Highschool felt at best a dungeon, and at worst a torture chamber. That was primarily due to my mindset. I didn't really know how the world worked, and it seemed to me like the system had been designed for the purpose of dragging me down to the level of the brutes around me. But unfortunately the experience killed my interest in wanting to strive to attend a good (or any) university, which I now deeply regret. Not due to loss of credentials, but rather due to missing out on the social experience of uni.

If it were explained to me that the reason I was in school was because an industrialized society needs a place to put children for 8 hours each day so their parents can work, it would've made so much more sense than trying to believe the lie that we were there to learn. It felt so obvious that we weren't there to learn anything substantial. By learning to program video games I'd gotten a taste of the amount of effort real learning took, and memorizing historical dates or doing trivial math problems definitely wasn't any effort. So maybe one solution to "How do we cultivate the desire to learn?" is to relax on the idea that school is even supposed to be a place for kids to learn.

Maybe it's just the people who comment on these types of articles are the kinds of people who also didn't like school, but I personally wouldn't change my high school or college experiences for the world.

But I did attend elementary school in Japan (and had cousins who went to high school there at the same time I was) and while they may have achieved a proficiency higher than most americans, the freedom granted to me at my high school allowed me to do even better - and I was given a decidedly non-standard education emphasizing critical thinking and questioning of authority.

This served me exceptionally well in college, and on through grad school and postdoctoral studies. Perhaps this is a bit of an overgeneralization, but almost all of the East Asian postdocs that I encountered did not, outwardly, exhibit as critical a stance towards data and evidence as did american postdocs - with the generalizeable exception of the East Asian postdocs who did their grad school in the States.

One additional aspect is that, while many classes were too easy/slow-paced for me, the fact that they weren't for everyone else made that a useful experience too. For one it was interesting to understand what people found easy or hard to get. For another I would often help other students with their homework, which was good practice in how to explain subjects understandably, basically in how to do tutoring.

Every teacher had figured out a system that they wouldn't deviate from. Spend the first two weeks of each class studying how the teacher behaves and befriending the students, and you're set for the rest of the year. From staging an "essayist uprising" in AP Literature complete with founding documents that closely mirrored the Communist Manifesto, to forcing use of sexual innuendo in every sentence in a class with a particularly senile teacher, to starting a "barefoot" trend (which was strictly against the rules but I hate shoes) high school was a huge game and a joke.

I feel I learned a lot from it, but almost never from the actual material. The pace was so mind-numbingly slow that I could spend my days plotting and sneaking out windows, while learning what really worked to influence people. Come test-time I could read the book for 15 minutes the day before class and do fine, or even just notice the patterns in the teachers' awful test writing and follow it throughout. High School, at least academically, was a complete joke.

A huge amount of education "policy" in the US is driven by the goal of closing the "achievement gap" between blacks and whites (for educational purposes, Asians are honorary whites).

Since when you improve instruction, high performers tend to benefit as much or more than low performers, gap closing is usually accomplished by enforcing a low ceiling for achievement generally.

The school system as we know it is a mass education "factory" system. There is and always will be cracks for students to fall through. Furthermore, it is not clear that the system ever served top students very well -- I emphasize issues around the "ceiling" is not actually new.

How to deal with those cracks in the system is a complex topic. But that hardly matters for purposes of this discussion because...

The school system is under intense pressure to produce results in the form of standardized test scores. What are they supposed to do? They focus on inching up the scores of those below the median, of course.

That has exactly nothing to do with "enforcing a low ceiling". The school system simply no longer cares about the brightest students, while the taxpaying voters are clamoring for those average test scores to climb. Individual teachers would love to care, but they are generally not allowed to until those scores go up first.

For much of school I wasn't very engaged in formal learning. I didn't hate it, but it didn't hold my attention, and the drudgery was boring. I would often not do homework and slack off on projects. As a consequence of this when I entered high school I was put on the advanced track on math and nothing else. To the everlasting credit of my adolescent self I realized this was a problem and I set about fixing it. I tested into the advanced English track for my sophomore year and I figured out how to get onto the advanced science track as well. I ended up graduating near the top of my class and I earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics after only 2 years of college.

Nevertheless, as much learning as I accomplished through school I achieved about the same level on my own. I read about what interested me. I read magazines (like Scientific American back when they were good) and even textbooks for fun. I was supposed to have taken a biology class in high-school prior to entering AP biology but I never could fit it into my schedule, so I didn't. And despite that I was still at the top of that class, often scoring the highest on tests. Because so much of that material was stuff I had learned on my own.

But I got lucky. If I had attended a different high school with different teachers or if I hadn't had the insight to realize that it was important to invest in my education or if my personality had been slightly different things would have turned out much different. I might have even dropped out. And I can't help but wonder how many other smart people have been ill served by the school system because they weren't so lucky.

Edit: as an aside, as I grow older I've become more and more disillusioned with formal education. I see the skills that the system instills in students and in many cases I'm of the opinion that those skills would be better not to have (the worst variety of competitiveness, concentration on minutiae and policy) while at the same time doing a poor job of instilling actual knowledge, problem solving skills, and so on.

It may be due to availability bias that I would know more American mavericks more than Asian mavericks. However, in the manga and anime that I watch, I do not know of any of the maverick learner archetype. It seems to be a trope that the smartest student usually have the highest score.

I was fortunate to attend an over-achiever public hs with half a dozen perfect SATs and full rides to Ha'var-d. The prevailing view was "legally-mandated prison, CWOT." The best thing was finding ways to take classes that allowed more time off campus and coding time in the computer lab (eg total anarchy.) I'd never have wrote a friendly TSR virus that included hotkeys for a calculator and an ASCII table if it was "EZ-bake oven" rote instruction. Also, private school (Challenger) for K-3 probably did some good.

