The Underworked American Child

http://www.economist.com/world/unitedstates/displayStory.cfm?story_id=13825184

by tokenadult • 17 years ago

54 72 17 years ago

I grew up with the long summer break (in Canada), and can't imagine how boring my childhood would have been without it. It was a great time to meet and make friends with the neighborhood kids, build forts, go exploring, go to camp, etc, etc. Some things can't be learned in school.

pyr32• 17 years ago

Do you really think that all people in Europe/Asia lead boring lives just because they don't get 3 months of 'time off' from school?

ilkhd2• 17 years ago

Canadian schoolyear is 10 days longer than American, none-the-less.

kiba3• 17 years ago

Learning programming or even learning how to operate a lemonade stand have far more economic values than a school system churning out ton of quadratic equation walking calculators.

Reading is not that hard to maintain even. What kind of a social environment the school is to discourage such disinterest in maintaining reading skills? Where is the internet? Where is the texting? Where are the blogs, or the twitter even? Literacy should be stronger than ever before.

Mathematics? For god sake, what reason do we need to learn useless concept like cosine, sine, and tanget and how to do the quadratic equation? What everyone probably need is an education on how to manage their money and do financial calculation, but beyond that, it is mostly unneccesary. I serously doubt business manager, nails shop, and musicians need to know that.

Programmers at the very least need to know algebra. If he want to do cooler stuff, he can learn on his own, just like how he learn all his tools and programming languages.

Other field may required lot of mathematics. If you need mathematics for your career, why not take a school specialized in making engineers out of you?

Schools, are the very least an hinderance to the economy. It is a test, a fake test at that. It have nothing to very little to do with the performance of our economy.

The smartest scientist in the world probably don't need English Literature 101. English literature is probably the scientist know, but is it revelant to his career? No.

If schools want to be useful to the economy, than make them churn out skilled work force for whatever their economy may need and do it well. We would still have schools like grammatica and mathematics that will equip people with the basic essential(Let face it, it is hard to go anywhere without learning how to write and read and do basic mathematics)

For those who still want a scholar's education(English, Social Science, Alegbra, the work), well...you still have the money to pay for such an education, right?

Let forget all the government beucracry, rules, and abritary grading guideline and start schools like the Hacker School where young and old alike get to learn technologies and skills in fast and furious courses like the Art of Unit Testing or Rails boot camp or whatever.

Our profession doesn't have guilds or unions, occupancy licensure, and all that bullshits that other professions have. If we program, than we're programmers.

If some bold hackers can show the world a successful example of a trade school where teachers teach because they know their stuff and teach well not because of their bullshit degrees and license that said they're teachers. This can be an example to other field to replicate.

Than our frailing education system will begin to rebound and starts to produce workers who are not quadratic equation walking calculator but can actually do real work!

Now, all we need is a little less regulations(actually just abolish all laws regarding education) and the privization of government run schools and their so called educational standard.

timwiseman• 17 years ago

To focus just on your comments about mathematics, let me point out that going through at least algebra at a minimum is valuable for everyone in a modern society.

First it is highly helpful in handling even basic household finance. Second, you cannot hope to understand even basic statistics without it (and with the way the media throws out statistics it is very dangerous not to understand at least the basics if you want to be a participatory citizen). But far beyond all that, it goes a very long way to teaching you how to think and how to make reasoned and rational decisions.

Also, I think you vastly underestimate the number of jobs that require going far beyond algebra. Virtually all technical jobs of any kind requires calculus. This includes almost all engineers, virtually all scientists, and most analysts. Also, most finance jobs involve math far beyond algebra. Remember that even fully analyzing interest rates involves calculus (or at least formulas derived from calculus, and a good analyst should know where they come from). And that is again before realizing that the mere study of math helps teach you to reason and think.

