It certainly did not appear to me that way, here in Germany. There was a lot of time spend sitting in a room and "learning", yet I basically learned nothing. For the other things you described I do not think they were ever considered.
All around school was a giant waste of time.
In a single semester of university I learned more than in 12 years of school.
I learned more in a single year on the job than I did in 3 years of university. That doesn’t make university useless
The uni taught you more real-world expected skills but I‘m certain you learned more before uni.
You keep saying this but I have a hard time believing this is true; in fact I'm not even sure what "more" means (objectively) in this context.
Let's see, in the 12 years of schooling you've learned at the very least: how to read and write, how to interpret texts, how to read literature, how to compose an essay, how to speak, read, and write a second language, a ton of mathematics from basic arithmetic to I guess something like calculus and trigonometry and algebra and some discrete maths, several topics of physics and chemistry, biology, geology, and other natural sciences (in more or less detail), several years of history, and mandatory physical exercise to top it off. What magical university did you go to that in a single semester you learned more than that :D Unless I'm missing something.
In university I actually had to study, take notes, research the subject, study for many hours, etc.
>a ton of mathematics from basic arithmetic to I guess something like calculus and trigonometry and algebra and some discrete maths
Hilarious to say this. As it turned out, my first semester of university mathematics was spent on learning everything I did not learn in school. And it made it extremely clear to me how badly school had prepared me.
You would think that school would put me in a position where university mathematics were just a continuation. Nothing further could be from the truth, nearly everything taught in school was taught in a way which made it useless for actual mathematics.
In school we learned nothing about: Sets, logic, deductions, Axioms or Proofs (which turn out to be really important!), we did however spend years solving integrals, which turned out extremely unhelpful for actual mathematics.
It takes people twelve years to learn to read and write at a 12th grade level.
You could study it for another 4 or more years at university if you wanted to develop your skills further.
> What made me good at reading was reading books outside of school.
This is your personal experience. I learned to read and write quite well at school and was well-prepared for university.
Do you think that was because their methods were bad, you didn't bother and they couldn't force you, or that their methods were not adapted to the way you learn?
Also, I'd find it surprising if you really learned nothing. From what I know of German schooling from people who went through it, you certainly learned at least a bit about the depths to which humans can go to and how to prevent them (Holocaust and wider Nazi atrocities). Also, you probably learned social skills, basic project management and collaboration, and some knowledge which is probably useless other than maybe as a basis of understanding the world and various things you might encounter. I don't recall much from my biology or chemistry classes, but I recall vague outlines, which is enough.
It was because they had nothing to teach. I still remember trying to learn fractions from a teacher who clearly did not understand fractions either.
Just to be clear, I did very well in school. Given their standards I would be considered a "successful student" and I went on to get a university degree.
>Also, you probably learned social skills, basic project management and collaboration, and some knowledge which is probably useless other than maybe as a basis of understanding the world
None of that I learned while sitting in class. I learned it despite the school activities I had to do.
School is about more than the part where you sit in class. The social skills, time and project management navigation etc. is all stuff you learn and do because of school but outside of class.
See Germany-Palestine relations. One third of weapons used in the Gaza war are paid for by Germany, and the remaining two thirds by the USA. Other countries contribute negligibly.
And telling if time spent learning is wasted is actually quite hard - if you know something and everyone else knows something it often fades into the background and nobody notices. But it still makes a difference.
I agree that this is probably the most important thing for children to learn. My point is that sitting in a room for 8 hours does very little to accomplish that.
>And telling if time spent learning is wasted is actually quite hard - if you know something and everyone else knows something it often fades into the background and nobody notices. But it still makes a difference.
I had the direct comparison when I went to university. It became very clear that I was learning much more and faster.
To talk about schooling we first have to make clear what the goal is. Sure everybody needs to learn how to read, write and do basic arithmetic, but that is not a 12 year endeavor. Even including basic general knowledge is not a 12 year endeavor. And we should not be wasting children's time on things, just because we can't be bothered to have them do something actually meaningful.
Sure, but this should be expected. If you filtered out all children with low interest/performance/support in preschool and just threw them onto a playground, learning rate could also be much faster in school for the rest.
But if you want a solid baseline of reading/writing/math/general education for everyone in society, those twelve years are already barely enough.
I'm very confident that early discrimination/segregation ("gifted" and "idiot" tracks in school) is a net negative for society and encourages unethical outcomes on top.
Optional programs for faster/more targetted learning are much better and can be very positive IMO, but even there you need to be careful with how you set things up to avoid problems.
