Everyone should get the opportunity to program, but school is a waste of time

http://www.philliphaydon.com/2013/03/everyone-should-get-the-opportunity-to-learn-to-program-but-school-is-a-waste-of-time

by philliphaydon • 13 years ago

11 34 13 years ago

philliphaydon.com

daGrevis• 13 years ago

I couldn't agree more.

Retric• 13 years ago

I couldn't agree less.

PS: I think the greatest hubris of youth is that there time is worth much, and they have any idea what they will be doing in 20 years.

barry-cotter5• 13 years ago

Their time may not be worth much but their suffering is just as real as yours. Being forced to endure the company of people you did not choose in an artificial society with no inherent meaning or goals probably isn't healthy for many, but it's a hell for some and purgatory for others. I don't really have much to say about primary school but most of secondary school was a waiting room for real life. It would have been worse if I'd known what I was missing, I'm sure.

NateDad3• 13 years ago

I couldn't agree less. If you can't write a proper essay, then you can't write a paper on the new algorithm you invented, you can't write legible documentation for the library you wrote, and you can't argue effectively about the merits of one technology vs. another (change out the terminology for whatever communication is required in your field).

Basic math (up to and including algebra and geometry) is used all the time in every day activities. You don't have to be a math whiz and remember every last formula... but remembering that it's possible to figure out the third side of a triangle when you have the other sides and the angle between them, or being able to figure out what the original price of an item was if it's $60 now and is marked down 20% from its original price.

Knowing history and social studies can help you understand the way the world works on a macro level, which is useful for figuring out if that new startup idea is going to be successful or just sit on the shelf with the rest of the bad ideas.

Real life does revolve around math, history, English, and science. Perhaps the author is smart enough that he picked this stuff up without doing any of the work, so he failed the classes but learned what he needed to anyway. But that doesn't mean you don't need to learn it.

Should we try to help people who don't do well in traditional school environments? Definitely. But that doesn't mean we throw out traditional schooling. There's a basic level of knowledge that everyone should have to be a productive member of society. And you have to test kids, otherwise you can't know if they're actually learning anything. But that doesn't mean we should be shaming kids who don't test well. We should be helping them learn, and changing how we test so that we are testing the knowledge rather than raw fact regurgitation.

Now, if you're talking college, I can agree a lot more. Taking literature in college when you're in a CS program is more than dumb, it's a huge waste of time and money. College should be about teaching you skills for a career. For STEM careers, that doesn't mean reading Shakespeare.... but it might mean statistics and probability. The time wasted on a shakespeare class could be better spent taking a class on compilers or assembly.

philliphaydon3• 13 years ago

I'm not suggesting we don't teach kids Math/English, I still think that is important, but the approach we take by shoving kids the same age in the same class doesn't work.

Some kids learn faster than others, we shouldn't hold some kids back simply because they are years younger than other kids. If a 7yo is racing through maths and enjoys it, put him with kids of his skill level, when you put a 7yo who is already years ahead in math, with kids his own age learning what he already knows, he messes around out of boredom.

Just because a few kids work well in a traditional environment doesn't mean we should hold those kids back, but we do. And likewise slower learning kids who could be exceptional at subjects are rushed through school and declared 'slow' or we blame the parents or homework etc for their lack of apparent intelligence.

betterunix4• 13 years ago

"Should we try to help people who don't do well in traditional school environments? Definitely. But that doesn't mean we throw out traditional schooling"

Traditional schooling is the cause of the problems people have in school. Keeping it, but making special exceptions for people who are bright but failing, is like having a tow truck drag your car to work in the morning because you did not want to take it to a mechanic.

In an American school, the goal is to have all the students think the same way. We have laws that reinforce that goal at all levels of government. All students learn basic algebra and basic trigonometry. Very few learn Euclidean geometry, and almost none learn non-Euclidean geometry. A math teacher is not in any way free to decide their curriculum; the curriculum is given to the teacher, who forces it upon the students. A standardized test is given to all students at the end of the year, and it always has the same format, same subjects, and similar questions.

That is not a system meant to educate people or to promote their ability to think; it is a system meant to train people to be like everyone else. It is not just that we settled on that because we lacked alternatives. We chose this approach because the people in power did not consider teaching the population how to think to be a priority. If they had considered it to be a priority, standardized testing would have been rejected early on, if it had even been thought of in the first place.