And she probably would. If you're not on the "normal" track, it is hard to make relationships in the American culture today. Kids don't seem to meet and play in the yard like they used to.

So we're mulling this problem over. If anyone has found some solutions, I'd love to hear them.

You might be able to find something similar in your geographic area, hopefully?

Summary: There were 60+ kids and only two teachers. The kids were allowed to do whatever they wanted all day. About the only thing I learned is how to forge the signature of my assistant teacher. And some kid hit me with a metal shovel and wasn't given more than a stern talking to about why hitting people with shovels is a bad thing.

I may have just gotten unlucky in attending a particularly bad Montessori school, however.

Of course the writing is quite crude, but motor control improves with age not with schooling.

The main thing in common I could discern so far is that the parents encourage curiosity and use those skills themselves.

There are kids who don't know reading/writing before school? o_0. I thought it's what parents are for.

There are children who don't know what books are, let alone how to read.

The UK (which starts school at a very young age) has several things in place to help. There's the charity BookTrust which gives books to parents. Early Years teaching (pre school) has lots of stuff around books and reading. There are charities and schemes aimed at improving parent literacy so that can be passed onto children; and at increasing the number of men reading to their children.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booktrust

The only part of school I enjoyed was math. I absolutely loved learning and doing math. That I could do a problem with lots of complicated steps, many of which seemed almost creative, and arrive at a common answer, was like logical magic. And it complimented my budding programming hobby very well.

I started trying to program games almost as soon as I had a computer, when I was still very young. I remember it took a long time to understand for loops at first. Then it took a long time to figure out how to poll keyboard input the right way. Then it took a while to learn the ins and outs of BLTing, and so on.

I left college after only one semester. I still thought the programming thing would probably only be a hobby. Still, I made a game, and tried to sell it. But it only sold 500 copies, so I was discouraged. My adulthood got off to a very rocky start, not knowing what to do. I took me 2 years to realize that I could actually get a programming job with what I already knew. At first, I wouldn't have believed it was possible, not without college. But through a couple of lucky breaks, it happened, and I found myself a full-fledged software developer at a real software company at 21, with no formal education. 15 years later, I find myself in the middle of a pretty interesting, varied programming career.

Looking back, the only parts of school that served me were math, and english. I could have just studied those two during high school, I think, and come out just as well. Everything else was self study.

I would approach this book very, very sceptically.

You might find it interesting to read and comment on the actual article then. It dates the beginning of the recent reform of Poland's education system to 1997, just one year before you graduated, so it may be that a lot has changed since your time.

I think that thinking is not something that can be taught, more that it's something that can be encouraged to be learned. In fact, I think overbearing instruction can encourage kids that they don't need to think for themselves. They will be provided the answer, and if they come to a different conclusion, the person with more authority is right.

I remember having a math test graded incorrectly. I knew I was right, I challenged the teacher. I was told that it was still wrong, but the teacher couldn't explain why, the teacher didn't really understand what they were teaching. I brought it home to my parents who also agreed that I was right, but the test wasn't worth enough to get into a fight over.

That experience was one that, if it were repeated, would have hurt my willingness to think critically.

Then I went to college. Most of the people praised their high schools. I really felt that my school must have been at the bottom of the heap. As soon as the first set of grades started coming out, I realized how much better prepared I was than everyone else. The people pushed through "Rah Rah, aren't we great!" factories lacked critical thinking. But their schools did have great basketball teams and marching bands.

When someone pitches how awesome their educational was, I wonder where their critical thinking is.

[Note -- those were two different people in two different conversations.]

E.D. Hirsch [1] has written a lot about needing to know content in order to properly reason. Some of this goes by classical education, elsewhere it's cultural literacy [2].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._D._Hirsch,_Jr.

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_literacy

Poland has been through a lot of BS. There was constant government propaganda for generations and you never knew who you could trust, so people learned to use their brains to keep themselves safe. Until communism fell, it was a poor country with shortages of pretty much everything, so people had to learn to fix and tinker with things, because they couldn't go out to buy new ones. Kids played differently than they do in the US, with little in the way of toys and lots of imagination and in mixed age groups.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that the differences are cultural, and maybe that hardship breeds more critical thought than plenty. I'm not advocating hardship by any means, but I think it's very important to teach kids to play creatively and hopefully, this will carry on through school. It's disingenuous to say that school reform and funding are responsible for critical thought.

For example, when I was at school 20 years ago, we had to memorise formulas for common thing ( speed = distance over time, and similar). Apparently the kids are given the formulas in exams now. There doesn't appear to be such a thing as a "fail" these days, just a "foundation level pass".

As such, I can see where the UK is failing, and see positive things mentioned about Poland in the article.

I don't see a problem with that. Memorizing formula is as useful as memorizing anything else, it's not very useful and not a measure of knowledge. Knowing how to use the formula, how to manipulate them, are what they are supposed to be being taught.

The best is to give the students a cheat sheet with a lot formulas, but not a reminder in each exercise of which formula is useful in that exercise. In that case they have to think about which one to use.

We don't want people to learn formulae. We don't particularly need people to do mental arithmetic. We want people to understand problem solving and gathering information and relationships between different bits of the formula.

See also the viral video "meaning of MPH" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qhm7-LEBznk)

There's some unpleasant "HURR DURR GURLS ARE STOOPID" in some videos (and don't for the love of god read the comments) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=br0OsGu9B2o)

This is the way I've seen it done, the same way you give chemistry students a periodic table.