I'm curious about this, can you elaborate more? My feeling is that in a class of 25 kids grouped by age being taught by 1 single teacher, it's basically impossible that the teaching pace and style is adequate for more than a handful of them. You're going to have kids bored out of their minds learning nothing and being unengaged, and you're going to have kids that can't keep up and would need extra support / a different kind of support. You're not doing either of those any favours.
By doing "early segregation" you make this more difficult because that "common baseline" no longer exists; you'd expect to get significantly more people that struggle with language and basic math as a result (in exchange for better outcomes in your "gifted" track).
Furthermore, you are sorting people into social buckets in a way that is really bad for social cohesion (inevitable, all the white kids with rich parents are gonna end up in the "gifted" schools). Everyone is gonna grow up in a echochamber, basically.
Finally, this is going to lead to restrictions on a young adults options, that I find really unpalatable to blame on the affected children: Can you honestly argue that people don't deserve the chance to study medicine at university just because their parents did not tutor, push and mentor them sufficiently? Equality of opportunity as a principle is gonna be nigh impossible to preserve in such a system.
I do not dispute that you could teach children faster and better with individual tutoring and customized programs, but that would be cost-prohibitive, and I see currently no realistic way to get there without above consequences.
Maybe AI will solve it :P
In Germany you have schools for students targeting university. I was in such a school. Every student there was there to get into university.
What can I say; I like arguing. We don't actually have to choose a single goal - everyone can have different goals. If schooling isn't compulsory then you could have a mass of different people doing different things for different reasons and it all gets called 'schooling'.
If schooling is state managed ... the same interest groups exist, they just have to fight over the curriculum in parliament or the Department of Schooling. The end result will be a weird hodge-podge of compromises that nobody can confidently say satisfies them completely and doesn't have a clear goal.
It happens that we cannot say that there is a goal of schooling. Some people may have one goal, but other people may have alternative goals. There are some really tricky edge cases, like History - should Mongolian schoolchildren be taught that Ghengis Khan was a hero, a scumbag, a disaster, a triumph, a fact, a national symbol or someone best forgotten? That is not a question where a reliable and enduring consensus can be reached because real life is too complicated to take a final universal stand on something that happened 1,000 years ago.
I completely agree. If I wanted anything from current schooling it would be giving students more abilities to develop themselves. Obviously that doesn't mean a 16 year old playing videogames for 12 hours a day, but students who like doing sports should be doing much more of it and those who like learning should be doing much more of that and so on.
So some self proclaimed smart person “learned nothing”, and therefore school is a waste of time. At the same time, ignoring that maybe a school or system is indeed not prepared to handle some individuals (which is not good), or that maybe some teachers are bad, or maybe the system does not support their staff enough. But that can’t be the case because they learned nothing. Whole school system must be a scam.
I am sure you want to blame me for this, but somehow I went to university and got a degree in (applied) mathematics. So I doubt it was some fundamental problem with me.
Everybody is upset when someone tells them they fail at their jobs and teachers are an entire industry of total failure. In a single semester of university I learned so much more than in 12 years of school. If teachers aren't at fault, who is? By any metric I was a successful student.
I know a high school teacher with a PhD and has tutored and lectured at the university level. But they are a teacher now. Guess I’ll paint them with the same brush as all teachers.
Where did I say that the intentions were bad?
>Because you had a bad time, then the whole system is malicious right?
No. In university the expectations were drastically higher. If the goal of the school was to prepare me for university, then it failed at that for everyone. The mismatch can not be attributed to me.
>But they are a teacher now. Guess I’ll paint them with the same brush as all teachers.
We had one of these as well. Average teacher, learned basically nothing in her class.
Some teachers start with high spirits but most turn into regular slobs trying to get to the end of the month once they realise that their job is to mind the children while the parents work.
I was lucky enough to meet just a handful of teachers that tought me some values, the rest were just ... forgetable people.
In any normal (private sector) job, if you can't perform the basic job requirements you get fired or retrained. Maybe you're moved to a different area that better suits your skill set. But you don't just sit in a position for 20 years screwing it up day after day as you see in government / lower education.
Not necessarily causative, but we'd want to be very sure the educational fence isn't contributory before we tear it down.
Not my experience.
>But yes, it is possible to slack through it all if you want to slack.
I was a good student though and did really well. I never learned for anything though and was bored in basically every subject.
There never were any expectations on me which I didn't trivially meet.
Overwhelming majority of people is not like that, they do not get highest grades, they do not get into gymnasium without effort, don't pass tests without effort.