"you have to test kids, otherwise you can't know if they're actually learning anything"

Giving everyone the exact same test, or variants of the same test with all questions being asked in the same way, does nothing to test their academic progress. Anyone can be trained to take a test when the format, subject matter, questions, etc. are all known in advance.

If you want to test people in a meaningful way, you need to give them problems they never encountered before, in formats they never encountered before. Otherwise you are just as likely to identify well-educated students as well-trained students, and you will lack any way to measure the difference.

"Taking literature in college when you're in a CS program is more than dumb"

Only if you think the purpose of college is vocational training. The idea that people go to college to receive job training and job credentials has been extremely destructive to higher education. It is not just that humanities departments are being slashed; in the CS department at my alma mater, computability and algorithms were the only theoretical courses. Compilers had been offered a few years before I arrived, complexity theory was not taught at all, and programming languages was just about different language features without any discussion of type theory. When I asked the department chair why the curriculum was so easy, the answer was that only a handful of CS students actually enjoyed learning CS, and that the department could not afford to have the other students leave as a result of rigorous standards. Those "other students" were only there for job credentials.

If you want vocation training, get a two year associates degree. That will save you time and money, and you will not be part of the wave of destruction that is ruining higher education.

cafard• 13 years ago

Santayana said "[even] In the best schools, most time is wasted...", but frankly I don't think that anyone has come up with a better system.

barry-cotter5• 13 years ago

Montessori and Steiner schools. The general level of math and science education among their graduates is lower than in normal schools but the children don't receive so much training in what it is to be someone else's minion.

School time isn't wasted unless you think school is for educating children. They get all the education they need and there's childcare and socialisation in first and second place.

barry-cotter5• 13 years ago

School is not about education, it is about childcare and about indoctrination and socialisation. Some education occurs but that's not what school is for.School is for getting people to do as they're told, when they're told to, for inuring people to being ranked and judged.

http://www.cantrip.org/gatto.html

gazrogers• 13 years ago

What utter crap. Would you rather go back to the time when only the children of the wealthy would be educated by private tutors and the children of the poor (who couldn't afford to have their children educated to even basic standards) went into work as soon as they were able? Without school how do those kids get an education? Their parents are probably working all hours to make ends meet so they won't be able to provide the basic numeracy and literacy skills a child needs to function in society.

cpursley• 13 years ago

The problem is, just because they sit there all day long doesn't mean these kids are getting an education (in American schools). My wife is a teacher, it's 80% babysitting and discipline.

barry-cotter5• 13 years ago

It takes fifty contact hours to teach the average nine year old to read. I can't recall how long basic arithmetic takes but it's unlikely to take more than ten times that. 550/40 would be very, very approximately one school year. We just covered basic numeracy and literacy. Now we can talk about how all modern school systems are descended from ones designed to produce soldiers. [ htt//www.nber.org/papers/w18049 ]

If we must have a place to park children if we want their parents to work why can't it be like Summerhill, and not somewhere children are made to sit still, be quiet, do as you're told, stop doing it when I say stop? [ en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summerhill_School ]

If school is about education why does it start two to four hours too early for adolescents to learn at their best and why do they get homework in all subjects when the only subjects that show positive effects from homework wre math and cognate subjects?

betterunix4• 13 years ago

"Would you rather go back to the time when only the children of the wealthy would be educated by private tutors and the children of the poor (who couldn't afford to have their children educated to even basic standards) went into work as soon as they were able?"

That is not entirely a thing of the past. My zoned high school in New York City only graduated about a third of its incoming students when I was a teenager (I was fortunate enough to go to a more well-funded school). What do you think those high school drop-outs were doing? Some were in gangs, others were out working. There are still families that are so poor that they start pressuring children to work as soon as the law allows it.

"Without school how do those kids get an education?"

A large number of those drop-outs are only barely literate, and only barely able to do basic arithmetic. The question is not, "How can they be educated without school?" but rather, "How can they be educated?" We still struggle with that issue.

"basic numeracy and literacy skills a child needs to function in society."

As it turns out, the minimum literacy skills needed to function in society are taught somewhere between 2nd and 4th grade. You do not really need to be able to read at a more advanced level for many lines of work, where your vocation training is entirely hands-on and where you have calculators or computers to do your arithmetic and logic. My mother is a blue-collar worker, and some of her coworkers are only barely literate enough to fill out incident reports (she often has to help them). You do not even need to be literate to vote in a national election.