There is (imho) nothing of value in memorizing simple formulas, and everything in the value of knowing how and when to apply those formulas, or where to Google for them.

In my highschool physics exam, about 2/3rds was of questions based on memorised formulae. For example, the bouncing ball problem, with a series of questions to tease out our application of calculus, memorisation of compression rules and so on.

Then comes the final question. I remember it well because at first, I did not know which formula to apply. Water wells into a pool at rate X per hour, falls over a waterfall into a second pool below, which drains at rate Y per hour. When it falls over the edge of the waterfall, the water is at temperature A; at the start of the problem the temperature in the bottom pool is C.

After an hour, what will the temperature in the second pool be?

To solve this problem you actually need to consider the thermic effect of water falling. You need to build a single equation to accounts for acceleration due to gravity and the beginning temperatures of each pool. Then you need some calculus to transform it into an equation that will spit out the final numerical answer.

The only reason I was able to attempt and solve this problem was because I had memorised the equations. There simply would not have been enough time to try to reverse-engineer a bunch of anonymous letters in-flight.

Similarly, when I studied law, all exams were open-book. This is because, as a law professor told me, "it lets us ask harder questions". There's simply no way to synthesise thousands of pages of material in an exam setting. Either you learnt it beforehand, including a whole bunch of flat out memorisation of details of cases, or you didn't. Having your casebooks for reference is useful, but only to check a detail or reuse a quote.

I suspect you got this question wrong.

I am currently teaching a bunch of very bright graduate students from a number of countries. On the most recent midterm, students from countries that force people to learn to compute and learn some formulas finished in an hour, while US students and some others took two. US students in particular were caught up on figuring out the solution to x+y+z=1, x=y+z, y=4z. Just impossible.

US students in my class are wasting time on mechanical calculations rather than understanding the meanings of the theorems they illustrate, because they have weak computational skills. I can't write problems that are computationally easy enough. They are unable to apply their much-vaunted "creativity" and "critical thinking" because even once they Google a formula they can't carry out meaningful work with it.

I can Google how to use a hammer and a table saw, but I'll produce a crappier table than the person who has so much practice she can use them without thinking. That person can think about the final design while I think about not hitting my thumb or slicing off a digit. The argument about knowing how and when to apply formulas misses the fact that practice in applying those formulas is essential to competence.

Instead of threading my point, I have quoted you and hived it off as a separate reply.

I'd say that you have to look at particular education levels and types of studies to get a good understanding on what's good and bad in PL education system.

The conclusions I'd draw (and mind you, this is knowledge from ~15-20 years ago, and it is my knowledge and my opinions):

* Polish high school students indeed know more and are better at problem solving than most US high school students, * that said, there are high schools (public!) in the US that offer university-level courses and are excellent, * and university-level education seems to be much better in the US, * the US approach of "if the answer has one too many significant digit, it is wrong and you get zero points" is virtually unknown in Poland and comes as a shock to Polish students, who are often taught that "it is the approach that counts". I find the US approach much more realistic: it doesn't matter how you "approached" the design of a bridge, if the bridge collapsed. * French schools are quite similar to Polish ones, but: * mathematics taught at French technical universities (the best ones) is WAY WAY WAY above what a Polish high-school graduate would expect,

My main point is that it is very difficult to compare educational systems and draw meaningful conclusions. Dealing with society-wide aggregates doesn't tell you much about the outliers: best schools, best students, specific curriculums, or specific sciences.

My secondary point is that based on my experience I wouldn't say the Polish system is better than any other. And I don't see any sweeping changes that would improve the situation in recent years (the reshuffling of schools and age groups doesn't do much in my opinion).

I agree that our higher education is doing something right. The problem is what comes before that. In France, to have an engineering degree (equivalent of a MSc) from a top school, you go through:

- High school, where the quality of education and the technical level is very low IMO.

- CPGE. This is a French specificity, two years dedicated to preparing competitive exams. Basically, you only study maths and physics in the abstract there. This is the reason why our math level is so high compared to other countries. But the math we study is not the most useful: lots, lots of analysis, a decent amount of algebra, almost no statistics and nothing discovered since the end of the XIXth century (exit Turing, exit Gödel...).

- Only after that do you study at a "Grande École" for three years... But you have to catch up things like project management and so on so real technical education is limited.

In the end, we produce generalists that are often good at everything but very good at nothing. Those of use who want to understand a domain in depth often go study abroad.

This is what I did, I went to the UK to study distributed computing. I had students from all over the world in my class and I was impressed by those from Poland. I don't know how you do it, they may not have not know the most on arrival but they were certainly learning the fastest (along with student from Czech Republic).

I'm curious how you compare students in different educational systems. Like what is "high school" and "university" in Poland. I ask, because every time I read something about the American education system I have quite some trouble assessing the statements because of the foreign categorizations.

For example "school" in Germany comprises the first 12 or 13 years of education, with the first change of school happening after 4 or 6 years in primary school (with school starting at the age of 6). The following 13th till 18th year of education is held at a "university" where you earn a Bachelor and a Master degree. A PHD would be 3 to 5 further years in university.

I've pieced together that the American Bachelor seems to be more broad than the German one. My Bachelor degree was in Mathematics and it did not contain some mandatory stuff in humanities for example. Yet it seems we learned that stuff in the first 12 (/13) years already and thus the German Bachelor starts later than the American one? But that would also mean that German students would spend more time overall in education (the current average (of people with higher education) might be about 18 years) and I also find that implausible.

Basically I'm asking: Does someone know of a good comparative introduction to the American education system?