Hopefully not at the same time.
Trust is a privilege that must be earned not given. Prove to me you're trustworthy and I'll give you trust.
One untrustworthy 16 year old can cause hell chaos in a group of trustworthy teenagers. I've seen it when I was a youth worker.
> Depends on what. I can't even trust the 40 year developers in my team at work. "Hacky if foreach loop will fix later"
Whenever people make statements like this, I always wonder what their peers think of them. This dismissive attitude is so off-putting.
I want working maintainable code to enable me to do my job. If people dread submitting a PR because they can't write code with effort, good. I like my ships built strong not weak like your ego.
If they fix their problem, good. Trust given, more than happy to salute however time and time they've proven to me they don't.
These developers have proven to me they won't. These are developers who are those who do not fix the issuing code and will just move on to the next problem hacking it to make it work.
If you've never worked with such, then lucky. If this sting for you, time to grow up and put effort in to your work.
Blag the senior with bullshite of: "I will fix this in the next revision, it works for now" and don't.
Now your left with a code base forever with tech debt because of a hacky foreach if loop.
You're telling me you've never worked with anyone who does half arsed work? Where you need to pick up their slack? Lucky you.
Because if you can't do a proper job at least on elementary level then what do you do then when they refuse to fix their mess?
This sounds like you have some very specific trauma around a very specific "foreach if loop", because I would personally never throw around such a specific-but-not-specific example of tech debt. Tech debt is extremely contextual.
Where us the drinking age 16?
By the time you're 16, I'd say a significant amount of school time is decently geared toward learning, and you're old enough to supplement that yourself during spares or downtime if you want to.
At younger ages though, it definitely seems like more of a daycare service than a learning focused environment. The free daycare is important, but I do feel bad for the kids who are stuck in that absurd environment. Someone can come up to you and stab you with a pencil for no reason and that's just par for the course.
* Finland is a gerontocracy and recent governments have made significant cuts to education and the general wellbeing of younger generations.
* Modern schools are increasingly built like open plan offices with dozens of students crammed into "learning spaces" instead of traditional classrooms. This reduces building costs and is also sold as a trendy new innovation in pedagogy.
* Special needs and gifted students are no longer put into special classrooms where they can receive the extra attention and care they need. Instead, they are put in with the other kids to the benefit of no one except the state budget, but at least it feels more "inclusive" to some research professor in their ivory tower.
* The amount of immigration and share of children speaking Finnish as a second language is rising and they are statistically more likely to perform worse (https://yle.fi/a/74-20018233, https://yle.fi/a/74-20016772).
I am confused by people who use this as a derogative.
I learned drafting, how to type, welding, library science, color theory, woodworking, BASIC programming, the internal anatomy of a piglet, resume writing, how to play the cello, calculus, and how to sing the names of all 50 US states in alphabetical order in middle school and high school.
That is not childcare.
edit: forgot darkroom photography, yearbook editing, extemporaneous speaking, and Robert's Rules of Order.
That's why I don't think banning smartphones is the best idea. It is probably better than unrestricted access, but I feel that school should teach how to use them well instead. It is a bit like with calculators, there are classes with calculators, classes without, and classes that teach how to work with them, their strengths and shortcomings.
I don't know how to do it in practice though. Airplane mode and offline educative apps may be a start.
I'm actually of the option we should have a smartphone category/setup at the same positioning as bikes are to cars, it would even benefit adults the same way not everyone wants a car.
Frankly, smartphones should be discussed in health class, much like drugs and alcohol, and in a similar tone.
Explain it to young kids as the smartphone giving you a 'treat' for doing nothing. Eventually you get lazy and won't do any work because you get a 'treat' from the smartphone for free whereas if you play sports or hang out with your friends you only get the 'treat' for doing something.
Then explain that very smart people have taught the smartphone how to make the 'treat' tastier and tastier until you spend most of your time chasing treats instead of doing and enjoying things.
And applied math on a PC would be great, but we barely have applied math on a calculator.
And kids love calculators: only digital numbers are numbers. 2/3 is cleary not a number to anyone below 20 years of age, that is two numbers, we have to write .6666666\dash_over{6} down as a solution instead.
- If he bus doesn't show up, she can call and ask us to come drive her to school
- If she wants to go somewhere after school, she can call us and let us know she won't be home at her normal time
- If she forgot something at home, she can call and ask us to bring it
- etc, etc, etc
There's a ton of reasons for her to have her phone on her. Enough so that, when she gets punished with phone removal, we generally still let her bring it to school.
