Why we’re working our young people too hard

This article finally revealed to me the mathematical structure of curriculum optimization. It's a <i>bias/variance tradeoff</i>.<p>If you've done statistics, you know that B/V tradeoffs are more or less an unavoidable feature of optimization or learning. If you go in with less clear goals, you depend on learning on the fly to find the best solution which means your performance varies a lot depending on environmental conditions. If you go in with very clear goals, it's likely that people will cluster around them tightly, but if you're <i>wrong</i> with your bias, you'll be surely fucked.<p>How do you beat B/V tradeoffs? You put in more effort, more experience, better sharing of information. You select your biases very carefully such that they are less clear but cannot possibly be wrong. You constrain your variance such that it is less harmful to your task.<p>Finally, there's the idea of consistency and convergence rates. Consistency means that if any person spends <i>enough</i> time and effort they will eventually overcome both bias and variance and find the best solution. Rate of convergence is how much time and effort it takes to get reasonably close. Consistency and fast convergence are highly valuable properties, obviously, but both are easy to hurt and destroy, especially through biasing.

&#62;"<i>... = Better future workforce</i>"<p>Any educational system where that is the goal is going to be fucked from the beginning...at least for anybody who agrees with Dewey's idea that the goal of education is to make better people.<p>A country that considers itself made up of consumers and workers rather than citizens, invites crap like SOPA, PATRIOT, and the TSA's shoe fetish.

So many times I have complained about the horrors of Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Access and Turbo Pascal and Typing Mario (does anybody even know what that is anymore?). Education is a complete mess. There’s a particular sentence that I think needs more emphasis:<p>"I noticed a recurring theme. Hackers would bring up anecdotes of playing around with BBC Micros in their spare time, learning C in their spare time or building basic command-line games in their spare time."<p>How do they think they are helping us children by stuffing us with hours upon hours of mindless work, following instructions on textbooks almost verbatim, whether it’s Computer Science or Math or Chemistry or Literature? Students are only allowed to interpret a literary work as the teachers see fit, only allowed to play with chemicals on paper in their own imagination, only given dull Math problems and a few certain “tricks” to solve them, and, yes, of course, only allowed to complete computer projects that involve Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or Access. I don’t hate you, Bill Gates, but your office suite is killing me. There has to be change. Only the best of the best will be able teach him/herself the basics of IT while survivng high school (and K12 and higher education in general); the rest will just lose interests even though they have tremendous capabilities. Not to mention how it gets lonely once in a while.

This article is working ME too hard in order to read a dark grey font on a darker grey background

It's often hard to see a bright side of something as broken as the US educational system, and perhaps I'm just a weird kid, but the mindless bureaucratic nature of school actually caused me to seek out more interesting subjects and read more books whenever possible because school never left me "satisfied."<p>I used all of my high school "elective" blocks to attend a specialty school to study CIT (graduated high school A+ and NET+ certified!) and spent all of my free time doing IT consulting and building websites for clients. It taught me a TON, but I'm almost positive that if school was mentally fulfilling each day I probably would have just gone home and watched TV and socialized like everyone else.<p>It is strange, though, that while most most of the messages and predictions of dystopian/Cyberpunk novels and films tend to be vastly over-exaggerated, the underlying principals and ideas seem to have come true. One of the nearly universal themes tends to be an extremely bureaucratic and systematic world and when you compare most aspects of 21st century life to 50 years ago, it's a little frightening.

I don't think the blame can be necessarily be placed entirely on the school systems though. I find that I have to fight my own urges to over schedule my kids' free time. I am also way more involved in my kids' lives than my parents were, for better and sometimes for worse.<p>I think it's important for parents to make sure that their kids have some time to do nothing, get bored, and find their own mischief and passions. It's a tough balancing act.

I was sucking it big time on a video game once, and my friend turned to me and said "Don't try harder; try <i>better</i>."<p>We should be working young people better.

Several factors are important here:<p>Degeneration of K-12 education. College freshmen have to spend significant effort (up to 1-2 years on average I'd guess) just getting caught up to levels of basic mastery of reading, writing, logic, and mathematics that they should have had as a HS graduate.<p>Increasing concentration on volume of "material" rather than on level of mastery.<p>As the college loan bubble and the increasing reliance on a college degree as a necessary credential for most white collar work colleges have shifted towards becoming degree mills. More and more students are valuing the credential more than the knowledge, and they are pumping huge amounts of money into the system sustaining those values. This necessarily warps the institutions of higher education. And as they struggle with ways to soak up massive influxes of tuition without throwing their integrity out the window (or losing their accreditation) they've increasingly fallen back on volume and intensity of course work in lieu of demonstration of mastery of knowledge.