My problem with this all-or-nothing approach to grading, you aren't designing a bridge in a 2 hour exam with a graphing calculator and pencil and 3 sheets of scratch paper. These aren't representative of real world situations, engineering rarely operates under that sort of time crunch. Apollo 13 is an exception, but by that point it isn't novices but experts doing the work, experts who'd studied the physics and math for years, if not decades. This approach is used to weed out students from programs that admit too many to their freshman classes. They should reduce their class size if this is so important. Many upper-level undergraduate courses, and a lot of graduate courses, don't even expect the sort of time-crunched, mental feats expected from freshman level calculus and physics students.

1) it's verifiable

2) it's probably more about having good average than having some students be super-smart

3) it says more about PISA than Poland

The article believes making more children have more shit on their head is the way to go...

No, seriously, that is not "learning to think" that is learning formulas and other random shit that you will never use on your life with few exceptions.

Learning to think is when you allow kids to learn on their own, what they are curious about, when curiosity drives learning, THEN people learn to think, because they have to.

When you just hammer random facts on someone head, you just fill that someone head with random facts... And the only need for that, is to hammer those random facts on someone else head.

"How to think" shouldn't interfere with thinking for themselves.

[0] http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2013/09/ec...

In the US, schools seem to be succumming to two very serious trends. The first, and most basic, is in the school attempting to replace rather than support the family as the basic unit of education. You can't do this though. Education begins and ends at home, and what schools offer is largely a supplement for the home.

This leads directly to the second problem which is the worship of innovation. I get told by friends in the US about how math classes are teaching Fibonacci parlor tricks for multiplication (like lattice multiplication, which I know enough math to understand but only because I know a lot more math than the average parent). This joins the high tech toys in the idea that gadgets and trinkets can teach our youth but parents cannot. The innovation focus further devalues the home as the center of learning, and it leads to a highly institutional, almost assembly-line view of learning.

In the end, I don't see how American higher education can survive another generation without some major adjustments to our public school system (and probably society as a whole, to be honest).

This isn't to say that education outside of the home has no place. It's just that it is something to be delegated, and shared.

However, I would posit that what happens often (at least in American society) in terms of attitude... is parents drop their kids off at the school's doorstep and assume that it is the schools's responsibility to educate them, and give them character training.

In my opinion, this is nothing less than an abdication of your responsibility as parents.

>Actually compared to the likely quality in the UK we probably have nothing to worry about!

Funnily enough the most elite schools try to follow the UK curriculum but there is not a consensus that this is the best education around.

I think it is the opposite. I pay the school to teach my kid. I don't expect to have them come home and require me to finish the job. Can you imagine if you went to a restaurant and they said, we prepared the food, but you must cook it.

I work every day with my child on her homework, but it is not to teach her what she learned at school, it is to supplement her teaching with things you won't learn in the classroom.

The question is whether learning is something that is to be compartmentalized off into school work, or whether it is something we weave into every aspect of life. If the former, one will never become very smart or very skilled. If the latter, then all school offers is an opportunity to learn, something that kids take advantage of based on habits acquired at home.

There is more to education than book learning (ABCs and 123s). You are supplementing her book learning while the school is supplementing her life skills learning.

Also- Papa Murphy's pizza. They make the pizza, but you take it home and cook it. Tastes better than delivery.

What if they're teaching your kid something that is just flat out inaccurate? How do you know?

My point is that perhaps you're placing complete faith in someone else, with little/no accountability from you or your spouse to make sure that the education your children are getting is both quality and accurate.

In my opinion, even though you have delegated the role of education to the school system... final responsibility for the outcome still rests with us (the parents).

I thought the whole world is about assembly-line learning rather than self initiated learning.

Polish educational system (especially nation wide maturity exams after high school and college education) are in my opinion decreasing. The maturity exam is getting easier and easier each year to allow more people just to pass. Sure, life is going to verify that somehow, but it also diminish value of this exam.

In my opinion people that are successful in polish school are only those who decide to not follow teaching process given at school but they work very hard on they own, in my opinion the main problem that is present here (and probably worldwide) is students assessment process, every student is taken to the lowest common denominator when it comes giving grades. People that (in scope of the class room) are doing fine, let's say B grade students think they are doing just fine and there are only few things to improve, similarly A students - they generally tends to think they have already reached the peak, when there is still unbelievable much things to learn.

Every major publication runs a piece just like this every few years. The exotic countries and methods always differ somewhat, but the formula is always the same. It's the pseudo-intellectual version of the filler/cover-baitait articles on new ways to become heart healthy, or inventions that will change the world, usually done well in advance and saved for slow news-weeks.

Not that the subject matter isn't of value, but it's always oversimplified, and oversold.

Interesting as these subjects are, they don't give anyone an easy start on a job market as tough as it is in Poland.

And the reality is that 1.5-3 milions (estimations vary) have left for Western Europe (since Poland entered EU in 2004) and Tescos in London can boast having the best educated staff, consisting mostly of graduates.

Even those who stay in Poland often see studying as a way to delay the moment of entering the job market, and this is hardly a surprise, given that this moment is typically unpleasant. By striving for an MA, they get a compelling alibi to be subsidized by their parents for 5 more years.

Many wouldn't educate themselves further if they had a chance of getting a decent job allowing them to move out, pay their bills and live without counting every penny.

I have a feeling that although you most likely didn't go to an elite ground school or an elite high school you probably know a second and maybe a third foreign language as well, in high school you could do what Americans would call college level math.

How many Americans know the largest city in Poland? Can they name just 5 European political leaders from the past 100 years?

