On my part, I chose the trade-offs of time, energy, and expense to homeschool our children so that they would be in a position to learn in freedom[2] and make a lot of decisions about their own education. So far the one child of ours who has grown up to live independently in the outside world (also an occasional participant here) is glad that he had that kind of education. He wrote to me for Father's Day, saying, "That has made it very easy for me to step into a leadership position and feel very comfortable in positions of responsibility."

Some people survive the prison environment of school and go on to great things.[3] That doesn't mean that we have to organize schools as we now do. We should be sensitive to opportunities to organize schools in ways that promote young people having responsibility and freedom to grow while they are still minors.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4728123

[2] http://learninfreedom.org/

[3] http://learninfreedom.org/Nobel_hates_school.html

So the worst case of homeschooling is better than the ideal model of public education? As long as we're on the topic of cultish practices, I'm not very comfortable with an institution that forces its "pupils" to pledge allegiance to flag on a daily basis. I hypothesize that people who are against homeschooling pledged to flags many of times, and are probably incapable of forming opinions that aren't regurgitated to them from a figure of authority. It's just a hypothesis.

This came as a surprise to me, so I looked it up:

http://www.faqs.org/childhood/Pa-Re/Protestant-Reformation.h...

Not the most authoritative resource, but the provided bibliography is at least impressive.

> I hypothesize that people who are against homeschooling pledged to flags many of times, and are probably incapable of forming opinions that aren't regurgitated to them from a figure of authority.

And this is why I'm not upvoting you.

There are other countries besides the US you know... we don't pledge to any flag in Australia, and I'm certainly not "incapable of forming opinions that aren't regurgitated to them from a figure of authority" which funnily enough seems like an opinion regurgitated to you from a figure of authority :P

I'm not against home schooling per say, I'm against idiots teaching kids poorly. This is the dilemma we have.

Unless it's at a national and systematic level. Then it's kosher.

Peanut allergies are a real problem and kill lots of people. Do we ban peanuts and sue God? Is that the plan?

I have no experience with Hasid communities, though.

I can't be bothered to speak about this topic with people, who like me, suffered public education. To suggest that state-wide/nationwide education-prison system isn't the best setup causes others to give me strange stares save the staunchest libertarians and anarchists.

The school system teaches us first and foremost that it is the best education system. I can't imagine an institution better designed for self-preservation than the current style of public education in the west.

Literally no one ever claimed that, or so much as implied that, a single year of my own public schooling. Or, for that matter, at my son's.

It's a good thing too, as it would have been obviously a flawed argument (we can't all be the "#1 School" so someone is not getting the best). Even the most clueless of administrators can figure out that the kids would figure that out.

Likewise I don't see PTA members going around with an agenda full of "NOTHING TO DO. THE SCHOOL IS PERFECT TODAY". So it seems to me that more than the libertarians and anarchists seem to agree that we don't yet have the best setup.

Don't get me wrong but I have to wonder where these strawmen come from. Surely there's enough actually wrong with public schooling today that we don't have to stoop to anthropomorphic analogies that are trivially provided counterexamples?

E.g. you could argue that public schools are probably bad for those who are talented but anti-authoritarian. I'm sure most of us could agree with that (even if we couldn't all think up proper solutions).

No one did imply it in their comments. People just tend to live this way.

Likewise I don't see PTA members going around with an agenda full of "NOTHING TO DO. THE SCHOOL IS PERFECT TODAY"

No. They complain about snacks and football practice. PTAs would never do something like band together and defy/take down the DoE. The schools just say that they're subordinate to it, and that is that. Next topic: are there enough emergency eye wash stations?

You can find the secular group in your town if you want it.

Which is why my children meet children from many other families, and ADULTS from many other families, in their community activities. What they do in the outside world spans a much wider territory than the attendance area of our friendly local public schools, and exposes them to a lot of people who are of different ages besides just their own age plus or minus one year. (This is a general response that is true of most homeschooling families. More specifically about my own family, we have lived in two different countries since our oldest son was born, and he was all over the United States and even overseas for summer academic programs before he finished his secondary education.)

There's an entire other side to the socialization we find in schools.

They tend to be bound to a geographic district and people tend to live near people very much like themselves.

You don't think there are more experiences to be had in the wider community than can be had in the confines of a classroom?

I suspect there might be a bit of selection bias going on with your lack of negative experiences.

The same way, you will never notice normal homeschooling kids - because you will not know they were homeschooled. They will know the stigmas around homeschooling, and probably won't bring it up.

But in my situation at least I'm told which schools (or lack thereof) our kids have come from.

Even with your anecdotal assertions, do you really, really expect us to believe that you're unaware of the number of parents in this country who home-school their kids largely if not solely to prevent access to such dreaded concepts as, oh....evolution:

"Christian-based materials dominate a growing home-school education market that encompasses more than 1.5 million students in the U.S. And for most home-school parents, a Bible-based version of the Earth's creation is exactly what they want. Federal statistics from 2007 show 83% of home-schooling parents want to give their children "religious or moral instruction. "The majority of home-schoolers self-identify as evangelical Christians," said Ian Slatter, a spokesman for the Home School Legal Defense Association. "Most home-schoolers will definitely have a sort of creationist component to their home-school program.""

http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/religion/2010-03-08-home...

In what way is homeschooling to suit a parent's utter stupidity not a prison?

2) what difference does it make if 99% of the early adopters are ultra-right wing, conservative Christian creationists? If homeschooling my kids gives them the best environment to develop academically and socially, why should it affect my decision to know the motivation of everyone else that's doing it?

As engineers, this should be an easy point to take hold of. How is the publicly elected government planning curriculum somehow less indoctrination than a parent doing the same?

I'd love to see these people back it up with facts. To me it seems like a lot of people make up their mind about homeschooling and then use this as a straw man argument against it. Again, just because the early adopters are motivated by a certain factor doesn't mean that you (or I) need to be motivated by the same factor. We could end up having the same positive conclusion about homeschooling but for very different reasons.

edit: For the record, I don't at all think home-schooling should be outlawed or even at all discouraged (quite the opposite!), but I do think it should regulated, which is a scary ball of wax, to be sure.

Look, no one is denying that there are lots of religiously motivated people that homeschool their children. But for those that aren't, this is a completely irrelevant fact. If you've got an argument that shows me that homeschooling as an educational approach is fundamentally flawed because religious people are a majority of the early adopters, I'd love to hear it.

This is generalization.

1. Those that shouldn't be homeschooling because they are not trained as educators, certainly not in all of the subjects they need to teach, but they are religiously conservative to the point of some social withdrawal, and don't want their kids going to public school and being exposed to drugs and liberalism. I've known many people in this category. BTW- I'm somewhat conservative and religious, so when I say they are conservative and religious, I mean really conservative and religious.

