worked at an architect's, an archeologist's, a hospital, an epidemiological research institute where I got to use _my own computer_ all day - decided I needed to work with computers, got a summer job there.
earned the President's Award medal
had one class where we stripped an engine over the term
got my first aid certificate
learned how to develop film
took night classes touch typing (on an electric typewriter)
took part in the Irish language school music competition
took German
was in a play
got an award at the Young Scientist
I really developed as a person. I hadn't ever really stopped to think what my life would be like without that development but I suspect it was very beneficial. It certainly wasn't a "doss" - and it started to grow a self determination muscle - find your own work experience, find projects you want to try etc.
I often mention to people that graduate research helped me mature for this same reason. Prior to grad school, I just followed the strict well-defined path modern schooling tends to have - spend most time studying, very limited investment in hobbies and out-of-school friendships, get good grades, focus only on moving to the next year. My grades were great, but it left me as an underdeveloped anxious mess of a person who was incapable of being independent.
Having a few years where I had to do things mostly on my own while still being somewhat 'sheltered' (because a research advisor doesn't have time to babysit, but also won't exploit you the way an employer can) helped me a lot to become my own person and to stop having panic attacks over trivial decisions. At a younger age, the same effect could've been achieved with one year.
Plus, while everyone used to act like missing a year of ~high school would be a permanent blemish on a career, having gone through all this education, I feel that high school was the least consequential part of it. It could easily be replaced with a year of professional 'exploration' with no loss. Especially nowadays, where undergraduate degrees are very common (high school grades can already be entirely forgotten after obtaining a degree), and undergrad programs spend much of the first year redoing a lot of high school material to bring everyone up to the same level.
As a result, when I have children of my own, I plan to emphasize this sort of exploration a lot more.
> but also won't exploit you the way an employer can
Eh, my experience is the opposite. A lot more exploitation in grad school than in industry. It's a lot easier to change jobs than change professors/universities.
I recall multiple cases of formal/semi-formal interventions where other professors or the department had to force an advisor to let the person graduate (they wanted to keep milking them for more papers).
And then when you do graduate, forget a career in research if you can't get recommendation letters from him.
But otherwise, I agree. A ton of benefits if you go to graduate school and don't have an abusive advisor.
(I also took a year off after high school. Never understood why everyone said I was making a big mistake...).
>Eh, my experience is the opposite. A lot more exploitation in grad school than in industry. It's a lot easier to change jobs than change professors/universities.
>I recall multiple cases of formal/semi-formal interventions where other professors or the department had to force an advisor to let the person graduate (they wanted to keep milking them for more papers).
That's kind of what I mean though. In grad school other professors you've worked with might still keep an eye out for you. Under an exploitative employer, the way I was previously, I wouldn't know any better, I had no sense for the value of my time/work and I used to panic about having to send simple emails to people, quitting a job used to sound equivalent to suicide.
For me there's also the factor that as an international student, it's a lot easier for employers to exploit me than a school.
Edit: Although, come to think of it, I do know of other departments at my uni where even other professors can't be relied on to help in such cases. So I guess you're right.
School for me (in Ireland) was more or less a race to get out of school (+ concomitant bullying) and into university to study what I was interested in (maths - at that point I wasn't able to advance any further on my own and there was nobody who could help/guide me further where I lived) - the idea of adding a year on felt like it would be a waste. In retrospect, yeah I think I made a good call. Happy to see other people getting benefit from it though.
In Quebec you find a similar program; elementary school is K-6, and high school is 7-11. Following this you can optionally attend an interstitial educational system called "CEGEP".
It's government funded and costs next to nothing.
CEGEP has two streams, pre-university or professional. For the latter, you learn skills like aircraft mechanics. For the former, you pick a stream that bulks up what would normally be first-year university courses like calculus, biology etc for a science stream.
However, you are required to take approx 15-20% of your courses in an "opposite" stream to force you to get acquainted with other alternatives before you commit to university. In addition, the structure is much like university (you pick your classes & schedule, class sizes are increased compared to HS, your responsibility is increased) which is a good transition for university if that's where you're headed.
I think it's a wonderful system and I wish it was more widespread.