The problem with being uneducated is not that you cannot live -- people with no income can still survive in our society. The problem is that an uneducated person is at a great disadvantage in our society, being cut off from opportunities and being easily taken advantage of by educated people. Uneducated people are far more likely to waste money on the lottery. Uneducated people are far more likely to forfeit their right to remain silent if they are arrested. Uneducated people are far less likely to attain leadership positions or financial security.

Unfortunately, the public education system as it exists today utterly fails to give people the minimum education needed to avoid all of the above. I suspect that giving people the education needed to be leaders or compete effectively in our capitalist system (or, heaven forbid, to change that system) is not even a goal of the education system. Vocational training is not a goal either -- trade schools are popular for a reason. If you were to ask me, I would tell you that the goal of our education system is to produce compliant workers who accept their place in a rigid social hierarchy. It is not just the "bad students" who are punished in school; students who master the material of a course and then stop bothering to show up are equally punished, even when their teachers are fully aware that they are bored. Low grades -- in the D or even F range -- are given for failing to do homework, regardless of the education value of that homework. Punishments are doled out for insubordination, regardless of what it was that the student was doing (e.g. a student who was smoking pot in a bathroom will be punished the same as a student who cut class to go to the computer lab and learn how to program).

Really, this is a problem of values. We do not value education. The people in power, who received a quality education that focused on teaching them how to think, have little interest in ensuring that poor people learn anything other than compliance. If the goal were to ensure that people are learning to think, we would not be using structured tests where the precise subjects to be covered are known in advance to evaluate academic progress (nor would we be pressuring teachers to deliver high scores on those exams).

NateDad3• 13 years ago

Yeah, and the moon landing was faked, and there's fluoride in the water to keep us all meek. Right. Cause we're obviously all so good at doing what we're told in this country. OH WAIT.

EliRivers5• 13 years ago

Speaking as an outsider, and without wanting to start comparing other countries, the citizens of the US do actually appear to be very good at doing what they're told by the government; the range of political opinion and so forth amongst the citizenry typically exists within an extraordinarily narrow band as laid down by the government.

rm999• 13 years ago

I hate these articles that argue for drastic changes in schooling without the deep analysis those changes deserve. It takes a certain kind of arrogance to go from "I wasn't good at X" to "X is useless; let's get rid of it."

I also struggled in high school because I couldn't choose my own curriculum (as do a lot of people), but what school reinforced in me is the concept that not everything in life is easy - successful people can turn a challenge into something constructive. I could go on about all the benefits of a standardized, well-rounded education, but every time one of these articles pops up a lot of people do that for me :)

betterunix4• 13 years ago

"I could go on about all the benefits of a standardized"

I could just as easily go on about the detrimental effect of standardized education. The executive summary is this: societies do not advance when everyone thinks the same way as everyone else.

mu_killnine• 13 years ago

People are welcome to their cynical, paranoid opinions but there are good educators (not just teachers) out there. Phillip's data set is approximately one point yet, from this, he concludes the whole system needs to be scrapped?

It's popular to dump on education but for anyone to conclude that the entire system is unusable and needs to be destroyed is silly. For some people, like myself, I fit right into the education system as it exists.

The holy grail of education is a system that is agile enough to cater to the myriad learning styles and goals of students. This isn't a novel idea but obviously the challenge is in implementation.

Everyone's entitled to their two minute hate but it'd be a much more interesting article if he posed some solutions. It would also show he's more than an armchair quarterback with an axe to grind against an old english teacher.

anthonyarroyo• 13 years ago

"Schooling in general is a waste of time because it caters to this idea that life evolves around English, Math, Art, Science and General Knowledge. But real life doesn’t, and these things don’t help children figure out what they are good at or enjoy."

Sorry to nitpick, but how can life not evolve around General Knowledge which, ostensibly, includes all knowledge. Agree with the sentiment, disagree with the argument.

"The greatest disservice to a cause is to defend it with poor arguments." -- Some Famous Guy Dead Guy Who Couldn't Program

philliphaydon3• 13 years ago

Maybe generalizing like that is bad.

Take English for example: In school we used to analyze poems from World War 1 / 2, and we had to explain why the poet used this word, that sentence, this style, etc.

The truth is, there's no English Answer. The person wrote what he felt, what he smelt, saw, heard, etc. He felt that those words and sentences best described the what he wanted to say.