2. Those that are so liberal they take their kid on a round the world trip spending all of their life's savings and money from their newly-sold house to do so, homeschooling (some would say no-schooling or light-schooling) during the trip with little support or structure. When they got back they got a lower-paying job and started from ground-zero again, with their kid who disliked the trip and missed months of education. I only know one person in this category.

I have never been introduced to a no-speed-limit homeschooler.

Now you know someone who doesn't fit either of those molds :)

I'm co-moderator of a secular homeschooling group and your description doesn't really match anyone in our group (20-30 families). There are unschoolers, but there are also people who follow various approaches to varying degrees.

How many in your group of 20-30 have the qualifications that would allow them to be teachers in every subject that they teach their children if they were to apply for jobs in your public school system?

While I believe in your freedom to homeschool your children, why does the public school system have those requirements for their teachers? It isn't only to have the ability to manage kids and parents. While I believe that your group may do an excellent job at educating your students, 84% of 1.5 million students were estimated to be homeschooled only at home as of 2007 according to http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=91 , and I doubt that all of them are sufficiently qualified to teach all subjects required in their local public school.

Teachers are generally intelligent and well-meaning. Their paper qualifications and their ability to actually teach are not as strongly correlated as one would hope, though. While on average I'd expect a qualified teacher to be better at teaching than a member of the general public, I know many members of the general public who are not eligible for jobs as K-12 teachers, but nonetheless are excellent at teaching both children and adults. Amusingly, one qualified teacher I know was given a crash primer in the subject he now teaches professionally by a friend of mine... after he was officially qualified to teach it. On the other hand, I know a teacher in Switzerland who spent several years telling his students random anecdotes about his life, rather than actually teaching the students anything whatsoever about the subject he's paid to teach - and this is a country with much stricter requirements for teachers than the US.

Public schools have requirements for their teachers for a number of reasons: covering themselves, filtering out some unqualified people quickly, etc. The qualifications are neither necessary nor sufficient for finding good teachers, sadly. In programming, qualifications tend to be poorly, and sometimes even negatively, correlated with ability and productivity; I'm not convinced the situation is massively different in K-12 education.

There are no magic bullets for education. Not everyone teaching is even vaguely capable of doing so; there are some horrifically incapable people teaching in the public school system, and also some who homeschool. The majority of teachers in either system do a more-or-less tolerable job, and some excel.

http://www.psychologicalscience.org/journals/pspi/PSPI_9_3.p...

I'm in agreement with Diane Ravitch, the historian of education, that the college education major should be abolished. Instead students who aspire to be teachers should get a degree in any other field, and take a few courses on classroom management.

Teachers dedicate themselves to teaching for numerous reasons. They don't take on student loans for no reason whatsoever; the credentials they get are part of the price of going into a system with intentional barriers to entry.

Don't confuse a system of "reject some of the good, weed out most of the really bad, and usually get ok results" as something which is an entirely accurate indicator of competence. The shortcomings of the current system don't make it a lie, obviously - but putting decades into a process doesn't necessarily make it better, either.

I'm saying that in many cases, if suffices for a parent to simply understand what subject materials their children need to learn, and then teach them to read well at an early age, after that parents do not necessarily need to be knowledgeable about those materials because the books contain the knowledge.

I think what I'm describing is nearly synonymous with the hacker mentality that I would expect to be held in high regard in this forum.

Each child has different needs and different strengths and weaknesses. They progress in each subject at different paces. Our daughter is 5th grade age. At this point, we're still comfortable with the education we can give her ourselves (using materials created by people with a good deal of experience teaching their subject areas!). There will likely be times when she has reached the point where we can no longer adequately teach her certain subjects. But, there are tons of resources today and more coming every day for teaching those subjects.

I was talking with one of the other dads in our group last week and they're deciding how to proceed with their 8th grader for next year, when she'd be entering high school. One of the options they're exploring is one in which she would be able to attend courses at a local community college (for free via their local school district). Programs like that exist in many places.

Homeschooling families don't live in a vacuum.

This is why logjam's argument is a pure fallacy.

But the reality is that the homeschooling movement is dynamic:

http://www.topmastersineducation.com/homeschooled/

In time, it's easy to envision the secular population outnumbering the religious.

So, to your point, if atheists had been the early adopters in this case, you would support homeschooling. But since the early adopters were religious, you are against it, correct?

Not if the Atheists were teaching their kids information we know to be wrong as solid fact.

If there was a group of Atheist KKK members supporting homeschooling so they can teach their kids that blacks are inferior we'd have the same issue.

The problem is the isolation, there's no standard that home schooling is compared against, there's no child education services that come along and ensure the student knows the alphabet.

http://www.topmastersineducation.com/homeschooled/

On a political level, the federal government has taken a hands off Jeffersonian approach (as far as I know) and let the individual states experiment. Some states are very involved while others are very hands off. You can explore the variety of approaches and see for yourself which work (if any) and which don't (if any).

The fact of the matter is that the vast majority of homeschooled kids do as well or much better than their public school counterparts when it comes to knowing the alphabet and much more (see link above). If your primary argument for outlawing/regulating it is that kids are being taught non-fact based information, let's go ahead and shut down all the churches, mosques, and synagogues while we're at it.

Thinking about it further, I actually appreciate that there are a lot of kids being homeschooled for religious reasons. It doesn't really affect me or my family in any negative way and they are creating a market where there was none -- no mean feat.

That means that people who do want to homeschool their kids for reasons I personally agree with will have more materials available that might not exist if not for the zealots.

And, ultimately, you have no right to police what I teach my children.

Most of them are perfectly capable, not-stupid people, doing a good job raising their kids and educating them.

You wouldn't call them stupid, or think their kids were stupid, if you met them without knowing they were creationists. The fact that they're mistaken about evolution is not very important in the big picture.

no, its not very important whether they are creationists or not. The more worrying fact is that given the overwhelming evidence that points to the theory of evolution as being true, they decidedly deny it in favour of a less proven theory. I.e., they lack critical evaluation skills which is important in deciding matters - such as who to vote for.

I think you're wrong about that. Most people's opinions, on most things, are not particularly well thought out.

All of us, you and me included, are walking around with wrong ideas we picked up as received wisdom or that help us fit in with our social group.

Seizing on creationism and trying to make it into something uniquely awful indicating failures of intelligence or character that most people don't have, is likely a socially motivated error in itself.

i dont think you understood my point - which isn't that creationism is awful, but that blindly believing something without evaluating the evidence is awful. Those people who just claim evolution is true without having read any of the supporting evidence, but simply to " fit in with our social group" is just as bad.

What's wrong with the notion that the creator just used evolution to create things? Why must he create them as they are.

Cuz i personally view the creator as The Great Coder (or Goder or God for short :P) who jsut wrote an epicly long program and hit the "Compile and execute" button! (hence the BIG BANG) :P

Just a thought

That is basically the modern catholic church's opinion on the matter.