I googled "quebec educational attainment" and found https://statistique.quebec.ca/en/communique/university-gradu..., which says that "Québec has the highest proportion of people aged 25 to 64 with any postsecondary certificate, diploma or degree (71.2%).". According to https://www.statista.com/statistics/467078/median-annual-fam..., Quebec's median annual family income in 2021 was 96,910, almost the same as the median 98,390. The top "provinces" are Northwest Territories and Yukon, whose ways of doing things, for better or worse, cannot be easily copied to other provinces.
Patrick Collison (Stripe) credits the Transition Year in Ireland for his computer interest
" Ireland actually has this interesting thing called “transition year,” this year between two major exams of high school or at least Ireland’s high school equivalent.Transition year is a formally designated year that’s optional, where you can go and pursue things that you might not otherwise naturally tend to pursue, and the school tends to be much more permissive of going and spending three months abroad or going and doing some work experience in this area or whatever the case may be. And so, in that year, I basically decided to spend as much of it as possible programming, and so I did that.”"
In Ireland -- with one kid in Junior Cert and one who did Junior Cert, then had an external Transition Year, then self studied for A levels, and one who's done home school/self study through GCSE and now doing A levels.
It's an optional, definitely not universal thing. Not all schools offer it, and even then I get the impression that it's well less than half the students take the opportunity. The implementation is also highly school dependent, which is either totally expected or a complete surprise, given that the rest of the curriculum and tests are all national level standards.
This article paints a far rosier picture than I've really seen from the local experiences, but that's probably as much the lack of drive at the school than anything else.
My eldest's TY experience with us was great -- we took the opportunity to AirB&B around Europe, at least till Covid hit. But we were totally comfortable with dealing with the home schooling part of that for the three of them.
20 years ago it was considered a 'doss year' (waste/screw-around etc.), and the general perception was that it was for those that require a little more time in the oven developmentally before proceeding to the next stage. I was a child then so I don't know if that was true, but certainly the majority of people who took it were not academically inclined.
It was both extremes when I did it 15 years ago. Those who needed it just to catch up on what they were supposed to have learned in junior cycle and those who wanted a bunch of extra curriculars for whatever reason. Note that admission to college/university in Ireland is not a motivator for extra curriculars - for school leavers the only things that matter are your overall grades, and for some courses, grades in specific subjects. (For foreign students, over 25s, those with special needs etc. there's a 10% or so allocation for an alternative process which is more subjective application based. But the 90% go through the purely grades based CAO)
Think it varies a lot school to school and sometimes even year to year.
Which seems fair enough. There’s already a year difference between the youngest and oldest student in any given class; if you want your children to do well, make sure they’re among the oldest.
The problem is it might come too late to change their self-perception. A year is a lot of time when you’re nine
A year is still a lot then. You can do a lot in a year if you don't have to worry about earning a living and have the time to engage in things that are interesting.
In England, I've seen education get consistently more rigid and inflexible over the years. All about tests, tests and more tests. Teachers leave the profession, children turn off. And as it consistently fails to produce better results, the answer is always to do more of what has failed.
Same in the USA. The old student question "will this be on the test?" is now also asked by teachers and administrators. If the answer is "no" they skip it.
The article says it is like a gap year, but during secondary school.
Clearly not the same as taking time off before university when you are already an adult though. Participation in some activities is required, so it's a bit more structured - and I don't think you can take off on your own to travel the world!
The Gap Year is a year-long deferral from university or college. Sometimes, it occurs directly after finishing High School, and other times, it occurs in the middle of your course.
Many countries allow young people (under 30) to live and work in-country under a Working Holiday visa. Both are effectively Young People travelling (aka backpacking).
A gap year is normally between the end of secondary school and starting college (so 18-20 or so). TY is between junior cycle (junior cert, or inter cert if you're older) and senior cycle (leaving cert). So 14-16 year olds (who couldn't legally take a gap year)
my physics A level teacher did something really interesting with us.
we spent a whole class looking at an old O Level question from an exam.
all of us, including the boffins in the class, were completely stumped by it.
he explained it to us at the end, but it did solidify an appreciation in me that, at least 20ish years ago, we definitely had it easier than folks before us.
