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Comment by akasakahakada | Hacker News Reader

Current education system is broken. You can't learn anything. Learning need feedback loop, but this do not exist.

In school, you hand in your homework, get the feedback only after Christmas. Because human cannot evaluate 100 students' homework efficiently.

Majority of academic textbook are trash. Some author even say "we have 300 new exercises in this edition" proudly, while the solution is often either nonexistent, or at the end of the book. Why at the end, not next to that problem? Or next page? Why wasting my time to flip pages back and forth?

If the content of exercise is important, why not include that into the text?

If instructor is needed, why not making every concepts into Q&A as they had already been explained in office hour or email somewhere else? Why zero effort being put into knowledge accumulation?

Human failed at education. ChatGPT obviously is a more knowledgeable entity, personally I prefer that more than human instructor.

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I'm sorry, but I've taught a lot of students at the university level. Some of them have exactly this attitude. You're simply wrong. And on the long term path to failure.

The exercises are invaluable. You don't get the answers because then you look at them. The whole point of the exercises is for you to do them, and then for you to figure out if you are right or wrong!

The content of the exercises isn't in the book because you need to actually do things to learn. You cannot learn math, physics, and many other topics passively.

You're ignoring the main lessons and features of the system.

And no. There are countless amazing books. The fact that you can't see that is because you don't understand how to learn.

Yeah reading and doing stuff is how you learn any topic, getting the right solution is not really the point (and arguably should not be in the book in the first place).

The main issue with education is grades and how obsessed people are with those as a sorting mechanism for students.

OK well then 2+2 is 5. I figured out the answer myself, good for me, good for the humanity.

If you choose to fight with me, I fight with you. You dig your only grave. You just jump out and admitted that you are the problematic human teacher that causing social problems.

I do my homework when I feel like I need them. Accessibility to the solutions is a problem. Learning though examples is another prominent way that you don't see. People can choose to investigate into the problem right now or absorb knowledge then think about stuffs. I have 80 years in my life expectancy to do exercise and indeed solving problems everyday is that. What is the point of "figure it out yourself" about some useless math at the moment when people have their whole life to think about it? People know nothing because you never tell anything. You failed your job as a teacher. You are doing excellent job of not documenting stuff and being anti knowledge accumulation.

Tell him to figure it out himself, not read.

Ask HN: Where do I find good code to read? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37248002

The problem with linking success to attitude is the counterfactual; Would students with the right "attitude" been successful regardless?

That's why more formal academic studies are needed for topics such as these rather than anecdotes, because we'll find a whole range of contradictory opinions.

And why are they not doing the exercises? Are they lazy? The moment a significant percentage of learners are alienated by the system then there is something wrong with the system. Currently a specific subset of learners fit into this system. The rest either needs extraordinary grit or fail since it is not setup for them to succeed. I for one welcome AI to burn some of our old decrepit institutions to the ground.

I'm sorry to read you've had such an awful educational experience. Where was this? It does not resonate with my experience at all. I had my fair share of awful teachers, but the handful of excellent teachers really made a difference. The course material was generally pretty decent as well.

My formal education ended some 20 years ago, and I'm sure things have changed, and from what I hear from younger friends and relatives, it doesn't seem to be for the better ...

I think I read more textbook then average person to a extend that can call myself textbook reviewer. People usually stuck with only one book that is being assigned to them at class, But as a self-learner, I read all, literally all, linear algebra, discrete math, stuff like that, all just terribly written.

I think it's broken, but for other reasons. In the UK at least, secondary school exams are overwhelmingly about memorisation and prediction of what questions there will be rather than applying logical or investigative thinking. There's very little practical work, you sit in a chair and listen to the teacher or things on the whiteboard most of the time. Also, there's a majority feminine influence in education. All of these factors lead to me believe that education simply does not cater to males, and soaring grades of girls confirms this. In the UK, white males have been the poorest performing demographic on exams for the past decade. But nobody wants to talk about it interestingly.

I was fortunate to get an apprenticeship at the age of 16, which enabled me to get into the real world of work and build experience years ahead of everyone else. It's a completed overlooked path - most students still think they need a degree to get a good job.

> secondary school exams are overwhelmingly about memorisation

That's depressing. It was starting to move away from that when I did my physics and chemistry A-levels in 1974, had been for some years in fact with Nuffield courses emphasizing exploration and comprehension rather than simply getting the 'right' answer. The Physics A-level had a substantial section that tested the student's ability to understand the results of experiments.

>In school, you hand in your homework, get the feedback only after Christmas.

Is this supposed to be a problem? Research says that delays in getting corrections are not all that important, you still end up learning even if there's a fairly large gap. https://pcl.sitehost.iu.edu/rgoldsto/courses/dunloskyimprovi...

Paper is more focused on "feedback benefit learning" instead of how long should people wait for feedback.

Seems that you are quoting another paper instead. But I don't think it is definitive, as you see, n=27. Also the experiment setting is not about how long after initial test, it is about how short before the next test.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/MC.37.8.1077

> The participants were 27 students enrolled in Grade 6 at The School at Columbia University in New York City.

Problem with education is that it has a dual goal of both educating everyone and "filtering the cream of the crop". On the long term such goals begin to clash, but it's much easier to do the latter than the former.

It's easy to blame the individual, but I wonder what are the collective social costs of such stringent attitudes on the long term.

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