The problem you are having is that the word "creationism" is not a definition, it is a summary. For the most part, the word refers to a literal belief in the genesis book of the bible.

Nothing, but there are a lot of people who are unwilling to accept the truth of any statement that contradicts their understanding of the biblical creation story (typically the understanding given to them by someone else). For them the timescale required for evolution is out of the question, humans absolutely had to coexist with dinosaurs, and the entirety of the universe was created in a six day period. Evidence is irrelevant to such people; either they try to concoct a different explanation that fits in with their beliefs or they just use an escape hatch e.g. "Satan planted the evidence."

Fortunately a large number of people accept your proposed version, that evolution is the process used by the Creator. There are also a number of people who accept my proposal: religion serves various social purposes and is not in any way useful for explaining physical phenomena (that is what science is about).

No it doesn't, it shows a presence of severe cognitive bias.

I would be skeptical of any other opinions they hold regarding biology, geology, and morality but they probably don't have any preconceived notions about math, or physics.

Of course you must have read claims like "the speed of light changes over time" and "all that light was created en-route 6000 years ago". This allows them to believe a ridiculous premise but still participate in reality and use their GPS with a clean conscience.

But I think there are many creationists who can reconcile their differences with reality by believing the seven days of creation are a metaphor or some sort of measure in "God years", so they can reject evolution like they were brainwashed to, but they have no problem believing in the speed of light and measurements of distances between stars.

If there is no way to effectively regulate it to ensure that the children are getting a real education, then yes. Parents should not be permitted to deny their children a real education. They can supplement that real education as they please, but not deprive them of it.

Your options for remediation all require resources that parents in lousy school districts don't have. Moving to the burbs requires money (apartments in the burbs don't take housing subsidies), a reliable car, a dealing with a lot of hassle as a non-white person (getting pulled over by the cops, etc). Your solution of suing the school district into submission requires that you as a parent have lots of time and resource to manage a litigation. That requires lots of external support -- that 3 hour detour to sit in some court hearing is 3 hours of lost wages.

If the state is failing to provide the education that I feel is appropriate to my child, I have the right to intervene, period. If I'm doing something extreme or harmful to my child, the state has the ability to intervene, to the point of seizing custody if I'm not acting in my child's best interest.

I received a Catholic education at one point in my life. The teachings of the Catholic Church are offensive to many people. Does my exposure to catholic docterine disqualify my education? In my mind, one of the core components of a "real education" would be to respect others beliefs and avoid meddling in the affairs of others. Sounds like our perspectives vary.

Your school doesn't have the money for fancy microscopes? Welcome to society; get involved with it and fix it.

> Does my exposure

I thought I was clear: exposure to religion in an education is not what concerns me (unless, of course, it is in a public school). The RCC, for all of its numerous faults, has their schools in developed countries teaching proper science, not religion in place of science (for the most part), and not in the same class. They are pretty damn low on my list of concerns.

My concern is with adults deciding to swap out science lessons with religion lessons. This is what the majority of homeschoolers do, and this is what many protestant religious schools do.

> If I'm doing something extreme or harmful to my child

Denying your child access to a basic science education is exactly that. Children have a right to receive and education and parents have absolutely no right to deprive 'their' children of that.

Explanation by example: You want to send your kid to Catholic School where he can learn proper biology and latin prayers or whatever shit? Cool, knock yourself out. You want to send your kid to public school where he can learn biology, then teach him that Jesus rode dinosaurs when he comes home at the end of the day? Cool, knock yourself out. You want to keep your kids out of schools that teach biology and instead only expose your child to Dino-Cowboy Jesus theory? Then you should have your children taken away from you, as you are clearly incapable of raising them.

I'm wondering what you think of that; is that different from what you meant by swapping out science lessons or is it close enough in your eyes? Do you think my experience was the exception to the rule when it comes to homeschoolers? How do you know what most homeschoolers teach? (I'm honestly curious; not just trying to argue with you.)

Presenting religious arguments in science lessons qualifies as swapping out science with religion, no matter how much those lessons teach you the opposing position (generally only done so that the student is able to "lie" on standardized testing).

Think of it this way: would it be acceptable to teach kids in chemistry, "...and that kids, is the periodic table of elements. Of course WE know that there are five elements, which are represented by these five Platonic solids. We know this for the [holybook] tells us so."?

Children have a right to receive a science education that has not been purposely sabotaged. If parents want to give their child such a blatantly slanted education, then it needs to be in addition to a proper education.

That you made it out alright says nothing of the acceptability of such abuse.

I disagree that it would have been a good thing for me to have been taken away from my parents because of the curriculum they chose. I can't even imagine what that would have done to me and my siblings.

Have you seen a foster home? I don't think you would say this if you had much experience with the foster child programs.

How do you propose people living in poverty both provide their children with the necessary resources (textbooks, a microscope, maps, a computer) and have enough time to instruct their children?

(And those of you who are not parents do not fully comprehend how disturbing this is to those of us who are.)

It's way less persuasive than you think it is.

Not to mention you must be unfamiliar with news of just that happening in Germany.

Perhaps we shouldn't allow YOU to vote, as proposed in this discussion for those who are supposedly seen as having poor critical thinking skills.

And we shouldn't allow you to teach your kids either, nor to have the option to send them to the school of your choice. All under the logic of this discussion. Enjoy.

Suggesting that someone's children be taken from them is absolutely the threat of showing up at their doorstep with guns. Do you think people just say "no, it's no big deal, take my kids that I love."? Not a chance.

I'm not sure if you're being a dick or if you haven't thought this through (or both).

The only difference there would be that homeschooling would no longer count as "attendance".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_education#United_Sta...

Really little different than the other circumstances in which Child Protective Services might show up with a police escort.

There are many places in the US where this "real" education is entirely unavailable in the public school system. What do you do then?

Oh, but you probably just mean that they don't have enough money for new microscopes... In that case @jeltz has your bases pretty well covered.

Part of my problem with public schools stems from that experience - I knew valedictorians from a few graduating classes near mine in the public schools closest to me, and they just weren't as well-educated. It's possible that I had an abnormal experience, but I doubt it - my father graduated from one of those same public schools, and he's extremely intelligent (mechanical engineer, owns a robotics engineering company). Even still, he chose to send us to a private school because he didn't expect us to get as good of an education in the public system.

Of note: the private school I went to paid significantly less to its teachers than did the public schools around. I'm very aware of this because my brother is a teacher. He had to make a conscious decision to forego higher pay for his ideals, because he too felt that the public school system just doesn't have as much to offer.

My point is, microscopes and money are not the problem I have with the public schools.

Unfortunately for your whims, in a free country, parents can decide to school their children however they see fit. More unfortunately for your whims, the fact that homeschoolers are tremendously better prepared for university (or work if they choose) than their peers is the subject of countless news articles over the years. The statistics favor the homeschoolers, and that includes the majority being complained about here that dare to choose Creation over evolution.