The aim was to create teacher evaluation systems that depended on student standardized test scores and observations by “peer evaluators.” These systems, it was conjectured, could identify the teachers who were most effective in improving student academic performance.
(it's not clear to me if this created any standardized tests for students, or just depended on existing ones)
Sounds like it ran from 2009-2015ish. If Bill Gates is going to be brought up, then I guess George W. Bush should be, too, with No Child Left Behind. AFAIK that's what kicked off the trend of standardized testing for students in the U.S.
I took a year off after high school in the US to work part time and take welding and accounting courses at the local community college. Great experience that convinced me that I did actually want to go to university.
I'm pretty sure that if I had taken auto shop or welding in high school (it was still offered, but I was "college-bound" and steered away from anything in that wing of the building) or in a "gap year" I would have ended up doing something in that field. I love making stuff and repairing stuff. I also was interested in computers and programming them, I think there's a lot of overlap there in terms of motivations.
It seems like such a year could be either revelatory or totally miserable, depending what you got and what type of person you are. Just the thought of many of those activities brings me back to all my school year anxieties.
The Cillian Murphy reference seems off. He might have been too old when it was mandated in 1994, even though it was available earlier. Anyone know for sure?
It works on the other end of the spectrum too. Much of my class just wanted to leave school at 16 to work on the family farm. TY gave them practical experience of running a business, stripping an engine, how to use an manage credit etc. before they went out in the world.
TY was good to me, but I think it could have been better. As the article says, each school does it differently. We did a mini company, where we created knick knacks and tried to sell them. But the entire class of 30 students was one company, which was therefore quite badly organised. I remember the teachers saying that they wouldn't do it that way in future years. There was also orienteering.
And we still did some academic classes. Maths, anyway. And I think some others.
In my school, most of the kids didn't do TY, so there was just one class in TY, which meant that the maths, in particular, was fairly basic: there weren't enough of us for streaming. And jumping back into higher level maths in Fifth Year was, frankly, a bit of a shock to the system.
My child is too young for school but my partner and I expect to homeschool. We've talked about gap years in the childs early/mid teens for travel/backpacking/nature excursions. I wish fellowship and apprentice work was more commonplace in the younger years too. Get out of the classroom and experience the real world.
Plenty of family/friends nearby with young families. I'm in a rural area with a tradition of homeschooling so there's weekly/biweekly events/classes. Not really worried about the socialization. Over socializing can be bad too.
We homeschooled. When we worried about our kids' socialization, we yanked them into the bathroom and beat them up for their lunch money.
I'm kidding, but... you want school to build your kids' social skills? Apart from all the pathologies common in schools, you want your kids to grow up to live in an adult world, which is almost completely unlike school.
Yeah, homeschooling can be done where the kids are isolated and never interact with anyone outside the family. It doesn't have to be, though.
> I'm kidding, but... you want school to build your kids' social skills? Apart from all the pathologies common in schools, you want your kids to grow up to live in an adult world, which is almost completely unlike school.
I mean... yes, it seems reasonable to learn social skills from a school setting? Interacting with other people, some of whom dislike/disagree with each other, interacting with other adults, etc. This seems like a reasonable step toward what you describe as 'the adult world' - which, yes, is rather different from school, but that seems a good thing; throwing a child into 'the adult world' without preparation would be crazy, right?
(I'm not trying to deny that one can learn the necessary social skills while being homeschooled, just disagree with the implication that school is not also a good place to develop them)
“Children learn what they live. Put kids in a class and they will live out their lives in an invisible cage, isolated from their chance at community; interrupt kids with bells and horns all the time and they will learn that nothing is important or worth finishing; ridicule them and they will retreat from human association; shame them and they will find a hundred ways to get even. The habits taught in large-scale organizations are deadly.”
― John Taylor Gatto
And put those children in an invisible cage with two adults who will tell them when to get up, what to wear, what to eat, what to read, and when to go to bed, and these kids will learn...... what?
I think homeschooling could work for some combinations of parents and kids, but so many discussion sounds like "Of course it's going to work for my kids because I'm different!"
> And put those children in an invisible cage with two adults who will tell them when to get up, what to wear, what to eat, what to read, and when to go to bed, and these kids will learn...... what?