The fact that the phone doesn't contribute to the schooling itself (although it does when she forgets something she needs for school) doesn't mean that it doesn't contribute to QOL overall by being with her at school.
What is the point of school? Why do children have to spend 12 years of their lives learning basically nothing and coming out anything but well formed adults.
So that every kid has a uniform and common base of knowledge that helps them understand the world around them, and enables them to go further by learning more or starting to work.
With no mandatory schooling, most kids would be illiterate and ignorant. A lot of countries, even developed ones, already struggle with the second (antivaxers, flat earthers, voting for dumb populists, etc.). Which indicates the need to improve, not remove.
If there was no schooling, how would kids becoming young adults even know what they're interested in to do? Would they know that e.g. chemistry or physics are things that exist if nobody explained the basics to them? Or would they just continue doing what their parents did, condemning them to a vicious cycle and almost zero social mobility? From history, the latter.
Oh, I must have missed that class.
Generally people who went to school.
> With no mandatory schooling, most kids would be illiterate and ignorant.
School is not mandatory in a lot of countries. In the UK education is mandatory but school is not and educating kids out of school leads to much better results in my experience.
the modern public school system was designed during the height of the industrial revolution to pump out laborers. by adulthood it seems natural to show up in the morning, complete tasks assigned by authority figures, receive discipline or praise, then go home for dinner.
My school was an average school for students targeting a university degree and I did quite well compared to my peers.
Should schools be reformed to better align to contemporary ways of living? Of course, I'm all onboard to have a better education system, finding ways to foster kids inherent curiosities in a less strict and authoritarian way, finding new systems that are both scalable while being more free for kids to pursue their interests at their own rate, and finding a way where every kid might have a decent shared baseline of knowledge to go on into their adult lives.
It doesn't mean tearing down all education, or that current education is useless and teaches nothing. It's inadequate but it's the most valuable asset any society can have, finding better ways to do it is a natural progression to improve it.
I wish the education system had allowed me to not waste countless hours in classrooms listening to lectures that I either had already learned through autodidacticism, or that I wasn't interested in at that moment in time, I had to "re-learn" a bunch of material that was presented in classrooms but I was too uninterested to focus on it at that moment. Still, I don't think it was a total failure, just an education model with flaws that needs to be fixed.
At grade school, the rest of us learned: to read and write, a little arithmetic, some biology, some physics, some history, maybe a second language, and much more.
What a blessing it would be, as an adult, to have free access to a tutor for such a variety of courses.
The point of school is to grow up not to be an ignoramus.
School is very inefficient in terms of the student time spent to learn. It optimises for minimising teacher time and other costs.
> What a blessing it would be, as an adult, to have free access to a tutor for such a variety of courses.
You have paid access. Do you value it enough to pay?
Are you implying we should school them the Spartan way rather then? Would that prepare them for life in a better way? Or, what do you think would be valuable then to do (purposely not saying learn) during those twelve years?
There are definitely better alternatives to the current school system.
The amount of anxiety on show is really saddening.
You pose this as a question, but I find it's quite easy to say "we need to achieve this some other way" but then not having a concrete suggestion what that other way could be.
So I fear if we do not want them to be addicted we have to prohibit things (it does not need to be smartphones, it could be mechanisms on these devices).
Why would you be expecting better results for this ?
But at the same time, I think banning smartphones is perfectly fine because you can still use computers and stuff. It's not like they're going back to quills and ink.
Smartphones fry your attention span and enable bullying. And if parents want to have emergency contact, you can always have a simple mobile phone with texting/calling.
1. Educational is not vocational training. Schools should give kids skills and a foundation, not teach them how to use particular technology.
2. Not all jobs require much knowledge of how to use technology.
2. True, though less true over time. Even in the non-tech jobs you're now constantly using technology. In the trades, you need to know how to operate a CNC machine. As a nurse, you're operating medical devices that are getting more and more powered by technology.
They are failing spectacularly on that front anyways. You don't learn useful skills by being handed a remotely administered tablet or Chromebook, which is what schools provide.
Yes!
> ...without banning stuff?
What incentive do companies have to do this? It seems quite profitable for them?
I am quite strict here with my comment; but honestly, I can't see much reason other than making new products that are made as an "anti" movement, but companies will just find new ways to get people hooked -- because it is profitable for them to do so.
As much as we would like to tout some individualised solution for this, there's no way for all individuals to be trained to resist products designed for maximising its usage. There are armies of smart people being paid to think about ways that will make users be "engaged" with their products for as long as possible for it to be profitable, armies of experts in user behaviour, developers that can churn out good quality digital products, designers who can make the experience feel smooth. It's all geared to be addictive since the incentive is to capture as much attention as possible.