There, there, little totalitarian, it will be OK. Just move to China.

Can you think of the REAL problem that is the issue in this regard instead of inflicting massive collateral damage because it's an easier path?

Have you considered the case where the parent is not 'stupid'?

The irony of the situation is that parents who are educated and intelligent and, therefore, great candidates to be good homeschool teachers also realize that they are not up to the task of homeschooling their children.

Hmm.

Also, the reality is that many schools are segregated by class and/or ethnicity, so students attending those schools - for better or worse - see no more diversity than they might see at home or in their communities.

My personal experience with friends that where home school would agree with your view. They where all home schooled to 'protect' them from undesirable beliefs and ideas. The parents (of the kids I know) would also disagree with you. No one wants to think that they are over protective and hurting their children by protecting them.

I wouldn't say all home schooled kids are like that, but I wouldn't say that none of them are either.

Few actual classes. The only recurring subjects were: World Geography and Culture, Math, and Writing. As one-offs, I had one year of Electronics (because I requested it) and two years of Spanish.

Other than that, I spent the rest of my time mostly working on whatever projects I wanted to. It was amazing! I learned programming from a book and an old DOS machine, I learned basic electronics from a family friend, and I learned a ton of handyman skills such as carpentry from my Grandpa. And I built projects in all of these fields. The projects were open-ended and entirely informal (just for fun). I would typically work on one project for between 3 days and 3 months.

Other than that, I also spent quite a lot of time outside with my brothers (we had a nice backyard, and lived near a creek), and we spent a full day at the library every week, which I enjoyed immensely.

Also, I was not allowed to watch TV or play video games. But we had a ton of good books.

The diversity of people kids meet and clashes of opinions are important and cannot be fully experienced in a small scattered community of people that think alike. I learn a lot more from my ennemies than my friends.

Your comment read a lot like: "I was super privileged and it was great!" So great, in fact, that you forgot about your neighbours.

The reason why home schooling is not scalable is that parents of under-performing students are predominantly poor, and are either single parents or if there are two of them, both need to work to make ends meet.

There is no one-size-fits-all in this case.

One thing I fear for my children is that homeschooling may rob them of vital social skills that can't easily be taught at home. But with the right social network (large family / friends), this can also be addressed.

Many homeschoolers get together for lessons, field trips and just socializing for this exact reason. They are also generally active in assuring their children have a social network of other children.

From personal experience I think the only thing it lacked for my daughter was teaching her not the social aspect of school but how to navigate authoritarian hierarchies. I am not convinced this is a bad thing.

I've said it before and I'll say it again, the "socialization" I got while homeschooled was far superior to that I got at public school, mainly due to the quality of the other kids I was dealing with.

Exactly that!

Interesting also that that page also finishes with an 'if you like school, then you're a paedophile' angle. "I can't find statements of medicine or physiology winners who said they didn't like school... but one of the ones who said he did like school was a child molestor!". Sounds like the deck was stacked to me.

--> http://www.topmastersineducation.com/homeschooled/

Fyi. Sites like brillant.org and khanacademy have been instrumental in our homeschooling success.

Montessori, or Jenaplan (a Dutch/German thing, which was the one I went to).

There was a bit of 'prison' in that there was a certain number of fixed tasks to complete each week in areas such as Math, Dutch and English. But one could pick which, and mostly even check them oneself. Once done, the rest of the time was free to work on projects and things just like you described above (the carrot :-). Often by Wednesday afternoon I was done.

It thus worked wonderfully for me, though it may not be for everyone. But when I have kids they are definitely going to a Jenaplan-type school. As it never felt like a prison to me and instilled a love of learning, and ability to plan and reward myself (besides other positive things such as a sense of equality towards others, including bosses & profs)

School != School. Shop around before you reinvent.

I've studied the Dutch regulatory model of schooling quite thoroughly since the early 1990s, when I first learned about it. Few Americans have the pervasive power to shop for different varieties of schools that all Dutch parents have by the Constitution of the Netherlands.

http://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED316478

Allows 'the market' for good education to operate, without bringing money into the equation.

To do it right, it seems to help to have a parent with an education degree or mindset, or some heavy duty financial resources.

It also depends on your child. If your child is more of an independent learner, or one who pick up material fast, it would be much easier.

I would imagine that many people want to homeschool in order to avoid the mainstream (as used in schools, as taught to new tutors) education mindset...

I have read this same thing a few days ago, and today I have experienced it for the first time.

And of course I mean a lot of good things by saying this.

Kudos.

Some of these kids have been somewhat inept in the social department. It's not that they are asocial, more that they are sometimes ignorant of the many small rules of social interaction that I presume we pick up naturally in school. Do you recognise this as a potential problem, and if so, what do you do to teach your kids social skills?

1. There is no one-size-fits-all plan that could possibly work for education. Everyone is different (duh);

2. Centralization of primary and secondary education institutions is a very bad thing (think fewer and fewer large school districts);

3. Teachers' Unions are possibly the single biggest barrier to innovation;

4. There is no simple, easy answer to improving education.

Unfortunately, I don't have a prescription for fixing things, but I'm sure that centralizing both administrative bureaucracy and delivery standards is not it.

I don't know too much about this topic, and the few friends of mine who are "in the know" are teachers. Not exactly the best place to get an unbiased opinion.

Another issue I noticed was a strange aversion to letting anyone other than state-certified teachers do any teaching. The most striking example I came across was a brochure I picked up while waiting for my obligatory teachers' union candidate interview when I was running for office. I flipped through the brochure on teaching your child to read. The brochure explicitly stated that parents should not correct their child's improper spelling or pronunciation because that would somehow stifle learning or take away from the "professional's" ability to "properly" impart knowledge to the child. It was stunning. And weird. And that's why the issue of teachers' unions is complex and at time perplexing.

Its kryptonite to union leadership because student outcomes involve more than just what teachers control, including what administrators control and how administrators interact with the individual students. No one wants to be held accountable for outcomes when someone else -- particularly their counterparty in the relevant contract -- has the ability to interfere with their ability to influence the outcome.

My initial reaction to that was "but surely teacher quality isn't a major issue, when there are so many other problems to solve", but then I noticed that the arguments my brain was marshalling didn't reflect my true objection. At about the same time, I thought back to high school and how I stopped taking Spanish after having a particularly awful teacher for third semester.

That's when I realized that my objection was actually about fairness, not the importance of teacher quality. It's not fair that someone can dream of helping kids learn, study for years in college to achieve that goal, accumulate student loan debt, and then in the end, when they finally stand up in front of a classroom ... be so terrible that they cause kids to drop the subject entirely. It's downright tragic, but it's also true.

