Interesting article on some of the roots causes of nerd misery in school.
http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html
His thesis that schools are currently mostly just a part time prison definitely strike home.
His thesis that schools are currently mostly just a part time prison definitely strike home.
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I disagree with a lot of what Paul Graham has to say in other places, but he does have some good points in this essay. Schools really don't work very well right now, and they are used as a kind of mass daycare/prison lite for a lot of kids. His ideas about assessment frameworks are well-taken too, in that it would be better in a lot of ways if students did more real work and less makework.
That said, I think he's wrong about a bunch of other things. For a lot of people who were nerds in school I think he's got it backwards - I think I had time to think about other things because I'd already failed socially, not that I failed socially because I was thinking about other things. Also, I'm pretty sure he's got it mostly wrong about why kids try/use drugs, but maybe that was just me.
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