Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

What a load of short-sighted nonsense. Instead of revising curricula to be actually attractive and modernizing teaching instead of a drone blathering at the front of the classroom, ban phones.

The problem at the core is that education has ossified. A toxic combination of parents unable to accept that their children can have a better school experience than they had ("we had to hike two hours even during storms to go to school, stop complaining!!!"), privileged parents wanting to keep classist privileges for their children (this is a huge problem here in Germany where we separate between useless Hauptschule, just as useless Realschule and Gymnasium after 4th/6th year), politicians intimidated by the huge influence the well-networked classist parents have, underpaid staff and underfunded schools, burnt-out teachers who long since have given up on changing anything because of the lack of time, funds, respect for their work and backing by superiors...

There's an untold number of modern, engaging, attractive learning resources and hobbies available to adults. They still lose to smartphones. Not because those activities are boring, but because picking a smartphone and browsing is so effortless and habit-forming.

Careful with generalizations. I have a kid with unlimited game time on the phone and he will prefer Scratch or book reader nearly all of the time anyway. He has been doing coding games since he was 4. Most kids don't do this only because nobody has shown them how to use computers for anything other than games and social media.

He deleted Socratic app soon after I have shown it to him though, but not because he needed space for games, but rather because "the teacher must not see this". You should have seen the panic in his eyes.

Also, the only social media he is using is classroom Whatsapp, which is effectively required by the school, because there is no other reliable source of information about missed classes and other school matters.

All those kids playing games and scrolling through social media might be just fulfilling teachers' expectations after all.

Alternatively, this has nothing to do with an outdated curriculum and is about removing a distraction that impacts learning of anything!

If kids rather want their phones than to listen to school, maybe it's time to change how school works.

30 kids having to sit still 6 hours a day and do nothing more than listen and take notes? That's boring as fuck. Even worse as a lot of the stuff they learn is something they'll literally never even think about once in their life and they'll have to forget again after the test to make room for more useless crap. And every attempt to innovate gets shot down somewhere, so the teachers aren't really willing to adapt either - when I went to school a decade ago we had more than one teacher who used the same transparent sheets on an overhead projector that he made (and copied) decades ago, written on a typewriter.

Smaller class sizes, more teachers, interactive and engaging lessons... that's all stuff that only the private schools (Waldorf and friends) provide and it actually works out even with conventional metrics, but these are expensive and have issues on their own (e.g. the tendency to attract pedos and weirdos, of which there have been a fair share of scandals).

Yes, I'm fed up with the sorry state of our education system.

> If kids rather want their phones than to listen to school, maybe it's time to change how school works.

Once you start to demand that schools become more entertaining than the most addictive thing the world's entertainment technologists can dream up, you've kind of lost sight of the mission of a school.

> 30 kids having to sit still 6 hours a day and do nothing more than listen and take notes? That's boring as fuck.

Also not how school works, at least not in the Netherlands. There are lots of group projects and multidisciplinary lesson arcs and so on. Maybe in China?

> that's all stuff that only the private schools (Waldorf and friends) provide

Waldorf is an available option for public education in the Netherlands. Likewise Montessori, at the secondary level as well.

> Once you start to demand that schools become more entertaining than the most addictive thing the world's entertainment technologists can dream up, you've kind of lost sight of the mission of a school.

Maybe it's time to put the world's best entertainment technologies to use for our educational systems instead of fucking Candy Crush.

> Also not how school works, at least not in the Netherlands. There are lots of group projects and multidisciplinary lesson arcs and so on. Maybe in China?

I did my Abitur in Bavaria, Germany in 2010. My 13 years of school life and ~60% of my 2-year stint in academia were precisely what I described, and the generation after me that profited from the infamous "G8" reforms for Bavarian Gymnasium schools reported just the same. New books, finally (one of mine still had the fucking Soviet Union...), but same old teaching methods. Something like smaller classes would have been impossible due to a lack of teachers.

> Waldorf is an available option for public education in the Netherlands. Likewise Montessori, at the secondary level as well.

Kids shouldn't have to hope their parents know that this is an option or have the money for that to receive good education. Education is a human right and the only chance societies have for a survivable future.

> Once you start to demand that schools become more entertaining than the most addictive thing the world's entertainment technologists can dream up, you've kind of lost sight of the mission of a school.

People aren't idiots. Kids aren't idiots either. They want more than mindless entertainment. A school computer with Scratch can easily compete with a platformer on the phone. School in general is in a good position to be empowering, but the system prefers to be oppressive instead.

Don't get me started on how much my kids hated Scratch!

??? My kid loves it to this day. It's a major hobby. Never heard about anyone who would hate Scratch. Maybe it was a really poor presentation by the teacher.

You seem to be working from an incomplete model of the world. I can tell you for certain that small private schools with engaging lessons still have children who'd prefer to be on their phone. But I also went to school multiple decades ago and we weren't sitting quietly listening to the teacher all day, or working off typewritten transparencies...

I'm coming from the political side: all metrics indicate that quality of school has gone downhill or stagnated among most Western countries (e.g. PISA study or the #/% of students leaving school without a degree), businesses in Germany (legitimately IMHO) claim the same, investment into schools has gone down as well (particularly in the USA, but also in Germany - the usually dilapidated state of toilets is a meme on its own). Education scientists regularly come forward with appeals to improve the situation. On top of that, employment opportunities for low qualified people have been shrinking for decades as these jobs either went to China, to automation or need better qualification (half of the work of an household electrician these days is planning smart home stuff).

Meanwhile, Asian countries continue to excel... but at the cost of hundreds of thousands of broken young souls, of families going into absurd debt, and of suicide.

At the same time, Western politicians rarely seem to listen to the scientists and instead prefer to do nothing at all - this is extremely dangerous for the future of our economies.

To me, the most important thing is to give schools and teachers the resources (staff, funding, proper and maintained buildings) they need to give every single child the best education they can without falling victim to the horrors of Asian education culture, because otherwise our economy is getting fucked.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com