Don't underestimate the level of average Northern European education. We don't have elite schools, but our basic schools are quite alright.

Or does anyone remember that fellow? :) http://youtu.be/SmLwnSXNpFU

Sure that's just a random bloke (what about the public though? What are the odds?), but one could expect members of the parliament to be fairly knowledgeable, at least in the field of politics and current events. Italy: http://www.video.mediaset.it/video/iene/puntata/3673/i-parla... - the journalist asked them some not that tricky questions out of the blue.

They didn't know who Mandela was (or thought he was a president of Brazil), they didn't know what Guantanamo was (and ultimately made a guess it was located in Afganistan). Greenhouse effect? No clue. Darfur? (War in Darfur was the headlines back then). They're stumped. People who do politics for living.

Americans at least seem fond of accusing themselves of ignorance and are quick to acknowledge it, while Europeans, well, kind of do the same thing - in the sense that they eagerly stereotypize Americans as the ignorant ones :)

I'm not American (I'm Polish), but I'm tired of this cliche - whenever I hear someone babbling on about these ignorant Americans, it grinds my gears, not out of love for Americans in particular, just in the same way as all myths, urban legends etc. passed on as facts.

I've spent two summers in a row in US, WA area, and I've definitely noticed that US college students are very intelligent and knowledgeable about many things.

I've also spend enough time in Poland noticing many people that are quite opposite of that.

So for summary, labeling people in this way doesn't work very well.

I am neither Polish, nor American, but I have lived in Northern, Southern and Eastern Europe and in the US and the average American knows much less about Europe than vice versa.

A more balanced question than the one you suggested would be: does an average European know more about Europe than an average American about the US? :) That's closer competition here.

I lived in England for nearly 6 years and I wasn't exactly impressed by how much they know about continental Europe - let alone these parts of Europe that were on the other side of Iron Curtain.

And speaking of Americans, I'm sure that an average - say - Brazilian doesn't really have much of a clue about Europe either, despite Brazil's historical and cultural ties to Europe. Yet noone is talking about typical Brazilian ignorance and we'd forgive this without batting an eye. Why?

Because we usually know just as little about Brazil, so we are prompt to excuse them :) Not so in case of Americans (US citizens). It's the lack of symmetry that bugs people and provokes hostile reactions.

If on top of that Poles are better educated, that's great. Plus Europe needs jobs. But I'm sure the primary concern is the bottom line. BAMA could staff the factories in Oklahoma if they could get away with paying the workers $4/hr.

Perhaps those educated enough to think critically put that skill to work before accepting a factory job making mass produced biscuits. My critical thinking skills lead me to guess that is not the most fulfilling, high paying, or upwardly mobile job even for Oklahoma.

Bama Pie is not a high-end, boutique bakery. It's a low-cost, mass production operation. Their biggest customer? McDonalds. Showcasing their move as an indictment on the US education system seems misguided, as it's primarily a case of cost-cutting outsourcing.

They might sit there, thinking critically, and realise that skill-shortage is economic new-speak for "wage-shortage". Everyone wants a ferrari, no one wants to pay for it. This doesn't mean there is a ferrari-shortage. Similarly, every big business and corporation wants cheap labour, preferably labour that will take the cost of any necessary skills and training on itself, or have it paid for by government. When it cannot get it, the stock standard propaganda cry is "skill shortage", often even when unemployment levels amongst...say...university graduates... remains high.

Of course, despite this "shortage" they will not raise wages. They will not pay for training to up-skill people...because its simply spin.

Then the workers on the line might think critically and realise that the reason the jobs were outsourced had to do with simple wage levels and the relative supply of cheap unskilled labour in other countries, and nothing to do with education, skills, or training at all. They'd realise that the company was just repeating the usual propoganda, and probably be pretty pissed off.

I'm sure that's what companies REALLY want.

though actually probably not the best analogy Ferrari do limit the number of cars they make and to buy one of the new hot ones you often have to be an existing customer.

What I am saying is wrong is believing in oft-repeated corporate propoganda as somehow being representative of the true statements of what motivates their decisions when said companies and societies actively work against any desire for a highly skilled or critical thinking workforce/population...

This was the solution? Seriously? Going through the hassle of opening up a factory on the other side of the planet across language and legal barriers all because the local population in Oklahoma didn't come shrink-wrapped precisely as ordered? Seems to me that a far more simple solution would be to train your work force, rather than externalize that responsibility. If the problems are really so systemic as they are claimed, then demonstrate some civic responsibility and see to it that your community gets its act together.

People have a wide range of different responsibilities (self, family, local community, humankind etc). I don't see why Polish people are morally any less deserving of jobs than Oklahomans. This company clearly thinks the Polish are more capable of doing the job. Who are we to say otherwise?

(Yes, this kind of nationalism bothers me no end.)

But I have a feeling this is less about having a basic skillset and more about that few Americans wanted to spend their time doing that kind of work for what they were willing to pay.

High school in Poland used to be a preparation for further education at university. It ends with a nation-wide exam called matura. The reform greatly reduced the number of other types of schools. It has two effects. First, it's much harder to find a skilled worker because there are much less workers trained. Second, the general level of education at high schools dropped significantly. It had to drop because otherwise many of the new pupils wouldn't pass the matura. Notions of a logarithm, exponential, prime decomposition has become foreign to pupils. No one has heard about a derivative or an integral for more than a decade.

Of course all the above is a generalisation. There are some great schools with teachers who really want to teach their subjects instead of just formally completing stages of the government-mandated education program. Unfortunately they are in minority. I'm really concerned about quality of education that my children will get in this country. Home schooling is an option though an expensive one.

