zlacker

This is actually a fun thing to talk about, but an HN thread is insufficient. There are schools and countries out there who focus more on excellence and cater to the top students. They put a ton of effort and praise on the top % with contests, a dense curriculum. I think most of eastern Europe, possibly Russia and likely a lot of other places fall into this category. On the other side, you have places like Scandinavia where the curriculum is less dense, and teachers focus on getting everyone above a lower knowledge threshold.

It's a great topic to research if you want to actually improve the education system. Go have fun reading and learning about it, the more you understand about the tradeoffs of these approaches, the better! But that's clearly not what the author of the article, or the commenter referred to. _sigh_

>>laserb+(OP)
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2016/dec/30/no-excuses...

This school takes really deprived kids and gives them a great education. But it gets a lot of grief.

Edit it's an old article I believe they now have ex students attending Oxford and Cambridge.

>>bennys+o2
From the article: “In other schools that would never happen. You’d never see a teacher ask a pupil to pick up a grape, because they’d go mad.”

If this sentence is true, i'd worry about education in your country. And if the bullying bit is also true, it's even worse. And i fail to see how "same punishment for everything, no matter how small" is a good thing to enforce. It's lazy for the teachers and a very poor habit and thought process to teach.

No, honestly. I've taught children, schooled, homeschooled, sometime at a youth camp, sometime on perischolar activities; i'm pretty sure i've taught better habits in hours than this school can do in years. I mean, if you want button-pushers, this school sounds great, i'd rather have the children i teach understand why they are learning, how they can learn more, and how safely do stupid experiments, like my some of my math, chemistry, physics and history teachers did.