I do have some qualms about the idea of evaluating "student outcomes". It sounds difficult to do well (how would they have measured my dropping the teacher's subject?), and prone to unintended consequences. There are a few absolutely phenomenal teachers out there, and not all of the results of that are easy to quantify. If a set of evaluation guidelines axed 70% of bad teachers (optimistic) but also reduced or shackled 20% of the really good teachers, I'm not sure that would be worth it.

Those are some practical issues related to the proposed solution. But I think a lot of people, like me, initially flinch away from considering the problem. I've probably thought about this specific concept at least a dozen times, and I only just now noticed the flinch.

Its entirely possible that with some dedicated pencil whipping your legendarily bad Spanish teacher was turning in the best metric scores in the district.

Its a near universal that smart people focusing on turning in good metrics will turn in good metrics rather than doing their job... after all, they're not being paid to teach, but to generate good numbers. So you'll get good numbers. Pity the kids won't learn anything, but ...

Not unlikely. And she's a good example in that she wasn't particularly bad with the material (except insofar as all foreign language education is kind of broken, but that wasn't her fault). But one of the most important things (if not the most important) teachers can do is cultivate in their students a genuine interest in learning about their subject. Instead, I came away with associations of being shamed for not getting things wrong, and of being accused of cheating for trying to extrapolate. This is, to put it mildly, averse to language acquisition.

Anyway, the point is that you're absolutely right. Most of us in her class knew the material at the end of the semester. But knowledge is not very useful in and of itself. Unfortunately, I think that simple fact may be a very big piece of the puzzle, and it's one that the general public seems very far from flipping over.

looking back, there was no single defining feature of bad teachers I had, but every one of my good teachers were over the age of 40, had previous careers/jobs, and not a single one had a degree (in teaching)..

edit: I think the issue with home schooling is a societal one, we want to set a minimum standard and encourage a minimum level of interaction. I agree that a couple of good teachers make up for a whole lot of mediocre ones.

The strictures of institutional schooling in mandating same-age classes, teaching to test score metrics, and preventing interaction between schools (public/private/home) unfortunately also have the effect of turning this minimum standard into a maximum standard.

One of my favorite teachers my drama teacher, probably somewhere on the younger side of 25-35. The year I quit taking drama classes was the year that she was forced to go back to school because she "wasn't qualified" to teach permanently, having not completed a teaching degree.

For instance, back in the eighties, a local district did implement a performance based system for teachers. High performing teachers were rewarded with salary bonuses, while poor performing teachers did not even get raises to match inflation. Then, after a couple of years, the school fired all of the high performing teachers as a cost cutting measure. The incompetent teachers, whose salaries were much lower, were kept on and promoted to fill the departmental roles previously filled by the competent.

As much as you hate lazy, incompetent teachers, we hate them even more. After they waste a year teaching the students nothing and handing out the As like candy, we're the ones stuck teaching all their material on top of our own curriculum to get the students up to speed. We want these idiots to get fired.

Our problem is that the school board never fires them. They give As to all the rich kids, Cs to all the fat kids, and Bs to everyone else. This makes the parents happy, so the idiots keep their jobs year after year. When the competent teachers then grade the students on the little they've actually learned, they're the first on the chopping block.

This is similar to the aversion to non-certified teachers. I knew a brilliant teacher who taught French for twenty years. During the summer, she'd do consulting work for the french consulate. You couldn't ask for a better French teacher. Unfortunately, this isn't a story about the quality of her French. Instead, this is a story about lowering qualification standards. One year, the state lowered the certification requirements for foreign language education. Initially, this seemed like a great plan. Until the day came that this incredible French teacher was told that she would now be teaching Spanish. The new, lower licensing requirements qualified her as a Spanish teacher, despite her not having even spoken the language in twenty years. Due to her professional pride and dedication, she spent her own money on a three month summer immersion plan to gain some proficiency, but she still wasn't at the level of competence required by her professional pride and she resigned at the end of the year. The teacher who replaced her was just as (un)qualified to teach Spanish, but didn't have the professional pride and is still teaching. While changing the certification requirements has the potential to bring in some brilliant teachers from industry backgrounds, its mostly used to hire a whole new class of idiot.

Granted, I'm not naive enough to believe that it's this way at every district. I've heard the horror stories of teacher union defending complete monsters. I don't want that to happen any more than you do. However, reading a proposal from the school board is like reading an e-mail from a Nigerian prince: no matter how great the plan seems, you know that it's all part of a larger scheme to screw you over.

Bosses naturally hate unions because even a weak union carries the possibility of underlings saying "No" to their commands — and getting away with it. A form of defiance.

Evaluating teachers "based on student outcomes" is obviously a trap against teachers, if bosses are the one who define "student outcomes". That means teachers will do awful things like teach to tests. (Clearly, education management isn't about to check "student outcomes" in any reasonable manner.)

As a side note, I'm curious to see this brochure. Is it possible that the brochure was saying parents shouldn't correct their child's improper spelling or pronunciation because, in education, one of the parent's prime roles would be as their child's cheerleader, whereas the child's teacher should be the one to correct their child's improper spelling and pronunciation? It's hard to say, of course; context is key.

Student outcomes is ridiculous because given a reasonably small class size all you're doing is grading the randomness of the kid distribution aka you'll be rewarding / punishing teachers based on which specific kids they get that year. Sometimes a good year, sometimes bad. Statistically its far more valid to grade folks at a higher level aka a larger sample size, so obviously this should be implemented to grade district leaders and principals first... LOL that will never happen because it'll only exist as a weapon.

Making it an even worse weapon, most of the people doing the coaching are the ones in charge of assigning kids to teachers. So you can't fire a teacher for being a black woman, even if you hate black women. But if coincidentally you hate black women and are in charge of assigning kids and the 24 year old single hottie white woman just happens to "randomly" get all the angelic gifted and talented wonderkids, and the uppity black woman happens to have assigned to her all the village morons and wannabe gang members, well I guess the black woman's numbers are going to suck. And thats how, if you hate black women, you legally fire black woman teachers. There's a thin veneer of BS about accountability as a marketing technique to deploy the weapon, but its all about another weapon for toxic management.

Your reading example is ridiculous as I recently completed the same age range with my kids. The argument is that English as a language is completely screwed up with innumerable exceptions. So when the teacher is trying to teach basic phonic sound #17 or whatever, its not helping matters if you confuse the kid with peculiar exception 34 B subsection W item 6.

I understand there are perfectly phonetic languages where what you see is what you get. And there are languages situations where you just have to memorize Kanji. But at least in theory you can teach English to most kids successfully by gradually piling on first basic rules and later weird rules and finally shoveling exceptions on.

Frankly I learned how to read English from pure raw memorization and lots of reading. That's not how kids are taught today. There seems to be little point in blaming teachers or unions for the decision of middle managers in the admin building who selected a particular curriculum. You can homeschool kids using this curriculum you're making fun of if you want, it's a policy decision that has nothing to do with licensing the front line workers or their union or frankly even their immediate supervisors...