Sounds like a typical day for a regular school kid. Most school kids up to a certain age need a parent to wake them up, and don't get to pick their clothes or their food. And get shepherded into the bed.
Not sure what any of this has to do with homeschooling. It's just basic life.
In fact, from the parents I know who home school, the kids actually have more freedoms than school kids do. Their work is tailored to their skill level, so no BS tedious homework. As long as the parents have time, the schedule is flexible as well. If your kid performs better at noon - great! Start then.
So biased toward American public education, in New York City of all places.
For what it's worth, I look back on my time in school with relative fondness. Certainly I don't agree with anything like it 'being a cage' or feeling isolated from other people (????)
I remember taking part in Debate, MUN, XC, DECA, Wrestling, Quiz Bowl, Volunteering (NHS/CSF), and a bunch of Olympiads in HS and there was always a cost associated with participating (either a fee or the need to travel to the place hosting the EC).
Unsurprisingly, this meant ECs would skew upper middle class and upper class. Sadly, these same ECs are also blockers for college admissions.
I might get hate for this on HN, but this is why I support unweighted GPA, relative class ranking, and SAT/ACT for college admissions - sort of like what the UCs do. It's the least bad option out of the other options. Alternatively, going open entry with university admissions and then ramping up the difficulty with weedout classes is a good option as well.
Open entry would change a lot of things - lots of schools and rankings use drop out rate as a proxy for how useful attending there is, because of the assumption that if the dropout rate is higher, there's a worse education. It would at least upend the old saying about the hardest part about some colleges is getting in.
I agree with the SAT/ACT part - they pushed "holistic review" during Covid but ultimately SAT prep is way lower barrier (Khan Academy) than gobs of ECs.
Open admission is an interesting way to do things. I spent a bit of time in Belgium where the main universities will accept anyone who has a high-school level education. The first year dropout rate can be 70% in some courses. This system seemed to be very well loved by Belgians.
Notably the US has the lowest dropout rate, so obviously they are pre-filtering students hard. That necessarily means that there are lots of people who /could/ have succeeded but were excluded at the admissions stage. The degree to which that's the right choice probably depends on whether you think doing a year of university and then leaving is a huge waste, a horrible failure, or a worthwhile experiment.
(The unique economics of US universities obviously interact with this calculus in pretty major ways.)
> UC admissions decisions don't use SAT or ACT scores.
Ope. I forgot that changed after COVID.
Pre-COVID SAT/ACT was required.
> Like if you do well in middle school and get into Lowell by the skin of your teeth, should you be penalized for being in the bottom 10%?
Someone is always going to be penalized no matter what. Most schools in California as well as nationally are not specialized or gatekept via entrance exams like Lowell was.
I ran it through ChatGPT with a prompt to remove "unnecessary linguistic complications"
Niall Hare, a 63-year-old headteacher in Dublin, explains the importance of bike maintenance and philosophy in Irish culture while discussing what students do during their "transition year" (TY), which is the optional fourth year of the Irish secondary school system. After completing a three-year junior cycle, students can either go straight into the two-year senior cycle or take a transition year, seen as a sort of gap year.
Transition year has no set curriculum but includes mandatory subjects like Irish, English, maths, and PE for two hours a week, along with work experience and career guidance. Schools are free to design the rest of the program. Hare's TY program for 2024-25 includes subjects like Chinese, folklore, law, and workshops on consent and relationships. Students explore a variety of activities, from arts and coding to aviation and boxing.
Although not graded, participation is required. Notable Irish actors Paul Mescal and Cillian Murphy both discovered their love for acting during TY. The year provides opportunities for students to explore new interests and develop life skills. Kacey, a current student, talks about overcoming her fear of driving, while others highlight learning practical skills like preparing a CV and using a bus timetable.
TY, which began as a pilot program in 1974 and was rolled out nationally in 1994, now has 99% of schools offering it, and nearly 80% of students participate. It was the brainchild of Richard Burke, who wanted to create a space where students could take a break from the academic grind and explore the arts. The program has evolved to include work experience, reflecting changes in market expectations.