"Several questions like this one asked for my opinion, followed by rows of blank lines for writing my answer; that was odd. Since when did a standardized test care about anyone's opinion?

"Other questions reminded me of problems I'd encountered as an adult--having to decipher the fine print of a health-care policy before choosing it, or comparing the fees of checking accounts offered by competing banks. It seemed more like a test of life skills than school skills.

"All the math formulas were provided, thank God, including the value of pi. But I noticed that I had to really think about my answers. When I tried to speed through a math section, I had to go back and erase several answers."

"PISA demanded fluency in problem solving and the ability to communicate; in other words, the basic skills I needed to do my job and take care of my family in a world choked with information and subject to sudden economic change. What did it mean for a country if most of its teenagers did not do well on this test? Not all of our kids had to be engineers and lawyers, but didn't all of them need to know how to think?

"I still didn't believe that PISA measured everything, but I was now convinced that it measured critical thinking."

In fact, if you want children to be able to think, you shouldn't "teach them to think". You should teach deep knowledge and skills in a particular subject matter context:

"Maths classes tend to be more sophisticated, with lessons that show the often fascinating ways that geometry, trigonometry and calculus work together in the real world. Students forego calculators, having learned how to manipulate numbers in their heads."

High expectations can also be effective:

"Yet his most effective change was also his wooliest: he expected the best work from all of his pupils."

See http://www.aft.org/pdfs/americaneducator/summer2007/Crit_Thi...

The only reality-based test mentioned in this review was whether Okies could get a "basic" job in a factory, and an assertion that this would require critical thinking skills (with the implication that such skills would be of the sort taught at school).

However, I think Ripley may give more in her book. An NYT review suggests she discusses how American school-leavers "lack the knowledge and skill to compete in the global economy". It's all a bit vague, I admit.

"Teaching children to think" is a much-used phrase. It could mean a great many things.

The alternate hypothesis - that the Polish education system is much more effective at producing drones who are efficient and motivated when performing menial tasks for low pay - has much to recommend it.

Take for example literacy. There are Finnish/Swedish parochial records/church examination registries dating back to 17th century down to a level of individual families. This is important due to Charles XI's Swedish Church Law of 1686 stating that everyone had to be able to read bible. So you can follow how that emergent Lutheran essence actually turned into literacy. From an individual perspective it was necessary to learn because you weren't allowed to take holy communion, be confirmed and later wed without reading ability. By 1750 some parishes started to have 90% reading ability. What is surprising is the writing ability. It achieved same levels only around 1900 (1920 in Finland). So that is clearly connected to industrial reform rather than spirit of protestantism. At least my initial assumption that reading/writing go hand in hand was proven wrong. In light of this long history of literacy in Nordic countries I tend to value the South Korean jump in literacy from previous generation more highly, even if it was achieved through “culture of educational masochism”.

Book about this: Understanding Literacy in Its Historical Contexts: Socio-cultural History and the Legacy of Egil Johansson.

Take a look at pg. 47 at Google Books and see how incredibly detailed those church examination registries in 1688-91 could be (pg. 56 has a nice graph differentiating the development of reading and writing ability): http://books.google.fi/books?id=WBLOVq4ocLEC&printsec=frontc...

I'm Finnish and went to a French-speaking school. I didn't understand any French going in, but at the age of 6, you pick it up quickly as long as it's a friendly environment. Later during the standard 12-year education, I had English as a third language, then Swedish (it's obligatory in Finland) and also German.

All the other stuff taught in school is such that a reasonably smart kid can learn it on her own as needed. But foreign languages are not like that. Thanks to computer games, I was somewhat fluent in reading English even before the classes started in school, but I couldn't speak a word -- you just don't learn pronounciation and conversation from games and TV shows, you need to have a real teacher.

If the Polish education system taught me anything, it is that free thinking is a bad thing,and you are punished for it on every step of your education.

> He decided to keep all Polish children in the same schools until they were 16, delaying the moment when some would have entered vocational tracks.

This is misleading. First of all, education is obligatory until one is 18 years old in Poland. There is no such thing as dropping out of school before that age. The previous educational system was two-tier, with primary school lasting until 15 years old, and high school lasting the remainder 4 years (5 years for vocational high school, AFAIR). There were no electives in primary school, so the first real sorting of students based on ability was taking place at entrance exams to high schools (which had no obligation to accept a student based on their geographical location). What the reform implemented is it created a third tier in between primary (shortened by 2 years) and high schools (shortened by 1 year), the gymnasium. Gymnasiums do not have the sorting ability of high schools. With the end result being that what high schools were previously struggling to teach in 4 years now they have to condense into 3 years. So a lot of things are left out now. Plus the students they get at entry are also of lower quality -- I remember browsing through the first set of chemistry textbooks for gymnasium and being shocked that what the "old" system primary school students had to cover in two years was supposed to be covered in a lesser form in 3 years of gymnasium. So yes, the reform postponed the division of students into university/vocational tracks by one year, but at the cost of overall quality of education.

I was about to point out your mistake, but decided to actually check that fact, and you're absolutely right.

> There is no such thing as dropping out of school before that age.

I must have slipped through the government's fingers. I'm not sure if it's a bad or a good thing.

http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html

In reality this eroded university degrees by one level down. Also unemployment rate among university graduates is rising. On other side unemployment rate among younger people is lower, since most of them are studying until 25.

There is shortage of qualified workers such as plumbers, electricians and welders. Those professions can easily make more money than software developers.

The result is graduates are far, far less well educated than their predecessors but on paper (including, I would presume, PISA) a much larger proportion of the population is "highly educated", making the government look good.

