Comment by froh

Comment by froh 4 days ago

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I find looking beyond the rim of your own plate such an inspiring thing when it comes to schooling.

Germany for example prohibits home schooling. don't breed detached extremists. however Germany thinks binning kids into handcrafts, simple office jobs and academia at age nine (!) is a brilliant idea o-O. but then on the upside again, you will go to school for at least 13 years if you get _any_ kind of qualified professional education.

China has one (1) math text book for 1.4bn people.

France has competitive cognitive Tests (Concours) to enter highest education.

maybe a problem is that everybody went to school so everyone thinks they are experts. it's hard to evolve schooling. like steering a super tanker. slooow. too slow for four year election cycles.

synecdoche 4 days ago

”don't breed detached extremists”

This doesn’t follow. In addition, there are plenty who fit that description who did go to a state school.

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  • froh 4 days ago

    well, the German constitutional court thinks it does follow, indeed, and they are much smarter than I am in their argument:

    https://www.bundesverfassungsgericht.de/entscheidungen/rk200...

    In a nutshell, only schooling forces you to confront other beliefs in a way preparing you for life in a pluralistic society and thus schooling as such is a cornerstone in education.

    private schools German flavor are okay because their curriculum has to comply and their final exams are state controlled.

    So for example even if you went to some evangelical creationist belief system school, you'd have to understand and know evolution. And every student gets sex ed no matter if the parents think that's a bad idea, including contraceptives, abortion rights and all.

    And likewise every student is confronted with the Hollerith machine planned systematic mass deportation and mass murder of 6 Mio Humans for having a "wrong" birth certificate, using scheduled, planned trains and scheduled, planned mass murder factories. And every student learns how that came to be and how a weak democracy was overturned into a mind control oppression state.

    And that makes a _lot_ of sense.

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    • geye1234 4 days ago

      Two points here:

      1. Government schooling won't force you to confront other beliefs: it will deliver you a particular set of beliefs. Example: sex ed (which must, logically, be delivered from one or another moral perspective; there is no neutrality). Or history, which in many Anglo countries used to whitewash 19th-century crimes, and now goes to the other extreme of ignoring anything good.

      Empirically, it is pretty clear that government schools do not produce, and are not designed to produce, children who are capable of examining things from multiple points of view.

      2. Ultimately it's a philosophical question: who is ultimately responsible for the child's development? And, therefore, who has the right to make the final decision on this? The parents, or the state? That's obviously a much bigger question, but it will determine one's attitude to homeschooling.

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      • froh 4 days ago

        do you see the difference of "government schools" in contrast to curricula elaborated by democratically elected boards? especially in a country with proportional representation, which reflects into said boards?

        also the controversy is built into the curricula. "these are the positions, discuss"

        and yes my top comment is exactly addressing the top point. and how it may be a good idea to think about how other cultures approach education and why.

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        • geye1234 4 days ago

          > do you see the difference of "government schools" in contrast to curricula elaborated by democratically elected boards? especially in a country with proportional representation, which reflects into said boards?

          I don't think it makes much difference. Even if we grant for argument's sake that the people elected to school boards are likely to represent the majority of the people entitled to elect them, why should my children be fed the majority view just because it's the majority?

          > also the controversy is built into the curricula. "these are the positions, discuss"

          Presumably that doesn't happen with every topic. What is presented as factual, and what is presented as opinion, is significant and necessarily reflects a worldview.

          By saying "here is the pro-X argument, here is the anti-X argument, discuss", and then stopping there, you are necessarily teaching that X is something opinion-based and non-factual, or at least too trivial to matter. And I, as a parent, may think that X is factual and important. So somebody's views have to win out - mine or someone else's. There is no neutrality anywhere in reality.

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    • arkey 3 days ago

      > only schooling forces you to confront other beliefs in a way preparing you for life in a pluralistic society and thus schooling as such is a cornerstone in education

      That's absolute nonsense.

      Public schooling grooms you to fit into a rigid, calculated mould for society. You learn which is the right way and things to think, and which ones are wrong and you're not allowed to think, according to the current government in place. Your comment exudes precisely that.

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_petronius 4 days ago

On the flip side, a long history of multiple paths through public education has led to Germany being a country where there is no universal expectation that everyone should/must get at least an undergraduate degree, and so inflation (in terms of both price and dilution of value) of degrees is lower than in countries like the UK or especially the US.

