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Comment by BirAdam | Hacker News Reader

Personally, I’ve always felt that schooling is a waste of time, money, and resources. The default model of civilization is that children are absent from life. This means that kids are missing out on seeing adults interact, so they mature more slowly, and it also means that their life experiences are limited to what happens in a building. Importantly, after 18 years, people in the USA leave school in debt and are no better suited to professional life than when they entered school at 4 or 5. If I could wave a wand and changing things, I’d restructure civilization to expect children to be present everywhere with their parents or other family members, learning by being part of civilization as every young adult currently does.

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My parents do not speak fluent English, they have zero grasp of the sciences or even basic math (they still have trouble grasping percentages and fractions), and are very susceptible to scams by cult leaders from their country of origin. Same for almost all of my aunts and uncles, who lives hundreds or thousands of miles away.

I would have been doomed without an external setting where I got to interact with much more qualified people.

Well, yes, the adage that "It takes a village to raise a child" still holds.

Yeah, and the best way to do that is to have the village organize a central location where everyone's kids can go learn a variety of skills and subjects from a variety of well-educated adults. Otherwise you're asking every individual adult to meet people very different from them and develop such good friendships that they are willing to spend significant time with your kids.

Would that not utterly stratify social classes? Upward social mobility would be near impossible if not for general education? Children would have no approaches other than what their family already has access to. The son of a smith becomes a smith, the son of a carpenter becomes a carpenter, the son of a lawyer becomes a lawyer and so on.

And schools also function in part as day care. Parents can devote hours of the day to work, focused and without worry for their child. If all parents had to bring their children to work, would that not diminish their ability to work?

Can an electrician focus on his work when a young child is with him? How can he teach the child the theory of electrophysics that is necessary to understand if one is to become an electrician? Do others at the site watch the children and explain the theory? Would you then not end up with teachers again?

Edit: This is also a rather amerocentric take. What of other countries educational systems where you can choose more directional high schools. Where the final year of highschool IS an apprenticeship in some vocation? Where you leave school, with no debt and with experience on the job. And all the countries where education is free. Countries where relevant experience is a part of the degree? Where courses in teamwork, leadership and other skills are a part of higher education? To discard educational systems because of the defects of a single country's defects seems poorly thought out.

Would that not utterly stratify social classes?

Yes. This is one of the outcomes the anti-school crowd is after.

Is there a name for this tactic of projecting motivations on others in order to explain their behaviors?

Normal

Theory of mind.

I see where you were going, but I don't think Theory of Mind quite fits.

ToM says that a person understands someone else to have their own knowledge, ideas, motivations, etc. But this behavior is not simply understanding that others have their own motivations, but imputing negative motivations onto others.

It's estimates of future behavior from past public behavior and public statements and documented funding. Ask a teacher how they feel about Betsy Devos and you will get two very very very different answers largely depending on political ideologies that have nothing to do with teaching because of her history and "friends".

She isn't exactly friendly to public education, and a lot of the funding for pushing for voucher programs comes from religious organizations.

For a concrete example, our state has had vouchers for decades, and it has done jack, diddly, and squat for improving public schools in the area, because it turns out letting the rich kids go to a school only they can go to just means they have an easier time neglecting the other hundred thousand kids in the state that weren't born to the local power family. Meanwhile up north where there isn't enough density to support a school as a private business and not enough rich families to want it anyway, everyone is put into the same couple schools which struggle to ever have enough money to do even the basics but the teachers are good and the material is good and the effort is there, so for the kids that want education, there's a perfectly good one for all to have. I was classmates with a famous Senator's niece, and we had the same teachers and it turns out the world doesn't end when you let the poors learn stuff.

Don't be so cynical. There are serious problems with schools and there's no visible progress, so many people gave up. They concluded the problems are endemic and permanent and the only way to fix them is to dissolve the schools entirely.

Which is why they are pretty much universally funded by religious fundamentalists who spent their past years trying to force textbook writers to deny climate change or evolution as basic scientific facts.

This isn't disillusioned people looking to tear it all down and rebuild a wonderful new system, unless you think Betsy Devos is some sort of anarchist. These people have very specific complaints about the school system that rarely have to do with the actual problems of actual outcomes, because the people who by and large ARE getting actual bad outcomes from the public school system don't really have a voice.

What religious fundamentalists? Maybe in the US? Where I live, schools are actually a source of aggressive religious propaganda. But the problems with schools are far wider than that they become ideological battlefields with propaganda-filled curricula. Lots of non-religious and moderate people see the problems.

> Can an electrician focus on his work when a young child is with him?

Yes, of course. This doesn't mean a 4 year old is coming along on a traditional 8 hour US electrician's shift. It doesn't mean the 10 year old is coming along to the dangerous industrial jobs. When kids get put into reasonable contexts they adapt, it's kind of what we excel at as a species.

However, I was absolutely learning how to do basic home wiring (at a semi-useful level for some tasks) and electrical theory before I was in my double digits in years. By the time I was 10 or 11 (hard to recall precisely) I was wiring up my own circuits (alarm on my door to not be caught reading at night) at home and doing dangerous things with line current. I certainly knew enough to be dangerous, but also did understand the basics of how AC and DC circuits worked.

To this day I can still do basic electrical work such as bending conduit, wiring in work boxes - essentially everything past the demarc. These were all skills I learned before I was a teenager by helping out on job sites.

> How can he teach the child the theory of electrophysics that is necessary to understand if one is to become an electrician? Do others at the site watch the children and explain the theory? Would you then not end up with teachers again?

How many working electricians understand things to such a deep level? While I certainly understand more these days than I did at age 12, I can't really say any of it would be useful on a typical residential job site. The safety aspect is pretty well handled by a few standard rules of thumb that don't require much deep theory-level knowledge.