How are kids taught today? I don't remember how I learned English (it is my native language) but I think I know how I mastered it, lots of practice. Writing, reading, reading, and more reading.

leadership of the teachers' unions are very, very change adverse [sic]. They are first and foremost a union and trade organization that exists to protect jobs and the status quo. Anything that threatens that status quo is usually immediately dismissed.

Teachers' unions, like any organization or interest group, are at once agents of change and agents of conservativism. Which side of the line they fall on fully depends on the issue at hand and the will of their members. It is interesting to note that unlike organizations with typical top-down mandates for decision making (governments, corporations), teachers' unions like many other unions tend to vote referendum-style on current issues in a democratic way. Such votes are sourced from teachers who actually have the practical in-the-field experience within current era systems, not the "Why don't you do it my way? [but I have little to no experience with the issue at hand, except for my own kids Alice & Bob]" general public.

the idea that teachers should be evaluated based on student outcomes is like kryptonite to union leadership.

You understand that the primary purpose of a union as with many commercially engaged interest groups is to collectively bargain, though they also perform other functions such as information sharing and legal defense. The notion of constantly evaluating teachers based upon student outcomes is clearly difficult to justify to such a group, because it is basically targeting removing the capacity for teachers to collectively bargain. The assumption behind this assertion is that large scale, standardized, test-based assessments are a valid and useful way to validate teacher performance, which itself is based upon the assumption that they are useful to validate student performance. These assertions are certainly being questioned (some would say demolished) in today's pedagogical research literature.

a strange aversion to letting anyone other than state-certified teachers do any teaching

As well as a venue for basic learning, schools are significantly a tool of the state for communicating normalized perspectives on the nation, the environment, and other areas. As such, most states have some restrictions on replacements for these organs by private parties. Some of these are based on valid concerns (children locked at home exposed to weird perspectives), some are probably not (eg. learning from people from non-pedagogical backgrounds). This is the state's resistance, not teachers' resistance.

I can't imagine that most teachers or teachers' unions would support the notion that parents (who in any sane case clearly teach far more to their children than schools ever can!) should neglect to teach their own kids in favour of the state.

For all the rhetoric about the need for teacher accountability, school principals and district superintendents already have the power to fire teachers. Yes, it's true: Primary and secondary school-teachers do have a form a tenure, but it's not the same kind of tenure that university professors have. In primary and secondary education, tenure simply means that there is a more formalized process for firing a teacher. More hoops to jump through, if you will. But, principals can jump through them if they really want to.

The logical question to ask is, so why don't they? They don't fire the bad ones because, simply put, they need butts in seats. Or, rather, feet in shoes in front of the blackboard. If you have 4 teachers for 100 students in 3rd grade, firing one and increasing the average class size to 33 students isn't a tenable option. As a result, the principal must hire a new teacher to replace the one he just fired, and therein lies the rub.

There simply aren't good teachers on the market at the prices that school districts are willing to pay. That qualifier at the end of the sentence is important, so read it again. Many of my cohort from grad school were fantastic teaching assistants in the classroom (many were bad, too, but we'll save that discussion for another time). That's not to say that they would automatically make good primary school teachers, but if I had kids, I would wish that those excellent TAs were in the classroom. I'll bet that many people on HN know similarly talented people from their time in university, who were natural leaders and mentors.

Unfortunately, very few (read: none) of those people who are good at teaching are employed as teachers. Why not? It has nothing to do with teacher's unions or certification requirements or institutional bureaucracy or barriers to innovation, and everything to do with the labor market. Namely, a good engineer or scientist with a masters or doctorate can out-earn a teacher by a factor of at least two. Then there's the fact that an engineer employed as an engineer isn't required to restrict his use of paid vacation days to just a few weeks each year (a couple high-school teachers with whom I'm still in contact tell me that they've never been able to take their kids on vacation for spring break because their spring break didn't line up with their kid's spring break).

So, I think the solution is easy: Pay teachers a salary that is competitive with other high-skilled professions, and you'll get good teachers.

But let me offer a personal anecdote that suggests pay isn't the only problem. If pay were to remain exactly as it were today, but the bureaucratic bullshit went away, I would very seriously consider looking for a teaching position in a high school after I graduate. (I am currently a 4th year Ph.D. student.)

But all of the bureaucracy that goes on just makes it an absolute non-starter. It almost completely destroys the perks of teaching for me, namely, the freedom and flexibility to mold a curriculum. (The perk of having summers off just doesn't make up for it for me.)

Even if you doubled the pay, I'm still not sure I would go for it. But that's me.

It makes me angry that, if you finish your PhD (and maybe even if you don't), you would be perfectly qualified to teach college students, but teaching seniors in high school is out of the question without you going through still more schooling and hoop-jumping. Myself, I have bachelor's and master's degrees in mathematics and applied mathematics, but it doesn't matter. The public schools don't want me. Maybe I wouldn't be a good teacher, but maybe I would be. We'll probably never find out.

The problem with simply raising teacher salaries is that, due to the tenure system in public schools, most of the increase will accrue to the oldest teachers regardless of skill.

The problem with that argument is that the supply vastly, VASTLY outstrips demand. How can you possibly argue that we should pay these candidates more when you have 100 applicants per position in most school districts?

Doesn't this suggest a real problem with the upstream pipeline?

I think we are looking at an existential crisis.

I don't find that to be true. There are good inexperienced teachers that are searching for jobs, but go to interviews for jobs with 20+ applicants.

A lot of people are in agreement that the problem begins and ends with teachers, but this sounds suspiciously like scapegoating.

Amen. Schools are failing SOME kids, there is no doubt about that.

But the question I have - which is controversial, to say the least - is this: Do we really CARE that it's failing some kids?

Do we have to make everybody go all the way through THE PROCESS, or should some rightly just skip a chunk of it?

EDIT: My first comment to you is mostly in agreeance with you. I think it's inarguable that school fails SOME kids, because no compulsory system is perfect. But I took your statement of "are schools really failing kids" to mean "are schools really failing the majority or even all kids" or something similar (are schools failing the most important kids for some value of "important", etc).

That doesn't seem to make it more clear, but hell, I'm trying to vigorously agree with you.

I think what people really want is the economy to be better, and since the economy isn't what it used to be, the popular theory is that at some point, the education system got infected with some disease and started to fail kids, causing the bad economy. When the economy was humming, I doubt many people thought the education system failed those kids. The simpler explanation is that the education system was in a relatively steady state and the economy just went bad.

Why is that? All able-bodied humans have brains, mouths, eyes, arms etc all of which work in much the same way. If you are making clothing, you don't say "everyone is different", you make clothes based on the same pattern in a relatively small range of sizes.

For people who have specific disabilities, we should make adjustments, but I don't understand why a single way of teaching would not work for most people. Leaving aside whether schools are the best way of teaching.

Then why do the rich buy custom-tailored clothes?