An acknowledged, well-designed, and state-supported path to vocational education is very good; social mobility is important within such a system, and a lack of social mobility doesn't have to be baked in.

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  • froh 4 days ago

    oh, I agree "Länderhoheit", state level control of curricula, was one of the weaker ideas in German education. East Germany got that that much better. Finland had sent envoys to East Germany and copied their system (not the curricula, mind you), to create their Pisa winning system in the 1980s...

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cryptonector 4 days ago

> too slow for four year election cycles.

Maybe that's the problem: that education is so politicized. Yet another reason people opt to homeschool.

(For those of you who object so strenuously here to homeschooling, suppose MAGA were to remake public education they way they want it to be. Would you then not seriously consider homeschooling? I bet y'all would.)

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  • froh 3 days ago

    I personally.think the solution to the maga craze and polarization is a proportional representation instead of first past the post. oh and control over individualized media and their individualized political campaigning, built on disinformation and bubbles.

    has little to do with homeschooling or not.

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notTooFarGone 4 days ago

>however Germany thinks binning kids into handcrafts, simple office jobs and academia at age nine (!) is a brilliant idea o-O

As a German that's the first time I hear that. Do you mean Schülerpraktikum? That's usually at age 14. Never heard anyone doing that at age 9.

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  • ohthehugemanate 4 days ago

    They're talking about the division between Gymnasium, Realschule, and Hauptschule. It's actually state to state nowadays whether they have separate schools or Gesamtschulen, but I understand even in Gesamtschulen, in many Bundesländer there's some internal separation.

    Where are you in DE, that this is unknown to you? In Köln just 15 years ago I knew parents who had the horror scenario: a 4th grade teacher who quietly believed that girls shouldn't go to university. They switched their daughter schools that year.

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    • notTooFarGone 2 days ago

      this is very reductive and really hyperbolic. Also hauptschule does not exist in most states anymore.

      I also know enough people who did perfectly fine via Realschule to academics. Of course it's a decision with pretty much a single point of failure which is suboptimal, but don't act like it's predetermining your whole carrer.

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  • qdl 4 days ago

    I guess he is talking about the three school types you can go to after elementary

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    • froh 4 days ago

      or four (adding Gesamtschule) but yes, the what she's talking about.

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  • froh 4 days ago

    as others said: Schullaufbahnentscheidung vierte Klasse (at the age of 9 years for most Students)

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vasco 4 days ago

Also a lot of countries have different goals, and most people when they think of optimization of schooling think of better outcomes at the top end, whereas administrators think of better outcomes at the bottom end. The difference between stimulating your smartest people enough that they become leading beacons of their field vs minimizing the amount of people that get left behind. In some places there's a mixed approach with magnet schools but there's many countries where that doesn't exist.

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wink 4 days ago

Not sure inspiring is the word I would hve picked :D

Overall it sounds a tad better than the US, but far from perfect.

Especially not accounting for different developmental speed of kids annoys me, although from what I heard it'd a bit better these days than in the 90s - e.g. even if they sent you to the Realschule instead of Gymnasium and at age 15 you decided you wanted to go to university they wouldn't make your life extra hard.

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  • froh 4 days ago

    hehe, yes I absolutely agree partitioning schooling is a bad idea. It's much smarter to have shared learning and make a difference inside a class "Binnendifferenzierung" and it's also much smarter to create GATE gifted and talented programs (Hochbegabtenförderung) as enrichment and maybe after grade 8 or 9 as dedicated boarding schools.

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lbrito 4 days ago

>don't breed detached extremists.

That seems not to be working out well for Germany.

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  • froh 4 days ago

    could be worse, much worse. do you have something specific in mind?

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    • lbrito 4 days ago

      Well, things can always be worse. That's a tautology.

      I was implying the growth and "mainstreaming" of afd.

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      • froh 3 days ago

        that's an issue world wide and it's based on extremists abusing targeted advertisement and disinformation in individualized media.

        orthogonal to schooling.

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triyambakam 4 days ago

> don't breed detached extremists.

There are plenty... Who's that Nazi kid with the face tattoos? I don't remember his name.

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  • froh 4 days ago

    yah, Prof. TikTok (and Dr. FB before that), personally targeting political views, that's magic. can't blame schooling for that. it's rather _despite_ schooling. and it happens worldwide (thus my wild guess about TikTok and similar media products)

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    • triyambakam 4 days ago

      I'm saying your thesis is wrong. Public schooling doesn't prevent extremists and homeschooling doesn't breed extremists.

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