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Comment by EvilLook | Hacker News Reader

The problem is that most people today don't understand what an education is supposed to accomplish.

The vast majority of Americans believe that an education should ultimately end with a marketable skill, and as a result students are dissuaded from paths of study that do not end with a directly marketable skill (art school, liberal arts, music school). In a minimally viable education the pressure to not study these things goes away however there is no incentive to produce a student with marketable job skills. I think this is okay because school should have never been about job training.

An education should prepare you for job training and job training should teach you a marketable skill. This is not a new concept; guilds, apprenticeships, and trade schools have existed for centuries. What is necessary is to de-stigmatize these paths in the modern age and divorce the concept of education from that of job training.

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The problem is too many people who think they know what "the problem" is.

But I do agree with you on the second and third paragraphs.

Like when somebody asks you "but what will I do with quadratic equations later in life?". No, you semi-evolved simian, you don't need to solve quadratic equations later in life, you need a brain that has jumped the hurdle of learning quadratic equations later in life.

"you need a brain that has jumped the hurdle of learning" Thanks but no thanks. I just don't feel that 16 years of doing useless things are a good investment.

You can learn to do something useful and still develop your precious brain. Learn to play an instrument! Write some code! Build something with your hands! Learn to write.

Because guess what, around us there are a lot of people who can't write. Even on hacker news people use "its" and "it's" interchangeably these days. If we'll descend to the regular facebook users - they can't write, they can't speak. They did however end their school with some grades, so they pretend to having learned quadratic equations. And your "education" pretends they did.

Why is that? Did quadratic education help them? Did it? If so, why they can't write and can't reason? Did it?

This is bullshit. You are here selling us a product that does not work. Moreover, I guess you built some of your self-esteem on it working. Too bad.

OK, I'll bite. What do you consider "useless things"?

Everything I learned in school and can't remember today is useless.

There goes most of history, math (I do remember some math but most of the school math is pointless), language & literature (I like reading, I just never liked the selection), physical education and lots of other subjects. It's not that they aren't interesting per se, it's that school ruins them for you. By reading wikipedia for half an hour I understand more than from a month of a subject in school.

I could have better use for the time spent on this.

Or, maybe, you have a bad memory? Or never found an application for this "useless" knowledge?

You sound like a person throwing away a can opener because they can't use it to bludgeon open a tin.

I do remember some math but most of the school math is pointless

Such as?

I eagerly remember everything I read in wikipedia. Because I read what interests me, because I have grown-up context and know how to remember things.

I sound like a person who don't want to buy that expensive and useless can opener, but I'm forced to.

http://math.info-servis.net/59.jpg <-- this is almost useless (knowing about them are fine, memorizing is useless)

http://shkola.ua/web/images/uploads/algebra8klass_merzlyak_-... <-- this is an example of totally useless math

Your second example is practice--think of it as training the ALU in your brain.

In the first example, learning those trig relations is useful later for doing calculus and other things. You may forget them over time, but to have never been exposed to them would be a loss.

The answer that "Well, I can just Wikipedia them later!" assumes that you know what to look for later. This turns you from being a thinking person into a glorified cache for the internet. I'm not sure that's a good thing.

How old are you, anyway?

What if I don't want to train any TLAs? The problem with trig relations is that school math makes a whole lot of grindingly huge excercises out of them; and then grade you by your ability to do the mental clownade. I'm so not into this.

I'm 27.

If you like reading, is it worthless for the authors who will write the books that you will read to have studied history, language and literature?

Or in other words, do you use/consume stuff that are the product of what you can't remember from school? And if so, does that make [edit] the knowledge behind them less useless?

No. I know my native language pretty fine. I never liked literature they reach in schools. I don't remember anything from the history course in school, it was boring. I mean, they just can't make it interesting. Because it's not their (textbook authors) priority. So it tends to bore to death.

Everything I know about history is either from books I read by myself or from wikipedia/internet.

But would Wikipedia be worth reading if it wasn't for those who did find history classes interesting and wrote/fact checked Wikipedia articles?

Well, why not confine history classes to those people?

Because, I mean, you don't have learn programing to use facebook. And we still have those people who wrote it.

You don't sound like you know enough to even know what you don't know. That's really unfortunate.

i luv u 2

does solving mathematical problems actually increase your general mental ability? Is there any research that supports this?

Why study for 16 years to be "prepared for job training"?

I think that most people of reason will significantly reduce or outright drop this part of "education", if not pushed hard towards it by the old and inefficient system.

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