[MarcScott]

> In my experience, most people, the world over, are in fact self motivated.

In your experience? The world over? Can you tell me your experience. I've been a teacher for a long time. I've worked in the UK, the USA, PNG, and Kenya.

The vast majority of kids in the developed world don't really care about education. A few do, and they get great grades. Most care more about social status, their cliques, or just surviving the jungle that is school.

School is important. It teaches you how to deal with other people. It teaches you how to deal with people in authority. You can't get that at home, in front of a screen. Learning stuff is secondary. I'm sure there are plenty of people here that are not working in whatever they majored at.

[elliotbnvl]

Learning stuff is secondary? Found your problem.

School shouldn't be primarily about experiencing social interaction. It's an artificial environment that disappears as soon as you graduate, and which you'll never find again anywhere else in society. You can learn social interaction in plenty of other settings, most of which are vastly more efficient and realistic. Admittedly, none of them function as daycare...

School should be (and used to be) about learning to learn, building mental discipline and a base of knowledge sufficient to bootstrap whatever other studies appeal to the student, even more so than memorizing a particular list of facts. But it seems that that position has been largely abandoned.

[dash2]

Actually, until the mid 20th century almost everyone agreed that school was about building character, which can only be done in a social environment. As a British government report put it in 1846, schools should be "a little artificial world of virtuous exertion".

[bdangubic]

Learning stuff is 100% secondary. If it wasn't these two below would have same-ish chances in life/career.

Student A: Went to College X and majored in Y. Finished all XXX number of credits and graduated with Bachelor's Degree

Student B: Went to same College X and majored in same Y. Finished all XXX-1 number of credits so is 1 credit short and never got a degree.

Student B is worthless even though she/he learned exactly the same thing as Student A. School (especially in USA) never was and never will be about learning ...

[techostritch]

This is circular, how do you propose making school about that? If you’re only goal is to maximize the folks who like to obey authority then great, and maybe that’s all you care to do, and maybe you don’t care about losing the kids who don’t have the academics to make it, but you also lose a whole mess of kids at the top end of the spectrum too.

[simonw]

"You can learn social interaction in plenty of other settings, most of which are vastly more efficient and realistic."

What settings are those?

[ozim]

Yes teaching how to learn is the way for schools, but it is hard to explain to kids and lots of adults.

Just a nitpick that school enforcing memorizing particular list of facts or memorizing poems - is indeed teaching people how to learn, because how else will you explain to a child or an adult "hey you know if you read this thing 10 times and then try to repeat it another 20 times from memory - guess what !!! that is one trick to learn to memorize something."

But if they spend time on finding out how to memorize hand picked for them stuff and how to perform on exams on limited and picked topics - that sounds like they will be able to learn anything but still too many don't realize what the real lesson there is.

[walledstance]

“It's an artificial environment that disappears as soon as you graduate, and which you'll never find again anywhere else in society.”

Whoa there, society functions like a school environment.

You have cliches, bullies, enforcers, popular kids, the weirdos, etc.

What are our political parties other than massive cliches?

Bullies you can meet on the road, in stores, and nearly any other place you go.

Enforcers are police, detention centers, and fines.

Popular kids you need look no further than influencers, movie stares, etc.

The weirdos are anyone that doesn’t fit into our cliches.

Also, Foucault would have a few words with you as society is also an artificial environment.

The drama of daily life that plays out just happens in a larger more chaotic scale, but when we left highschool, highschool never left us.

[koonsolo]

How does being an employee differ so much from being a student? You still get either good or bad grades for your work. You do assignments, get rules and processes you have to follow, play well with your fellow students/colleagues, etc.

I would say it's quite similar.

[bmitc]

If I made be jaded here. I did extremely well in school(s). I was never a trouble maker and was a top athlete, student, and musician. I think education is supremely important. However, school didn't teach me any of what you mentioned. Because what life teaches is that unless you're Type A, you're not going anywhere. Life teaches that hard work and determination and doing the right things does not get you anywhere. Life teaches you that thinking differently is downright discouraged and rejected.

We mainly teach either boring material or outright lies about how life works. Because we try to put our education on rails, teaching students that that's how life and education works, that's why it's a complete failure. The fact that students in COVID didn't respond to remote lessons is partly because they weren't even engaged prior to COVID.

We don't teach students how to be present, to know nature, how to explore their thoughts and emotions, or how to collaborate.

[glial]

> We don't teach students how to be present, to know nature, how to explore their thoughts and emotions, or how to collaborate.

Montessori schools do. Wish they were more common.

[afarviral]

I mean ... many people went to school as students for a good 12 years. That's likely tainted experience, less objective perhaps, but nontheless valid experience.

[mrguyorama]

Those same people will say "I wish school taught me <X> (things like how to fill out a check book etc"

It did. You didn't pay attention. You want school to teach media literacy? It did, but you complained the whole time "when are we going to use this?". My school taught us how to interpret a "source", how to write well defended arguments (even if I don't always rise to that level), how to calculate mortgage interest rates and payments etc etc etc.

But people will swear up and down "school doesn't teach anything important"

because they didn't pay attention to what was taught!

The primary problem with education in america today is that a huge proportion of parents do not give a fuck about education, see school as just a thing you have to do instead of a constant opportunity. When a kid sees their parent complaining about education being "Liberal brain washing" every other day, why would they pay attention in class?

Education requires emotional and ideological buy in from parents and students for best results.

[BeetleB]

> Can you tell me your experience. I've been a teacher for a long time.

And as a result, your experience is mostly limited to kids who are forced to be where they don't want to be. That's a hugely biased data set.

> School is important. It teaches you how to deal with other people. It teaches you how to deal with people in authority.

And yet it does a worse job at it than those who are home schooled, as most studies show.