Is it possible to fight gambling addiction, alcohol addiction, nicotine addiction, drugs addiction, without banning them? Yup, it's costly, relies on a lot of regulation, control from the State on what kind of behaviour these companies can engage, and so on.
The addictive thing is not the smartphone but what it gives access to, without a conversation about what kind of regulations could curtail the addictive side of the real culprit, social media, there's no way out on an individual basis.
Banning smartphones in schools is akin to banning cigarettes' commercials, you aren't banning the stuff completely but at least trying to curtail its reach. We need more of this, social media has a lot of benefits so I don't think it should ever be outright banned, we do need more talk about its downsides and potential mitigations on a societal level.
There's seriously no alternative to banning them, and I don't even see the interest in trying.
Over here, at the other end of the Baltic sea, there's an ongoing debate about phones in the classroom and some schools have regulations in place regarding the use of electronic devices, but these are largely toothless as otherwise they would infringe on the right to property.
I graduated high school before the smartphone era, so I don't have much of a point of reference, but I'm leaning on disallowing at least Wi-Fi/mobile data - that's the largest source of distraction in my view.
Can children bring in portable hifi systems? What about those squeaky chicken toys? Or a water pistol?
When I was younger I imagined a world in which computing devices would be a boon to (young) people everywhere.
But many apps appear to be detrimental to people's mental health, both young and old.
Possibly this can be changed. Maybe separate app stores are a solution (think f-droid)? Or maybe we need to start looking a lot harder at apps that might actually be user hostile.
Current legislation allows the teacher to tell a student to put their phone away in a pocket or backpack, for example, where it will not be a distraction.
The use of phones during breaks cannot be completely banned, as students have fundamental rights. The Constitution guarantees everyone the protection of property, which also applies to students' phones. Restricting the use of mobile devices must be considered from the perspective of freedom of speech and the protection of a phone call or other confidential message.
Section 12 from Finnish constitution:
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Section 12 - Freedom of expression and right of access to information
Everyone has the freedom of expression. Freedom of expression entails the right to express, disseminate and receive information, opinions and other communications without prior prevention by anyone. More detailed provisions on the exercise of the freedom of expression are laid down by an Act. Provisions on restrictions relating to pictorial programmes that are necessary for the protection of children may be laid down by an Act. Documents and recordings in the possession of the authorities are public, unless their publication has for compelling reasons been specifically restricted by an Act. Everyone has the right of access to public documents and recordings.
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See also: Convention on the Rights of the Child https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/... Wikpedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_on_the_Rights_of_th...
lupusreal•2h ago
In America they started off banned as soon as kids started getting them in the early 00s, but then some years later the bans became unenforced or even undone because, apparently, parents said that their kids needed phones because school shooters (which is a dumb argument.)
But that shouldn't apply in Finland at all.
Hamuko•2h ago
technothrasher•1h ago
cudder•37m ago
n4r9•2h ago
jajko•1h ago
constantcrying•1h ago
pandemic_region•1h ago
constantcrying•1h ago
>Or, what do you think would be valuable then to do (purposely not saying learn) during those twelve years?
I think that this is different between children.
Actually I think it could be extremely valuable to learn, but then the child's activities should actually focus on learning effectively. And sitting in a classroom with children not that interested in learning and a teacher trying to find some middle ground is not helping that.
Personally I believe that with a good school system I would have been perfectly fine doing university courses at 16 and a good school system would have encouraged me to accomplish exactly that.
ndr42•1h ago
"There is substantial evidence to suggest that education influences intelligence.[3]" (From Wikipedia)
[3] Baltes, P., & Reinert, G. (1969). Cohort effects in cognitive development in children as revealed by cross sectional sequences. Developmental Psychology, 1, 169-177.
constantcrying•1h ago
I am saying that school is terrible at teaching. If the goal of schooling is that students learn then the school system I was in was a total failure.
The moment I entered university I learned much more and much faster.
messe•59m ago
Is it not possible that schooling prepared you for this and enabled you to learn much more and faster?
constantcrying•48m ago
Why couldn't the school have prepared me for that when I was 16? Why does preparation take precisely 12 years and only then I can really learn anything.
messe•42m ago
constantcrying•35m ago
ndr42•47m ago
constantcrying•37m ago
dpatterbee•27m ago
constantcrying•23m ago
baud147258•17m ago
n4r9•1h ago
nopakos•20m ago