly on SS income to be able to retire.
Even without SS, one in five Americans have a pension. The rest (who can afford to save for retirement) probably have a 401(K) with a small menu of target date funds. There are some tricks you can play on the side, sure, but they’re marginal. The rest is post-tax savings; again, afforded to most individuals in most (all) western societies.
> employment
I’m not sure how this is different from places like Europe or even China/Russia.
In fact, the US is a bit of an outlier to the other extreme. As best I can tell, the US Department of Defense is undeniably the world’s largest social jobs program.
In most developed countries it's illegal to fire someone without good cause.
If by have, you mean use, my own anecdata is quite the opposite. Everyone I know that isn’t in tech/software, is not contributing to their retirement plans that are offered. Maybe they “have” them with a 0 balance.
The US spends way more on education per capita than many countries that were able to keep their schools open during 2020-2021: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd
The US also spends way more on healthcare and has worse outcomes. Those countries also have way different societies, taxation regimes, healthcare, attitudes towards vaccination, and social safety nets. It's hard to find a country that you can fairly compare the US to in all respects.
Surely that is the point of making the comparisons: to highlight the differences, omissions, and additions so that they can be addressed.
And yet Australia has universal healthcare (among other things). Universal healthcare isn't perfect, but it is significantly better than sickness or injury causing a risk of bankruptcy (etc).
[1]: https://sendmoneyaustralia.com/tax-rates-in-australia-compar...
All societies in all aspects are like this. Regardless of people like to accept this or not, a person as an individual is always in total ownership of any situation. Sure every once in a while there are bigger problems and the society has to come together. But by and large, we are all on our own.
Acknowledging this helps take control of their life, then do whatever is the best for them.
People need to be ok, with this concept of 'total ownership'.
A person as an individual is rarely in total ownership of any situation. The only thing that we could say an individual has total ownership of is his own actions, which is a totally different thing to what you are saying.
Some elementary school teachers I know (in Europe) repeatedly remind me how important non-academic elements are in school.
* Kids go to school to get emotional care.
* Kids go to school to get attention, and someone to listen.
* Kids go to school to learn social behavior.
* Kids go to school to have a surrogate mommy to care for them while parents work.
* Kids go to school to learn (from teachers or peers) how to tie shoe laces, wipe your nose, go to the bathroom and so on.
In first and second grade, all of this makes up more than 50% of what kids actually learn, and this is what they are missing completely in home schooling.
Much of this is completely non-evident to small kids, because behavior at home is (naturally) so different.
I.e. they learn many things we don't know they learn, and don't know exist, because we are taking them for granted all the time.
In short, this concept that school actually has benefits is pretty alien to my lived reality.
This year (7-8yo), one sexually harassed her, school did shit, so she is homeschooling now.
I won't say more but many other things, including a crazy teacher humiliating kids as punishment (in a nutshell, asking the classmates to laugh at the kid), only listening to bullies etc.
If this is the so called socialization, fuck school. And we are in a supposedly a good town in Switzerland.
I vehemently support homeschool. The homeschooled adults I met in both college and in professional work are some of the best able to actually deal with reality. They’re not perfect and can be downright unaware, but that’s going to be true of anything. The bullying out there overrides any benefits.
I can also tell you that in contemporary affluent european regions, my rosy version of the story is common.
It's of course an enlightment-style utopia, but even if reality often was and is different, I'm very convinced that this is what we should strive for.
There are different stances towards educating children, of course, but this one (and its versions) is arguably the humane one.
I was homeschooled, albeit not in the pandemic form and I got all of that from my parents. I can't even express how much more grateful your comment makes me that my mom sacrificed what she did to ensure I didn't have to get all of the above from school.
I know people who have had to teach 3rd graders to give standardized tests, and reality is that a lot depends on the mood of the kid that day. Some kids just idly click away, and the teacher has to tell them to actually read the damn question before clicking on an answer.
A lot of the signal that those tests will give is just that kids weren't super attentive or feeling excited about giving the tests this year, for obvious pandemic reasons. Hard to be in a great mood when your parents are home all the time, everyone is out in masks, and all events and fun things are canceled or have restrictions.
But that doesn't seem to prevent people from pretending like there's some big scandal backed up by objective data about "learning shortfalls" and such.