I am focusing only on math here, but I think you will find anyone in an advanced society will benefit greatly from algebra and far more than you seem to expect need calculus. I also disagree with most everything else you said, but I will just focus on math for the moment.

nihilocrat2• 17 years ago

Also, in game programming trigonometry is fundamental, and in 3D an entirely higher order of magnitude is required.

kiba3• 17 years ago

If algebra is truely neccessary, than it will be taught in some school specializing in basic education. If it is neccessary for higher mathematics to be taught, than you could just go to an engineering school.

If you're a truly care about pure mathematican, than you would go to an actual university and study to become part of the scholar class.

Beyond that, I don't really care much about being a "participatory citizen" nonsense because I don't believe in democracy or writing pointless letters to politicans, but I do care a lot about civic because I am an anarchist, not an apolitical person. I don't know the approriate place to teach it but I suspect that is simply the duty of parents.

apsec1122• 17 years ago

"Virtually all technical jobs of any kind requires calculus. This includes almost all engineers, virtually all scientists, and most analysts."

Engineers and scientists, yes, but these are a small percentage of the population; scientists maybe 0.5%, engineers maybe 5%.

"Also, most finance jobs involve math far beyond algebra."

No, they don't. A lot of finance people can't understand the Capital Asset Pricing Model, let alone anything more complicated. "... if you really do like math then banking is NOT for you, it’s a joke quantitatively." - http://www.mergersandinquisitions.com/investment-banking-sal...

noonespecial• 17 years ago

Even if you don't "use math" per se in your daily life, it still provides a rich source of metaphors for understanding the world; Everything from the way flu spreads to your chances of winning the lottery. You may not stop to actually calculate these things, but "a feeling for math" will give you a great deal more insight than someone who didn't "need to learn useless concepts".

I can't unequivocally say that innumeracy = poverty, but my hunch is its damn close.

ori_b• 17 years ago

I agree. For even the most basic understanding of the world, a feel for mathematics is absolutely necessary.

While I wouldn't quite go as far as Heinlein does, his opinion on the matter seems to be:

Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe and not make messes in the house.

		-- Lazarus Long, "Time Enough for Love"

caffeine3• 17 years ago

Ugh ... I for one couldn't stomach a world of people who had skipped English Literature (or Algebra) to attend Rails Bootcamp.

sketerpot7• 17 years ago

I would love a world of people who had skipped English Literature to read a book for fun. I tried to do that all through school, and according to standardized tests it paid off big time, but the English teachers got all tetchy about it. Sheesh.

For some reason a book is never as good when you have to read it. Especially if you have to read it at the same pace as the rest of the class, and discuss it in patronizing detail during class.

spitfire3• 17 years ago

It's called a trade school. or compucollege.

See how well their grads do 10 years out.

michaelkeenan• 17 years ago

Voted up.

English literature and trigonometry have a place in schools, but teaching them has an opportunity cost. If a student can recite Hamlet's famous soliloquy, but can't manage his finances, then he and his school have spent their efforts inefficiently. The same effort could have been redirected to an understanding of the effects of compound interest, and that would have led to a better life for him, his family and for society.

Let's first focus on teaching the essentials to everyone. If we have time and resources to spare after that, then let's teach Shakespeare and trigonometry.

I'm also concerned about the spirit-crushing effect of failing at something. There will always be students who will struggle with trigonometry. With excellent and patient teachers, maybe almost everyone could master it, but we go to education with the teachers we have. A close friend of mine seems traumatized by her experience in high school, particularly with mathematics. It's so unnecessary. She's an artist now; she'll never need trigonometry. Trigonometry might help a fraction of those who learn it, but the experience of attempting and failing it actively harms the fraction of those who can't do it.

sketerpot7• 17 years ago

> Let's first focus on teaching the essentials to everyone. If we have time and resources to spare after that, then let's teach Shakespeare and trigonometry.

I've had a lot of boring and mostly useless basic classes inflicted on me because someone had the bright idea of making everybody learn "the essentials". And because it had to be taught to everybody, naturally it had to be aimed at people who are about one standard deviation below average in intelligence. Remedial classes shouldn't be forced on everyone, but that's what ends up happening.

trominos• 17 years ago

People: stop voting this guy down. I thought we tolerated dissenters here.

ars• 17 years ago

It doesn't matter if you agree or not, -6 is not appropriate for a non-spam comment.