I am compelled to note that our existing socioeconomic, and thus educational, systems operate pretty much the other way around: the revealed judgment of capitalism is that it's better to have a small elite of outstandingly well-educated rich people who can confidently exploit the mob of mostly ignorant masses.

1) Because the same effect and the same processes are displayed at the post-secondary level where capitalist forces operate more strongly than social-democratic ones.

2) Because the capitalists control the government, at this point, so government action is a good indicator of what the capitalist class thinks is best.

So even though "Everyone is different" may be a canard, it may still be the case that the only practical way to improve schools is through a distributed process of trial and error on a diverse set of teaching methods.

Have you ever worked in a software development company? You've probably noticed that some of your coworkers work better by being isolated and solving things on their own. Others prefer teaming up with a more experienced developer to guide their work. Some need a very detailed spec upfront, while others are fine filling in the holes as they go along.

Would you force the guy who thrives while doing pair programming to work on his own? Sure, he might get some work done, but he won't be as happy nor as productive as he is pair programming.

And the kicker is that those things change throughout people's careers.

Education is exactly the same. You can force everyone in the same mold, but all it will lead to is people performing sub optimally and becoming frustrated. Should education ignore that?

---

It's even worth it to take a step back and ask ourselves what the goal of school education should be. The average parent or teacher will probably answer that it is to develop the child's skills and knowledge in a way that will enable him to attend a good college, to secure a good job, and to live their life comfortably.

The more we advance in society, the more we realize that this definition was perhaps sufficient 50 years ago (when it was very common and accepted to stop your studies after high school), but it is becoming less and less so. As our society starts to be comfortable with notions such as minimum basic income, that many jobs can and should be automated, that there will inevitably be more able-minded able-bodied adults than there are jobs available in the future and so on, we need to revisit what the purpose of education from ages ~3-18 should be.

Things we probably want education "of the future" to be about:

- creating citizens that have the means and the tools to instruct themselves and understand the world and society around them

- enabling the children and teenagers to build & live a fulfilling and constructive adult life (we might have to accept at some point that some people are fine playing the saxophone 10 hours a day, while some are fine programming 10 hours a day - one is not necessarily better than the other)

- building the skills to relate to your peers and help them to work towards the previous 2 points. Having worked in educational settings (think boarding school style, with everyday life mixed with instruction) where teenagers would be in regular contact with younger children (for example helping them during programming workshops etc.), I've noticed how much good it does to everyone involved. The younger kids love having someone just a tiny bit older than they are helping them out, and a lot of teenagers appreciate being handed some responsibilities. The current school system is very much a one way street (teachers teach and enforce rules, students sit down and listen), and it's far from ideal.

Oh wow, you must have a common body shape/type. That range of sizes is actually kinda large, and there is "specialty" size ranges, for example, plus size, petite, big and tall. Bras especially have a giant range of sizes, and I still know woman who have to get custom made bras, and these are woman with natural breasts.

I personally don't fit into off the shelf clothing, period. I've never seen a pair of pants that fit me, I just make due with what is closest, and I've gotten used to constantly adjusting my pants, it is second nature to me.

Most Africans have an IQ in the 80s, barely above mentally retarded. Most of them can barely be trained to even go through the motions of algebra, let alone use it to solve problems in new situations.

"College material" kids need to graduate high school with a mastery of algebra so they can learn calculus, which they will be expected to use unbidden to solve novel problems they encounter in other areas.

It seems unlikely to me that the vocational training of the dull can be combined with the education of the near-genius. It is like trying to teach carpentry and structural engineering at the same time.

Kids also have a gigantic range of self control. About 1 in 20 are profoundly delayed, being an average of 3 years behind "normal" in planning and self control. (This is called ADHD to pathologize it, but nothing that common can possibly be a true disorder.) So a typical freshman high school classroom will have pne student who can barely keep their shit together well enough to glue macaroni to construction paper. And will have one student, usually a girl, who operates on a fully adult level.

And then there are the variations in memory. One student learns the entire course in 20 hours, while another has to grind out practice for 150 hours.

There is simply no way for a single process to handle the range of human variation well.

Even the body is like this. My ideal bicycle could permanently cripple another normal person of the same height. Ditto for shoes.

http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20O...

http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20O...

What evidence do you have for this claim?

The science on IQ shows that European Jews > far east Asians > Caucasians > Africans. There is still some uncertainty about the exact numbers and rankings, but there is zero controversy about the existence of the intelligence hierarchy.

In a few years we will resurrect the Neanderthals, who had larger brains than any living human race. It is entirely possible that in 50 years they will be winning all the physics Nobel prizes.

Needless to say, a black Nobel laureate such as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir_William_Arthur_Lewis is vastly more intelligent than the median member of any ethnic group...

Underprivileged students from minority backgrounds can do quite well at calculus - some teachers, like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaime_Escalante , dedicated years to trying, with quite impressive results. This has been demonstrated again and again at schools with poor track records. Simply having a competent teacher and an environment that isn't entirely hostile to learning can do far more than many people tend to realize.

Most people you'd pick at random from any group will be fairly average, and geniuses are uncommon, but exist, in all the groups.

Our civilization has come this far by cultivating genius. A billion average people sweeping floors will never discover penicillin or invent the transistor. And geniuses are radically less common in some groups.

An extremely basic knowledge of statistics would show you that for a set of overlapping bell curves with a reasonably sized standard deviation, a difference of a few percent in the median is far too little to make a statement like "Group X > Group Y" on with a straight face.

Genius lies at the upper end of the spectrum, where the normal curve drops off steeply. A small difference between group averages becomes a huge difference at the top end, thanks to the steepness. It is basic statistics that the elites are dominated by whatever groups have a small advantage at the average. (This is why airlines are so paranoid about quality control. If a company lets its average slip a little, it will kill most of the people who die in air travel, which turns out to really hurt bookings even if their average is a zillion times safer than cars.)

So if you design classrooms to "leave no Group Y child behind"—as the U.S. has done—you will necessarily leave behind all Group X elites. Thus answering the original question of whether uniform education works.

Yes, there are African geniuses. The problem is that they are really, really rare. So rare that a typical school has zero of them.

Our civilizations, for the most part, don't cultivate genius, unfortunately. And geniuses aren't radically less common in some groups, unless you mean groups like "people who suffered severe childhood malnutrition". Normal schools aren't really set up to deal with people with IQs more than a standard deviation, or perhaps two standard deviations, from the norm.

If you define genius to be an IQ of 160+, and model it as a Gaussian with a standard deviation of 15, most schools have no geniuses of any race. If you take a more-reasonable fat-tailed distribution, many schools still don't.

My personal, anecdotal bias: the best school I went to was quite small, and had several geniuses - including a black one. There weren't many black kids, but the ones who were there were exceptional; I wouldn't be surprised if they had the highest average IQ of any ethnic group at the school (and yes, there were plenty of Asian and Jewish students, from several countries).