To give an example of lowered standards everyone here can probably relate to: up until about five years ago, students at the school for applied information science where I work were required to learn (a bit of) assembly so they understood how computers work at the CPU level. This requirement has now been scrapped, resulting in applied information science graduates who don't know the first thing about how computers actually work. On paper, however, our school looks very good, because, after all, it is producing a larger number of "knowledge workers" than before.

* this goes for schools for higher vocational training as well

This sentence is exemplary of most, if not all, of the discussion about education reform. Another cue are the explicit goals of the Common Core standards, expressly designed to further economic competitiveness of America's youth.

But what about our children's ability to make informed decisions using qualified evidence?

This is different from so-called 'critical thinking', which is so vaguely defined whenever it comes up, or 'creativity', which lacks a rigorous method to appreciate its application.

These informed decisions I'm talking about not only affect our youth's ability to make decisions about their own lives (because no matter your education system, practical experience is other than doing well in school), but also their ability to make decisions about the state we live in collectively. There's little out there teaching people how to make informed decisions about areas they have no expertise in, and yet, must make a decision.

Politicians are voted in for dubious populism rather than the sensibility of their policy programme. Most responses to social issues continue to spiral around ideology and prejudice. America needs a lot more than just an effective STEM education regime.

* Real-world examples are not favoured. I'd go as far to say they are unpopular. There is an over emphasis on theory and rote learning, without providing context. This may be a result of "stove piping" mathematics to be "pure math only", rather than having "real-world applications".

* Children are shoe-horned and given little opportunity to pace themselves and their learning. The theory may be that kids that progress quickly may become bored.

* Technology is praised/shunned in the wrong ways. Tablets are generally praised, and in my view, offer limited opportunity and creativity. PCs are shunned, or treated as "toys".

* Over emphasis on rewards. There seems to be a common thread that kids continually need to be bribed. Avatars/humourous or cute animations/etc. There may be a good reason for this, but I find that it actually distracts students rather than helps.

I could list other things that have concerned me, but these are the first ones that come to mind.

Edited to add comments about "rewards".

While journalists commonly make this leap, it's not necessarily an accurate one. In other words, standardized testing is not always at odds with critical thinking.

For example, South Korea, a nation with a very strong emphasis on standardized testing, consistently ranks in the world's top 5 universities, according to Pearson. Its students have strong reading and math skills, which prepare them to meet the challenges of many jobs.

We should question the myth that standardized testing always harms critical thinking. In some cases, I think, this argument is used as an excuse to justify American children's increasingly awful test scores.

We had a guy from Poland living with us in Germany for 6 months. I think it was around 2003/2004 when I was still in school. His math skills were absolutely impressive but he still had to study a lot to keep up (he was living in Germany due to some excellency initiative, so this is a slightly skewed sample). When he showed me some of their lessons it was way beyond what we had to do in school.

In 9th grade I took part in an exchange program with the UK. As they lacked exchange partners , I got matched up with a guy from 10th or 11th grade (can't remember). The school was supposedly one of the better ones. I wasn't very good in math (usually hovered around grade 3 [1 - 6 with 1 being the best grade and 4.0 the worst passing grade]) but I was pretty much the best in their class. Wasn't very impressed by them.

However, by staying on the "right" path I was able to get in advanced programs, programs for students with high IQs that taught critical thinking skills.. I graduated high school with over 30 college credit hours and had completed Physics 1, Calc 1, 2, and 3, and a hand full of other electives... all in high school.

Other students in the same exact schools I attended had equal and opposite educational experiences/success.

Not true in Finland.

>

I am coming late to this topic, and I wanted to make exactly this point that @kaitai made in a thread, in one of the many threads about memorisation vs. critical understanding.... This is the (moot) point that people seem to be missing here, which is surprising, because most of us here do seem to think highly about "code katas" or the "10,000 hour rule" or "immersion into code/algorithms" which is all about the above.

I have lived overseas and observed the effect of another school system, and indeed education reform is the issue that drew me to participate here on Hacker News,[2] so I am always interested in discussing education policy here. Based on the different country I have observed, I think the book's account is largely correct. Americans underestimate how much young people can learn. School programs in the United States, according to federal sample surveys, are so underchallenging that many school pupils, not just the "gifted" pupils, find school too easy and boring.[3] Mathematics lessons in the United States are especially notorious for emphasizing the mechanical aspects of calculation--thus expecting students to bring electronic calculators to class--and underemphasizing the thinking involved in mathematical problem-solving.[4]

Let's discuss what makes sense in education policy on the basis of facts from more than one place. It's significant that we are discussing education policy around the world here in English, as very few Americans could discuss education policy in Korean, Polish, or Finnish, the languages of the countries profiled in the new book. (I could discuss education policy in Chinese, the language I learned as a second language, but that is not the usual experience of Americans.) The new book's encouragement to do that is a good contribution to better education policy.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/25/books/review/amanda-ripley...

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

[3] http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/education/story/2012-07-...

http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/MSNBC/Sections/NEWS/z_Personal/G...

[4] http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/Resources/articles.php?pa...

As for technological over-reliance, I take that as given.

I'm surprised that you agree w/ the conclusion of the review that segregating talent into higher and lower achieving groups is bad. To me this is one of the strengths of the US system. Even if the high achieving groups are not stimulating enough for high achievers, it seems to provide some sort of positive stimulus that otherwise would be lacking in the system.