If you don't agree, post about it. Don't mod down.

Mod to 0 for an incorrect comment (maybe -1, sometimes), but no lower. Lower is only for spam and things like "lol", "me too", etc.

dagw• 17 years ago

>The smartest scientist in the world probably don't need >English Literature 101

I very much disagree. My degree is in mathematics and my day job is programming, yet by far the most useful course I took in high school was English lit.

Being able to critically read a text, understand and analyze it and write a well structured and well reasoned response in reasonably competent English is easily the most useful thing i learned in high school.

Far too many times have I (tried to) read papers by probably very smart people only to be completely bogged down in horrible structure, dire grammar and and badly constructed arguments that as written are logically flawed. I can't help but to think that these scientist would have been far better off if they'd paid more attention in English class.

sketerpot7• 17 years ago

> Other field may required lot of mathematics. If you need mathematics for your career, why not take a school specialized in making engineers out of you?

Two words: premature optimization. Why should everybody have to decide, in their early teens, what career they're going to be doing for the rest of their lives?

> The smartest scientist in the world probably don't need English Literature 101. English literature is probably the scientist know, but is it revelant to his career? No.

Same deal. I'm no fan of English Literature classes -- I'd prefer a comfortable chair and a good book of my own choosing -- but language skills are important, and forcing people to specialize too early has its own downsides.

Incidentally, most math education also counts as premature optimization, where they spend ungodly amounts of time memorizing the procedures for each type of problem in the curriculum. Sure, you'll be able to find X quickly -- but can you actually apply this knowledge? For most people the answer is no. But this miseducation persists because it's easy for teachers and gets good test scores.

mpf62• 17 years ago

Personally, I couldn't disagree more. Specializing to early would narrow your window of opportunities.

A sixteen year old boy doesn't really know what's going to happen during his lifetime. Maybe, one day he would really love to program for a company that specializes in statistics - he would be hopefully lost if he didn’t even know what quadratic equation means.

Another example: in general, you don’t need geography and/or history for your daily job. But you would look pretty stupid if you asked your Swiss customer: “You still have that god save the queen sh*t”.

blhack2• 17 years ago

The problem isn't the time spent in school, the problem is the school itself.

We teach people to be the status quo, we don't encourage them to excel.

For me, summers were spent learning about computers and all the magic spells that I could cast to get them to do whatever I wanted them to.

For some students, school is holding them back. If we want to fix things, we need to abandon this psychotic idea that all students are the same, that there are no dumb kids and that you can just dump 20 similarly aged kids into a room that has somebody standing at the front of it talking at them and that they will somehow come out of the situation better for the experience.

likpok• 17 years ago

I remember seeing an interesting study somewhere (sorry, don't have the link) that found that (IIRC in elementary school) segregating the better students did not help them. It only made the poorer students perform worse.

I think that there have been similar studies which show that elementary school is a very different animal from what we think (i.e. similar nonintuitive results) and that it needs some kind of restructuring.

tokenadult4• 17 years ago

The problem isn't the time spent in school, the problem is the school itself.

That's my take on the issue too.

http://learninfreedom.org/

I also tended to learn more in the summer than during the school year. Something needs to be done to make the school year more worthwhile for such students.

caffeine3• 17 years ago

Something needs to be done to make the school year more worthwhile for such students

Actually, it needs to be done for ALL students. You really think the only kids poorly served by school are those that teach themselves math on the side?

Nearly every kid has an innate curiosity about the world and more importantly the people around him. Some prefer symbolic worlds, others the physical, and most the social.

Schools are currently poor places to learn about any of those. The bizarre hierarchies in place seriously warp most children - witness the daily cruelty that is normal in an average school (others on the internet have made this point better than I can).