All of which is to say, we have strong evidence of differences in IQ between groups, but we have pretty much no evidence of genetic IQ differences between groups. We know that environmental factors[2] play a huge role in population level IQ and are quite sufficient to explain the differences we can observe. Could one group have a genetic advantage? Sure, but I don't feel I have any reason to believe it's white people who are naturally smarter than black people as opposed to vice versa.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect [2]Well, there's vitamin D deficiency but that's so easily fixed by nutrition that I'm calling it an environmental factor despite the role genetics plays.

And I just broke my own rule to never, never ever respond to comments like this one or people making them...

</sarcasm>

On point #2 - why is that? Because of standardization? Lack of accountability?

Overall what is your opinion of the charter school movement?

I'm a fan of the charter school movement mostly in the sense that it radically decentralizes education and that most charter schools are non-union. I've visited traditional public schools and charter schools and the sense of community, engagement, and accountability is palpable at the charter schools. At the traditional public schools, the sense was one of defeatism and calcification.

Now keep in mind that my experience was in a large urban area, so your mileage will vary.

If Martin Luther were to read Gray's remarks today, I think he'd find them patently ridiculous.

Maybe you are being over-sensitive on behalf of Christendom here, as a worldly institution it should not be above criticism.

Actually that's not quite right. The previous home school movement came out of Christian roots. The more current "trend" tends to be unaffiliated with any particular religious background...

I have two middle schoolers in an affluent public school district and our experience is very different. There are many motivated teachers constantly tweaking their approach to keep students engaged. If anything, I'd want more structure in our schools.

The much bigger issue is that alternative schooling approaches work only with a high degree of involvement from parents and the community. Do we really thing "Sudbury Valley" schools would work in inner cities or the deep South? I rather think parents are glad to have someone keep their kids out of trouble while they work overtime to scrape by.

Also, self-motivated learning gets you only so far. Without some external pressure I don't think most kids would decide to study calculus or statistics or other dry but important topics.

Put another way, if you drew a Venn diagram of "stuff that would be useful for adulthood" and "stuff most kids would study until they were at least adequately skilled entirely of their own volition", the circles would barely overlap.

Sure, this doesn't apply to the average Hacker News reading autodidact, but one of the first things you learn in statistics is not to make judgements based on outliers.

I think the second statement applies perfectly well to most adults. Our whole system is based on having people maximally specialize into their element of greatest comparative advantage, to the exclusion of most of what we regard as maturity, wisdom, and humanity.

Statistics gets a bad rap, but it is far more important for day-to-day life than people give it credit for.

Math is not important at all for the vast majority of adults today.

This is just plain not true. I can't speak for calculus, but in addition to what I mention above, there's plenty of day-to-day need for math by the general public - money handling skills, for example, are something that almost everyone should have.

Statistics are useful in the way the parent post mentioned.

Logarithms are useful for better understanding some statistics, but this has less every day use than the two above.

And while I do not use calculus in my every day life I still find it very useful to reason about ordinary things in the terms of derivates and integrals. It has given my new ways to think about problems.

This was the most useless school ever.

I could not agree more.

The point of learning math is there's an inflexible scorecard of reality for an incredibly complicated logic puzzle, and the only determiner of adequacy in the subject is persistence. Now if you want to excel you need the knack or genetics or whatever, but mere adequacy only takes a certain amount of sweat.

So it teaches that at least some times there's certain logical rules where one follows from the other or can be combined with another, and if you're persistent you can figure it out. Or just summarize to persistence and logic.

I really don't care if your wife can solve 2x=4 for x, but I would be unhappy to be under her care if she would give up on complicated situations (oh he's not breathing AND no pulse? I'll just give up), or refuses to notice cause and effect relationships.

"Most mathematicians at one time or another have probably found themselves in the position of trying to refute the notion that they are people with "a head for figures." or that they "know a lot of formulas." At such times it may be convenient to have an illustration at hand to show that mathematics need not be concerned with figures, either numerical or geometrical. For this purpose we recommend the statement and proof of our Theorem 1. The argument is carried out not in mathematical symbols but in ordinary English; there are no obscure or technical terms. Knowledge of calculus is not presupposed. In fact, one hardly needs to know how to count. Yet any mathematician will immediately recognize the argument as mathematical, while people without mathematical training will probably find difficulty in following the argument, though not because of unfamiliarity with the subject matter.

What, then, to raise the old question once more, is mathematics? The answer, it appears, is that any argument which is carried out with sufficient precision is mathematical, and the reason that your friends and ours cannot understand mathematics is not because they have no head for figures, but because they are unable [or unwilling, DRH] to achieve the degree of concentration required to follow a moderately involved sequence of inferences. This observation will hardly be news to those engaged in the teaching of mathematics, but it may not be so readily accepted by people outside of the profession. For them the foregoing may serve as a useful illustration."

College Admissions and the Stability of Marriage, Gale & Shapley, The American Mathematical Monthly (Jan 1962)

From a link I believe on HN to http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2013/08/a-few-words-about... which lead eventually to http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2012/10/rigor_math_and.h...

You really don't know what you are talking about here. How you can make the link from not being good or enjoying math to just giving up on something critical is completely illogical.

When, after high school, will you have to factor a quadratic or describe to me in detail how a cell works? Who after high school does that? A very small population. However, who lives in an organized society with a set of beliefs that will have to judge and effect those beliefs? EVERYONE! Who will have to read something or judge a document put out by the government? EVERYONE!

(The full caps is somewhat required as he would always stand on top of his desk and yell it at the class...)

Independent of the studies (there are more) I think that stats is very underserved in society. Nurses should know statistics. Knowing joint %s and Bayesian stats are useful in treatment and diagnosis. Much of health care is moving from doctors to nurses, and it's important for them. Stats are also important for people making investments. And buying lottery tickets. And buying a house. And making judgements in daily living.

[1] http://www.ppic.org/content/pubs/report/R_701JBR.pdf

I strongly, strongly suspect the arrow points the other way.

However, a grasp of calculus and statistics (those two came to mind, there are surely others) is useful if you want to break past existing boundaries because they give you some tools to think abstractly. Personally, I want my kids to learn that. They already have plenty of time to explore on their own - the time spent in a classroom should, in my opinion, be spent on learning fundamentals very deeply.

It's not only hard to teach yourself calculus, it's also something you wouldn't think of doing unless you're Gauss or one of those guys.

Agree with the rest, kind of disagree with this part. Measure the slope of a curve, measure the area under a curve. No big whoop. Sure, the details get fiddly but 90% of anxiety over calculus comes from its arbitrary place as the capstone of a suffocatingly rigid elementary math sequence, not its inherent difficulty or magisterial importance.

Stats and discrete math are harder imho, and people teach themselves those all the time. Helps that they're much more useful (outside physics and engineering anyways...)