I'm very much not anti-school, but anyone who thinks our current system remotely challenges most individuals seems to have an incredible lack of imagination to me. Yes, this requires far more effort from far more adults across the entire spectrum of society.

Edit: All I do know is that sequestering kids away from 'real life' is damaging, and I'm unsure anything can convince me otherwise at this point in my life. We can never go back in time and give someone those experiences later in life (brains stop making neural connections as quickly) so I do often ponder what is truly being lost forever.

> Would that not utterly stratify social classes?

Not today. Schools no longer have monopoly on education. They actually prevent kids from learning by overloading them with the official curriculum, leaving no time or energy for informal education.

Isn't this how we end up with a lineage of uneducated blacksmiths? I am from a rural town focused on oil and gas and some agriculture. There were no software developers were I was from and the internet was only dial-up before I left. A lack of schooling would see me in a O&G work camp right now because I would have been exposed to nothing else.

Anyone who is interested in programming will learn about it regardless. It's especially easy today with things like Google and Youtube.

OK, how about becoming a doctor? Software development is a bad example for today, but was an excellent example for when I was growing up because Youtube and Google both did not yet exist and the personal computer had just started appearing in everyone's home. The resources weren't there.

How would this new setup allow me to become something other than what is immediately around me?

> The default model of civilization is that children are absent from life.

There's nothing "default" about Civilization, which entailed intentional centralization and creation of bureaucracy.

We don't live in a society where 80% of people farm shitty land to survive, and no one of sound mind wants to turn back that dial. We're not bringing our kids to roam sheepishly around oil rigs, mines, labs, sales floors, whatever.

I think everyone has an opinion on how education could improve, but there's no superior (or viable) substitute for it at scale.

Notwithstanding, this isn't zero sum in the first place: parents can teach their kid at leisure, and they do. They expose them to their interests and their work, to some extent.

And lastly, there's no such thing as "absent from life". Even if this is only meant to convey the idea that schooling shelters kids away from any and all interesting things in society, this is untrue (and by extension, it would suggest that you're "absent from life" if your shit job doesn't meet some arbitrary criteria, or otherwise that your shit job is "full of life" but school isn't).

> Importantly, after 18 years, people in the USA leave school in debt and are no better suited to professional life than when they entered school at 4 or 5.

I'm not aware of anyone in the US going into to debt for school before the age of 18.

Are you confusing the free public education that's offered throughout the US with the optional college education that some, though definitely not most, take out loans to attend?

18 years of school, not age

Thats crazy imo

You are limited to your sorroundings with less ways to move up due to lack of awarness

I bet it would increase inequality hard

I love this idea. It's done a teeny tiny bit in the form of work experience, but actually we should make a scheme where workplaces get some kind of incentive to let the kids come and hang around, maybe even do some work depending on what it is.

I would sprinkle this around the school calendar so that you had a few weeks a year where you could sit at various places of work and see what was going on, instead of little weeklong academic breaks plus a mega long summer holiday. Not everyone loves the academic side of things and this could be a good break, plus it might provide some motivation for the question of "why am I learning this" that everyone has at various points in their education.

I’m confused. Are you suggesting children should be working?

As I read the parent's point, I think he is advocating for kids seeing their parents work more often. As it is, kids in US don't experience the reality often. More than that, parents shield them from the reality as long as it is possible, because the reality mostly sucks.

I would think of it as 'take your kids to work', but more often. I am not a big fan. I was coming to my dad's car shop after school and I can't honestly say that I learned anything useful ( I could have, but did not ).

They probably expect the kids to be involved/help, but that depends a lot on the parents' jobs. Like I was of some help to my dad in elementary school (helped him with basic IT/networking/data stuff), but my mom worked with biohazards that had very good reason for not wanting children around so any time we had to go to mom's work we were locked in a break room for hours.

Back when my dad had an office job, I would visit him in his office. We'd be locked in a room with a (fancy for the time) IBM PS/2 for 8 hours. It blew.

My mom was a teacher and for some reason I ended up the entire school's IT dept as a preteen, despite the school's IT dept being acceptable, just not staffed 100% of the time. I did pretty well at running a photocopier and stuff, though when I was older I eventually realized that letting a ten year old run and DIAGNOSE AND FIX the photocopier was not something that should have happened.

My mom was single and poor so I also got to spend from 3pm to 7pm most evenings sitting in her classroom, which for some years was an actual server closet, desperately trying to note die of boredom while my mother had meetings and graded papers.

This was so useful, important, and necessary for my future /s

> I would think of it as 'take your kids to work', but more often.

I think these were called apprenticeships at one time

Works pretty well if you're a landscaper or something.

What if you have some soul-crushing dead-end office job? How long do you think a 6-year-old would last in an airline customer support call center?

That teaches the 6-year-old something too.

I thought this was only me! For me, my dad was self employed as an "accountant" of sorts, and specialized in what might be called forensic accounting of Medicare reimbursements. He dragged 12 year old me into hospital data processing centers at 3am to print records so he could do his work.

In this case, he had a certain amount of records to print in the time allotted, and he needed two operators to make the window. I learned a lot of useless knowledge about which medical procedures qualify for extra reimbursement for Medicare, and also what Sunset Park, Queens looked like at 3am. Nothing really useful in life.

I think if my dad had hired someone and let me sleep and play on the computer instead, that probably would have turned out better for me.

Not just that they should be working, but they should only be exposed to their parents' social circle. There should be no opportunity for children to meet people from different social backgrounds.

One of their parents' social circle. The other is too busy feeding them and making sure they don't run into traffic or disappear somewhere to play video games. So you've suddenly halved the number of people who can get real work done.

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