To most people, Lockhart's lament is a very minor annoyance compared to the social retardation that goes on in these institutions. Rampant alcohol abuse and unreasonable sexual promiscuity in universities are the inevitable backlash to years of social repression, far beyond the young ages at which it might be called for.

It was not unreasonable in earlier times to consider someone a "young man" or "young woman" at 13 or 14, and as a fully functional society member at 16. Why does this seem so completely ludicrous now? Has our genetic lifecycle programming changed? Of course not - but our social lifecycle programming has.

All this to say that the kids for whom symbolic systems education is too slow are the lucky ones. For them, there is at least the library as an outlet for that spark. Consider the rest, who have no such thing.

timr• 17 years ago

You're the exception, not the rule.

For the other 99% of children, the benefits of longer school years are well documented. Even for the "exceptional" children (who usually aren't as exceptional as they make themselves out to be), longer school years are good -- the question of time spent in school is entirely independent of the subject matter studied, or how it is taught.

da01• 17 years ago

Did the study mention whether or not it mattered if it was a government school or a private school?

bokonist• 17 years ago

Well documented? Where? Links?

granular2• 17 years ago

> The problem isn't the time spent in school, the problem is the school itself.

Actually, that's not enough detail. "School" is a complex system consisting of many parts -- all of which have their issues. Parents play a big role, in so far as what they expect from their children, their local board of ed, and their superintendent.

> We teach people to be the status quo, we don't encourage them to excel.

You'd be amazed at the forces in place that so strongly coerce teachers to stick to the status quo.

blhack2• 17 years ago

You'd be amazed at the forces in place that so strongly coerce teachers to stick to the status quo.

No, I wouldn't.

ramidarigaz3• 17 years ago

It's sad. All of the teachers that are forced to teach to the status quo do so because money is on the line. If a school doesn't conform to the guidelines set down by the government, then they don't get funding. This is a classic example of a law that is meant to help failing miserably, and even making things worse.

And you can't really blame the teachers. They need to make a living, and they barely do as it is. I hate the fact that we seem to value our teachers so little.

screwperman2• 17 years ago

We teach people to be the status quo, we don't encourage them to excel.

Asians rarely value individuality. Doesn't the American system do better in teaching kids to be different from the norm?

tokenadult4• 17 years ago

Asians rarely value individuality.

Evidence for this? (How much time have you spent in Asia, and how recently? As a reply above said, Europe has several different countries, and so does Asia, so what specific places are you talking about?)

sketerpot7• 17 years ago

My sample consists almost entirely of engineers, so I'm disregarding most of humanity, but within that limited sample I believe the answer is a definite yes. That's one of the few saving graces of the American educational system.

Of course, our educational system still sucks at it. I can't tell you how incredibly soul-crushing all my math classes were until about the time I got to trigonometry. And English classes generally suck royally. And don't get me started on biology classes taught by young earth creationists. Or the culture that looks down on learning. Fuck.

I think maybe it's getting better?

arrrg• 17 years ago

This article compares the US to a whole lot of school systems. There is nothing wrong with that, it’s just possible that if you constantly change the point of comparison you end up comparing the US to fictional countries – without the reader even noticing. There are huge differences between the school systems in different European countries (and, e.g. in Germany, between the different school systems in different states inside of those countries) that make those kinds of comparisons dangerous.

asdlfj2sd33• 17 years ago

Speaking as an immigrant from Europe, I was surprised just how much Americans value summer jobs for kids, even blue collar summer jobs.

In Europe working kids is considered a sign of coming from the lower classes, the people that might actually need the income. And upper class families would be embarrassed if their kids worked blue collar jobs.

nop• 17 years ago

What you are saying for about kids working is definitely not true for my part of Europe. I've had plenty of friends from rich families growing up and if anything they tend to be more likely to get a summer job and I can't in the slightest imagine anyone getting embarrassed over their children having a blue collar summer job.

Just because you are rich it doesn't mean you get everything you point at and even still it's quite satisfying for any young person to know hes earned something.