Yet we butcher these poems on speculation and assumptions. We don't learn anything from this in my opinion. The entire process of analyzing books/poems/movies in English class is silly.

With math we are forced to learn how to measure the volume of a triangle... Sure there may be some time in life where you might put this to use, but MOST people would never need to know this type of math, we need to instill general maths but we need to de-emphasize math and allow kids to focus on things they are interested in and allow them to be creative and learn to their full potential, if that means they want to go learn advanced math! By all means let them!

EliRivers5• 13 years ago

"Yet we butcher these poems on speculation and assumptions. We don't learn anything from this in my opinion. The entire process of analyzing books/poems/movies in English class is silly."

I have conversations with people (adults) who clearly never had to do these things (or any other similar study of the written word). It's like having a conversation with a child; they miss puns, subtext, irony, sarcasm, struggle to consider more than one conflicting opinion at a time, struggle to interpret beyond the purely literal and struggle to communicate their own thoughts to others. An inability to communicate beyond such a low level is crippling.

lutusp3• 13 years ago

> Sorry to nitpick, but how can life not evolve around General Knowledge which, ostensibly, includes all knowledge.

The answer is obvious -- most of those who excel, who create breakthroughs, do it by specializing. This is not argue against general knowledge, only to say that specialization is an element of nearly every success story and scientific breakthrough.

There's even a new psychological theory about specializing, that celebrates focusing on a few things, or one -- it's called "Grit":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grit_(personality_trait)

"Grit in psychology is a positive, non-cognitive trait, based on an individual’s passion for a particular long-term goal or endstate coupled with a powerful motivation to achieve their respective objective."

An example would be Albert Einstein working alone for years on his relativity theory, to the exclusion of any other activities.

But, just to prove how consistent psychologists are, the exact same behavior can get you an Asperger's diagnosis:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asperger_syndrome

"... an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) that is characterized by significant difficulties in social interaction, alongside restricted and repetitive patterns of behavior and interests."

These two theories describe the exact same behavior -- intense focus and specialization, but come to opposite conclusions -- it's good. No, wait, it's bad.

Given that there are two opposing but equally plausible psychological theories about this kind of personal focus, guess which historical figure is now diagnosed with Asperger's? Albert Einstein. Along with Isaac Newton, Thomas Jefferson, and Bill Gates.

More here: http://arachnoid.com/building_science

EliRivers5• 13 years ago

"These two theories describe the exact same behavior"

I disagree. One of them is about long-term passion for a goal. One of them is about social inability.

It's quite possible to have both at the same time. It's quite possible to have just one. It's quite possible to have neither. They are not the same thing.

effbott• 13 years ago

This is a reoccurring theme on HN and in the programming subculture in general: rowdy kid drops out of school, gets written off by well-meaning adults, learns to program, goes on to start a highly successful tech business, and then writes a blog post railing against the school system.

While I totally agree that the schooling system is outdated and primarily a way to socialize children, what programmers tend to forget is that we have a very special profession that has both low barriers of entry and high pay. Literally anyone who has access to a computer can learn to program. This is not the case in most professions! While aspiring programmers can tinker around with Linux in their spare time, an aspiring doctor can't tinker with a cadaver without being in school. As programmers we are extremely lucky that all the tools we could ever need are free and on the web.

philliphaydon3• 13 years ago

I think the only reason we see this in the programming subculture is because it's mostly programmers who are here reading these discussions and writing these blog posts.

I used to go to school with a guy who dropped out of school at 15, having failed year 11, get a job working outside, did a part-time course, ended up in an apprenticeship, worked a few years, started his own business, sold it, he's 28 now and owns his own house without a mortgage...

Put him in front of a computer and the most he can do is use facebook and play video games.

That's a single case, but there's millions of people just like him, and there's millions of people who are missing out on having a good life because we told them they aren't intelligent enough to go to university simply because they weren't good at one thing at school.

jeremysmyth• 13 years ago

And for every million like him there are a hundred or two hundred million who are not as driven, motivated, talented.

People who are successful despite being uneducated are outliers. Stories like OP (and Bill Gates and countless others) are stories. Anecdotes. Single data points that are meaningless without context. Deciding to forego an education based on such stories is a risky game.

Everyone should get the opportunity to program, but school is a waste of time

Related Stories