Nobody wants to admit that the concept of "school" itself was designed to church out assembly line slaves.<p>It's not a surprise that when the system is designed to turn humans into robots... that's what you get.<p>Anyone who comes out of school with useful skills does it despite school, not because of school.<p>John Taylor Gatto figured this out years ago.

Education is broken. Everyone is different, and meant to excel at one thing they do well to make a difference, yet the standardized education forces people to be indifferent. It also keeps you locked in an idealized world of grades and exams delaying your chance to become street-smart for a mere 15 years. We then end up with people in their 30s having their first born children, whereas the biological clock for this kicks at teen ages.

I'm lucky enough to attend a high school where freshman are required to take the equivalent of AP Computer Science, and those who wish to can go on to take CS classes taught by teachers with PhDs from MIT and Yale - you'd be hard pressed to find a better curriculum.<p>Despite the environment, there are very few students with a "hacker" mentality- maybe ten or so, a number not drastically higher than what you'd expect to find anywhere else. Plenty of kids choose to take the upper level (from a high school perspective) classes, and have no trouble understanding recursion, pointers, or any of the traditional hangups, but it's a much smaller number who would ever consider working on a project that wasn't assigned by a teacher. For everyone else, even among these incredibly bright students, programming is seen as the work you have to sludge through in order to guarantee a cushy $120k job.<p>For this small percentage of self-motivated students, the free time proposed in the original post would be a godsend, used more productively than any sort of schoolwork. For most everyone else, however, regardless of intelligence, CS education, or resources available, this time would be thrown away to TV or video games, with a net productivity less than an hour spent doing the most menial busywork under the dullest of teachers. I think many of us on Hacker News, surrounded by peers who are the sort of people that start businesses, tend to forget that while students might spend lectures wishing they were elsewhere, that elsewhere is rarely 80x24.<p>Admittedly, I don't have a solution. Increased STEM funding helps, no doubt, but not in the exponential way many of us envision. Resources in the form of state of the art equipment or funding for student projects only serves to empower those who are already driven, and this drive seems to be something determined long before students enter high school.

I find this to be quite hilarious. I just came back from a movie at my school called "Race To Nowhere" that touches on the issue. I then participated in a 45 minute discussion with members of my community, including my principal and other staff at my school. I was going to go onto Hacker News and make a very detailed thread on the topic....but someone stole my thunder. I will be back over the weekend to discuss this. I obviously can't leave with just this post since it's a pretty low quality post. So here it is:<p>We must shift the focus of education back to education. It is ridiculous to believe that a single letter can show how much work a student put in to learn the content. A "C" can be given to a student who puts in their best effort but just can't remember when to use a semi colleen. Yet an "A" can be given to a student who crams for the test the night before, yet can't think critically on any subject.<p>We must rethink our approach to education, and shift it back to education, rather than to that test at the end of the year.

I ignored English homework and taught myself jquery. Now people call me incredibly smart and are jealous of the great agency I started working for at only 21. These days kids have to take education into their own hands, because even though there are classes available in a subject; techers do not know what knowledge is most relevant in the workplace.

jesus, please increase the contrast, i can barely read it<p><a href="http://contrastrebellion.com/" rel="nofollow">http://contrastrebellion.com/</a>

For what it's worth, though I didn't do GCSE's (I was in Switzerland at the time), I coasted through A-levels without much effort. Other high achievers I know also spent about 2-3 days max (in addition to the required time sitting on a school chair, of course) studying and revising for each "paper". That left plenty of time for many extra-curricular activities.

No matter how bad the problem may be, please use a lighter background and higher contrast.

TWENTY TWO GCSEs? Christ... You didn't go to a comprehensive!

I take issue with the idea that there is too much structured time and students need more unstructured time to be creative. I think there's room for lack of structured time but not in school. Does this mean to give a students so,e materials and tools (materials/tools can be anything from clay or other art supplies to mechanic's tools, to computers with an IDE installed) and let them just make something? I don't like that idea. That's not real creativity.<p>We should be teaching critical thinking skills, then giving them tools and materials along with, most importantly, a problem to solve with a set of constraints. Now <i>that</i> is what creativity is all about. The article is from the UK point of view so I can't speak for them but in the States here we need something more like I described. And really, students aren't too overworked. They're just made to memorize and vomit up later useless facts for standardized tests instead of being taught critical thinking or problem solving skills.<p>Here, teachers get the short end of the stick. Especially the ones who are really passionate about teaching. I've got several friends and my mother who are all finishing up teaching degrees or have just started teaching and they tell me all the time that they aren't given the tools they need to properly teach their students.<p>Here we're teaching what used to be middle school math in the 50's in college. I'm not sure if overworked students is a problem. At least not in the U.S.