I on the other hand come from the lower classes, pretty much as low as it gets in Sweden and I've never felt the need to have a summer job because of income.

dimitar• 17 years ago

My observation is that richer kids do find jobs more easily because they and their parents usually have plenty of connections. They usually do this so they would have more money to party :-).

Also regulation in many places in Europe effectively limits teenage employment - until I turned 18 I had to either get something like 9 documents or work for money paid under the table for someone I knew before.

Please remember that Europe is far from homogeneous, so observations may vary wildly. :-)

nihilocrat2• 17 years ago

It's shameful for our children NOT to work because it suggests they are spoiled and lazy.

During college, there was an unspoken resentment towards students without jobs because most of us schlubs had to work to pay our own tuition / rent / spending money / whatever, while some people were just given everything by their parents.

kragen• 17 years ago

working kids is considered a sign of coming from the lower classes

I think that's why Americans value it.

nostrademons• 17 years ago

This seems to miss an important point: choice. Most middle-class Americans get to choose their jobs, within reason. Most American schoolchildren do not get to choose their schools.

I went to a charter high school whose curriculum focused on letting us do individualized projects catering to our interests. Its 7-hour day (8:30-3:30) seemed far less oppressive than the 6-hour-and-20-minute day at my public middle school. I've kept up with it after graduation, and they now offer after-school classes and programs until 5:00, and summer courses. And kids go, even though they don't have to. Why not, when their friends are there and the programs are stuff they're interested in anyway?

Similarly, I don't mind working long hours at the Googleplex, because my friends are there, they give me food, and the work is interesting and meaningful.

When those conditions aren't met, you'll find many fewer people bragging about how much time they spent at work. Some working-poor people will work two jobs to make ends meet, but they don't brag about it, they complain about it. It's only because a relatively large number of Americans can now work in jobs that they find challenging and stimulating that we get the workaholic American.

Locke1689• 17 years ago

"On top of that, American children do only about an hour’s-worth of homework a day,"

Haha what??

pyr32• 17 years ago

That average has no meaning. Are they averaging the homework loads of grades K-12? Obviously kids in higher grades will have higher workloads, while kids in kindergarten will have little to no homework.

jazzyb3• 17 years ago

Right. Between sixth and twelfth grades I averaged about 4-5 hours of homework per school night. A lot of those numbers in the article aren't reflective of my experience.

GeneralMaximus• 17 years ago

So what is the point? Force children to work harder when you could revamp the entire education system in a way that motivates them to work harder?

This article is just plain silly. Here's a summary: "South Korean/Chinese/India/Foo children work harder than American children, hence American children are doomed to a life of misery".

(I'm Indian, BTW. And no, Indian children don't work any harder than American children.)

enomar• 17 years ago

It seems like everyone would benefit if we spent our entire lives splitting time between work and school (or perhaps back and forth in cycles).

I've always found it odd that kids don't spend much time working and adults don't spend much time learning (in a formal setting).

diN0bot• 17 years ago

right idea, but the beginning of the article erroneously focuses on quantity not quality.

asorbus• 17 years ago

I transferred from a 200 school day per year charter school to a 180 school day per year public high school, and I found that I learned a lot more at the public school, so I have first hand experience with the differences. Also, the charter school's days were about an hour longer than the public school's. I found there were no advantages to going to the charter school for longer days and longer school years.

It's hard to stay alert as a young kid during such a long school day, with class times being so long. When I transferred to public school, I met a lot of very intelligent people my age, and I was surprised to see that. For the first year after transferring, I felt that I was too smart to be there, since I had just transferred from a charter school. It turned out that I had met people who were much smarter than me and just as insightful.

Sure American kids don't do so well on international tests, but maybe that's because they're not taught to take tests, they're taught to learn and apply what they learn. I don't know about you, but I'd rather my kids grow up knowing how to learn new things and broaden their horizons, rather than grow up knowing how to write answers down on a piece of paper.

The Underworked American Child

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