It's worse to present an experiment as objective without properly measuring its error bars. As I have pointed out, there are a million different factors that can influence performance on tests. Claiming that you are "measuring outcomes in a rigorous way" from these tests without putting in the time and money to assess and control for all those factors makes for bad public policy. Worse, you'll end up providing incentives to focus only on test scores to the detriment of actual classroom learning.
For individuals, yes. But for the entire cohort not really - the results are being compared to previous years, so the error bars should be approximately the same. Children are, on average, the same as two, five or ten years ago, so the test outcomes should be about the same. The article suggests that all children are now doing worse on tests than previous years.
The mental state of children today is not the same for those five or ten years ago, for a myriad of reasons; this should be obvious.
> The article suggests that all children are now doing worse on tests than previous years.
Yes. I am also sure they will do worse on a rubric for mental well-being. Unfortunately no one seems to have thought about measuring or improving that, since most of the standardized-test focused measures probably worsen it.
I am saying that the system should fail open in their absence. "Students' achievement dropped 50 points!" makes for a really potent policy cudgel. "Students' learning dropped 50 points, +/- 40" is silly and meaningless. The former should never be available, unless the +/- is explicitly mentioned.
This is similar to prescription medicines. We have a lot of prescription medicines that do great things, which no one is debating. But without a proper evaluation process, you have zero access to them. Test assessments should be similar in my opinion.
It's a work of fiction but I'd like to refer to "The Wire Season 4" and how they portray standardised test taking to get you a fresh perspective outside of the utopian thought about curricula.
Massive [citation needed]. It seems reasonably obvious that mood will affect ability of reading, especially when you can't measure it directly; you're probably doing so via some questions that ask about comprehension. Have you not seen all the conversations about adults burning out at their jobs during the pandemic? Why do you expect children to be totally unaffected?
> These tests are far better than anyone wants to admit at showing how terrible our schools are in the U.S.
The science around this is extremely flimsy, and is mostly supplemented by random strident declarations like yours. Learning is a complex topic even in adults, and influenced by many environmental factors. It's staggering to me that people (usually without an education degree) can casually claim to know a lot about how it's happening in children, who learn at a far faster rate than adults.
Meanwhile in the USA, private schools stayed open the whole time (with the exception of March-May 2020) while public schools in San Francisco were shut until January 2021.
The more gerontocratic and science confused the country, region, or simply it's current elected executive, the more likely that schools (even preschools!) were closed by legal order for much of last year. It has been a nightmare.
I had forgotten how bad learning from home was. My wife stayed home to help them - she spent most of the day trying to get them connected to the various videos to listen to stuff and very little time actually learning
It'd be interesting to see if VR is a possible solution for such use cases. I think VR tech has to advance a bit more (in terms of ease of use, as well as affordability) before it can be used this way, but these early adopters' experience (see https://blog.immersed.team/working-from-orbit-39bf95a6d385) seems pretty positive to me.
I believe broadband access is the bigger hurdle to having every kid attend in VR. When schools closed during the pandemic there was a shortage of hardware, because of the pandemic. However, even the schools that did snag hardware quickly learned that many of their students didn’t have access to broadband.
I don't think that is true
>and were better educated than most people today.
I'm really certain that isn't true
They are probably all working towards a similar curriculum, but all the "projects" and handouts and stuff that the kids were given to work from was created by their teacher.
Thousands of teachers all over Australia (and the world) are recreating the same resources every year!
How is there not a national level library of resources they can draw on.
Khan academy is really great, why is Mr Briggs from my small town recreating it badly in power point every year.
As a child, I remember seeing the poor quality of the material we were given, and hearing how hard teachers had worked to produce it. What’s the message behind it? Hard work is good because it’s work?
I worked in the ED-tech space (related to music) for a while and for me it's shocking you are expecting teachers to be on top of this. The issue is systemic, the teachers are doing the best they can, the people on the top aren't trained either on using software to leverage and scale their teaching resources. There needs to be someone/some government that implements that as a policy, with experts guiding and driving the adoption of ED-tech in a better and more productive way.
> As a child, I remember seeing the poor quality of the material we were given, and hearing how hard teachers had worked to produce it. What’s the message behind it? Hard work is good because it’s work?
The message probably was more in line with "look at how much more work outside your expertise you'll have to do in real life, rather than just what you were hired and trained for". Seems pretty in line with our economic systems, no?