Hacker News Reader

Comment by rocqua | Hacker News Reader

Sure, blame the people not the system.

Our whole education system is setup as a skinner box for grades. People finding tricks for better grades are massively rewarded. Study methods are optimised for recall within a month. And educators are accountable only to the measured outcomes.

Very little of the designed system of education is aimed at teaching. Most of it is aimed at measuring and certifying. Treating students as adversarial grade maximisers will likely teach a lot of them they are expected to grade maximise adversarially.

View on HN

Yes, unfortunately that is exactly how most education systems are designed. A lot of it is also historical baggage (at least in the European school tradition), where states were faced with the issue of educating the masses, which required a lot of standardization and thus also grades. Although nowadays, educational science has long established the detrimental effects of grades, they are still very widespread. Grades are institutionalized nowadays; you have generations of students who excelled in this Skinner box and became teachers themselves, thus perpetuating the grade box.

Fortunately, there are a few alternatives, schools without grades, that don't focus on short-term recall but long-term understanding, intrinsic motivation, autonomy, and self-actualization, like the Ecole d'Humanité in the Swiss Alps: https://ecole.ch/

You said it well and my brain automatically rephrased your comment while I was reading it:

Our whole everything is setup as a skinner box for mulah. People finding tricks for more mulah are massively rewarded. Efforts are optimized for ROI within a fraction of a second. And management are accountable only to the measured outcomes.

A lot of us went through a similar system and still retained both honour and desire to actually learn.

The issue is that education is the only way to get a well paying job. This means that students aren’t there to study the subject, they are there to get to a job.

When further education wasn’t mandatory, things like the honor code made sense.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com