Despite some criticism, including complaints about its cost and accessibility, TY is widely regarded as a positive experience. Studies suggest TY participants score higher on their Leaving Certificate exams. The program allows students to discover new passions, build confidence, and gain life skills, benefiting both students and teachers. However, challenges remain in ensuring equitable access for all students, especially those from lower-income families.
Thanks for providing that. I did read the article, but that is actually a pretty good summary.
I do agree with the other commenter -- despite all of the downvotes they got -- I did find that article especially cumbersome to read. A browser button to rewrite articles in different styles could actually be useful.
> Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.
> I wouldn't call the quality and readability of the written text "tangential"
The topic in this comment section is the "transition year" in Irish secondary schools. The format of the website which introduces that topic is tangential to that topic. I don't know where one would get the idea that a tangent that's not about CSS styling is not a tangent.
The topic is also a specific article about that transition year. I don't think that commenting about an article being particularly well-written, easy to understand, or having nice examples would be against the guidelines here.
If discussion of anything but the underlying subject of the link - including references to the writer, quality, and content of the writing - were considered tangential to the point of being against the guidelines to discuss, then surely so would commenting that another comment is against the guidelines.
I'd say so, it doesn't develop any discussion or conversation, it's bike shedding. Even more that overall quality is a question of judgment, I read the article perfectly fine and the writing style wasn't a distraction.
What do you think we gain in the discussion by debating the quality of writing (which was entirely passable) instead of the substance of it? To me it's quite clear: absolutely nothing.
In TY in 1998 I:
worked at an architect's, an archeologist's, a hospital, an epidemiological research institute where I got to use _my own computer_ all day - decided I needed to work with computers, got a summer job there.
earned the President's Award medal
had one class where we stripped an engine over the term
got my first aid certificate
learned how to develop film
took night classes touch typing (on an electric typewriter)
took part in the Irish language school music competition
took German
was in a play
got an award at the Young Scientist
I really developed as a person. I hadn't ever really stopped to think what my life would be like without that development but I suspect it was very beneficial. It certainly wasn't a "doss" - and it started to grow a self determination muscle - find your own work experience, find projects you want to try etc.
I often mention to people that graduate research helped me mature for this same reason. Prior to grad school, I just followed the strict well-defined path modern schooling tends to have - spend most time studying, very limited investment in hobbies and out-of-school friendships, get good grades, focus only on moving to the next year. My grades were great, but it left me as an underdeveloped anxious mess of a person who was incapable of being independent.
Having a few years where I had to do things mostly on my own while still being somewhat 'sheltered' (because a research advisor doesn't have time to babysit, but also won't exploit you the way an employer can) helped me a lot to become my own person and to stop having panic attacks over trivial decisions. At a younger age, the same effect could've been achieved with one year.
Plus, while everyone used to act like missing a year of ~high school would be a permanent blemish on a career, having gone through all this education, I feel that high school was the least consequential part of it. It could easily be replaced with a year of professional 'exploration' with no loss. Especially nowadays, where undergraduate degrees are very common (high school grades can already be entirely forgotten after obtaining a degree), and undergrad programs spend much of the first year redoing a lot of high school material to bring everyone up to the same level.
As a result, when I have children of my own, I plan to emphasize this sort of exploration a lot more.
> but also won't exploit you the way an employer can
Eh, my experience is the opposite. A lot more exploitation in grad school than in industry. It's a lot easier to change jobs than change professors/universities.
I recall multiple cases of formal/semi-formal interventions where other professors or the department had to force an advisor to let the person graduate (they wanted to keep milking them for more papers).
And then when you do graduate, forget a career in research if you can't get recommendation letters from him.
But otherwise, I agree. A ton of benefits if you go to graduate school and don't have an abusive advisor.
(I also took a year off after high school. Never understood why everyone said I was making a big mistake...).
>Eh, my experience is the opposite. A lot more exploitation in grad school than in industry. It's a lot easier to change jobs than change professors/universities.
>I recall multiple cases of formal/semi-formal interventions where other professors or the department had to force an advisor to let the person graduate (they wanted to keep milking them for more papers).