I think it's bad too, and here's why: The teachers & staff in charge of the less-performers will do less to help them. Won't push them as hard. Generally just not care(as much). I think it's better for the under-performers to see the strong-performers and understand those kids are not magically-smarter, they just work hard and it's completely possible for the under-performers to be like them if they try to mimic their study habits.

Once you divide a group between the "desired" and "non-desired" traits, there's no way the less desired people will get the same quality attention as the desired. It pretty much will turn into: Group them all together, then systematically eliminate them, condemn them or make them irrelevant. Basically, that segregation will become the solution itself:

"We need to get class-A performance up to get more funding or raise our GPA average so our Class-A looks better to those affluent parents to send their kids to! Hmm, billy & mandy aren't too bright and are lowering the average. We could help them to be better, or we could just move them to the Class-C group; thus eliminating their scores from Class-A's GPA average."

My own feeling (having also observed higher ed in Europe and Asia and other places) is that the US system works better for cultivating high achievement, but less well at making sure that lower achievers maintain a certain level of quality. This means that there is more spread over the bell curve and less in the center. Europeans, on the other hand, seem to prefer more clustering in the center of the bell curve.

This is equally true for wealth acquisition, btw, with Europeans generally preferring not to have extremes (i.e. extremely high wage earners or extremely low wage earners).

Yes, I do think there's a flaw there too. But the paid schools' issue is more complicated because of the "private" money involved. "Private" in that, students are paying directly out of pocket rather than the taxes that go into public high-schools that's less visible to people. What I'd like to see there, is that people who go to the cheaper & less "high society" schools get a chance to take maybe 1 or 2 classes a year at the Havards/Stanfords/Yales/etc just to see what it's like on those campuses. No segregation either; there should not be any way to tell which students are exclusively attending Harvard/Stanford versus the ones on the "visitor" program unless the student him/herself chooses to disclose that info.

>I think it's bad too, and here's why: The teachers & staff in charge of the less-performers will do less to help them. Won't push them as hard. Generally just not care(as much). I think it's better for the under-performers to see the strong-performers and understand those kids are not magically-smarter, they just work hard and it's completely possible for the under-performers to be like them if they try to mimic their study habits.

The error is labeling children to put them into tidy categories. Whether the 9-year-old is two years behind in math or two years ahead in math is still taking the mindset that the children are like farm animals we should measure with "calipers" and compare to others in same age segregated litter.

What is important is that their existing skills are correctly assessed, and then the appropriate lessons provided to move forward. The only reason people are graduating from HS without solid skill in arithmetic is they are being pushed forward on a relentless educational conveyor belt. The basics should have been mastered when they were 9 or 10 or 11.

>"We need to get class-A performance up to get more funding or raise our GPA average so our Class-A looks better to those affluent parents to send their kids to! Hmm, billy & mandy aren't too bright and are lowering the average. We could help them to be better, or we could just move them to the Class-C group; thus eliminating their scores from Class-A's GPA average."

In the real world, the opposite is more likely to be true. Why a student is a high achiever is, from the school's point of view, largely a mystery -- 99% likely it has everything to do with the parents and very little to do with the school itself. The school is capable of shoving many, many students through a standard curriculum. That suggests shooting for near the median and ignoring both the low and high outliers.

The thing about American classroom is that overall classroom interaction is more decentralized than the Chinese's. In China (specifically HK), you sit in the same classroom with 30-40 people for many years. For example, I can sit with 80% of the people for 6 years during my elementary school (in China, elementary school is 6 years, age 6 to age 12). So you build a strong friendship with a lot of people. You work like a team and solve things like a team for many years. Usually with team effort and strong friendship, students are more likely to produce something interesting - everyone can be honest to each other. You are not shy to tell others your opinion.

This is quite true for school up to junior high in America as one spends every day with students in their homeroom. When you enter HS, you usually don't have that kind of classroom model anymore. You usually see different people in different classes; it's like a college experience to me. For a school with 3000 students, 20/30 people will not appear in my next class.

Now you can still do teamwork, except, team work is with different group of people each time. This has an advantage though: you hear more different opinions. Except people can be shy and skeptical so it's harder to work with.

To me, education is not about score. Sure Russian and Chinese are scoring 98% and Americans are scoring 50%. So what? I don't go to MIT and people around me are genius in their own way. I can't make a good joke and people I know can. Every one has their own strength and own creativity. Teaching children how to think is like making everyone to do the same thing: get 100 on your next math competition.

That's stupid. If you make fewer exams and more on spreading knowledge, let students have more time to rest and play, eventually students will happier and will have more time to think.

When you put emphasis on testing knowledge, you stress students out. I am not saying you don't stress them from time to time - you know, because stress can produce new ideas (think agile and get shit done), but we need to put less on scores. This is why group activity is important. Students in group competitions like sports and robotics (FIRST) are happier. This is why we should go back to HS and help students to organize clubs and events. Or mentor people to do things.

Eventually, kids will figure out. Each of us can come up with some crazy ideas for the next biggest startup. It is just a matter of time.

Inventions don't come in a day. It takes idea, time, dedication, group effort and knowledge.

A documentary I saw about the human brain gave an explanation for this: the brain always looks for the easiest solution because it wants to preserver as much energy as possible (it has already enough to do in the modern world). It is just natural that energy follows the path of the least resistance.

And that is the reason we don't have Plato's State :)

Half of the world is just struggling to get by: job, food / water, security, etc.

Most of the other half doesn't need much thinking either; just try follow a generic life script: go to school, get a job, get married, have kids, die.

Tell me who is gonna call out governments on the stupid shit they do? The stupid? No, they are too busy drooling. It's the thinkers. They are always troublesome. The less of them, the better /devil advocate.