That's kind of what I mean though. In grad school other professors you've worked with might still keep an eye out for you. Under an exploitative employer, the way I was previously, I wouldn't know any better, I had no sense for the value of my time/work and I used to panic about having to send simple emails to people, quitting a job used to sound equivalent to suicide.
For me there's also the factor that as an international student, it's a lot easier for employers to exploit me than a school.
Edit: Although, come to think of it, I do know of other departments at my uni where even other professors can't be relied on to help in such cases. So I guess you're right.
School for me (in Ireland) was more or less a race to get out of school (+ concomitant bullying) and into university to study what I was interested in (maths - at that point I wasn't able to advance any further on my own and there was nobody who could help/guide me further where I lived) - the idea of adding a year on felt like it would be a waste. In retrospect, yeah I think I made a good call. Happy to see other people getting benefit from it though.
In Quebec you find a similar program; elementary school is K-6, and high school is 7-11. Following this you can optionally attend an interstitial educational system called "CEGEP".
It's government funded and costs next to nothing.
CEGEP has two streams, pre-university or professional. For the latter, you learn skills like aircraft mechanics. For the former, you pick a stream that bulks up what would normally be first-year university courses like calculus, biology etc for a science stream.
However, you are required to take approx 15-20% of your courses in an "opposite" stream to force you to get acquainted with other alternatives before you commit to university. In addition, the structure is much like university (you pick your classes & schedule, class sizes are increased compared to HS, your responsibility is increased) which is a good transition for university if that's where you're headed.
I think it's a wonderful system and I wish it was more widespread.
.
I googled "quebec educational attainment" and found https://statistique.quebec.ca/en/communique/university-gradu..., which says that "Québec has the highest proportion of people aged 25 to 64 with any postsecondary certificate, diploma or degree (71.2%).". According to https://www.statista.com/statistics/467078/median-annual-fam..., Quebec's median annual family income in 2021 was 96,910, almost the same as the median 98,390. The top "provinces" are Northwest Territories and Yukon, whose ways of doing things, for better or worse, cannot be easily copied to other provinces.
Stats Canada data disagrees with this. Do you have a source?
Patrick Collison (Stripe) credits the Transition Year in Ireland for his computer interest
" Ireland actually has this interesting thing called “transition year,” this year between two major exams of high school or at least Ireland’s high school equivalent.Transition year is a formally designated year that’s optional, where you can go and pursue things that you might not otherwise naturally tend to pursue, and the school tends to be much more permissive of going and spending three months abroad or going and doing some work experience in this area or whatever the case may be. And so, in that year, I basically decided to spend as much of it as possible programming, and so I did that.”"
https://networkcapital.beehiiv.com/p/stripe-ceo-patrick-coll...
In Ireland -- with one kid in Junior Cert and one who did Junior Cert, then had an external Transition Year, then self studied for A levels, and one who's done home school/self study through GCSE and now doing A levels.
It's an optional, definitely not universal thing. Not all schools offer it, and even then I get the impression that it's well less than half the students take the opportunity. The implementation is also highly school dependent, which is either totally expected or a complete surprise, given that the rest of the curriculum and tests are all national level standards.
This article paints a far rosier picture than I've really seen from the local experiences, but that's probably as much the lack of drive at the school than anything else.
My eldest's TY experience with us was great -- we took the opportunity to AirB&B around Europe, at least till Covid hit. But we were totally comfortable with dealing with the home schooling part of that for the three of them.
20 years ago it was considered a 'doss year' (waste/screw-around etc.), and the general perception was that it was for those that require a little more time in the oven developmentally before proceeding to the next stage. I was a child then so I don't know if that was true, but certainly the majority of people who took it were not academically inclined.
It was both extremes when I did it 15 years ago. Those who needed it just to catch up on what they were supposed to have learned in junior cycle and those who wanted a bunch of extra curriculars for whatever reason. Note that admission to college/university in Ireland is not a motivator for extra curriculars - for school leavers the only things that matter are your overall grades, and for some courses, grades in specific subjects. (For foreign students, over 25s, those with special needs etc. there's a 10% or so allocation for an alternative process which is more subjective application based. But the 90% go through the purely grades based CAO)
Think it varies a lot school to school and sometimes even year to year.
Which seems fair enough. There’s already a year difference between the youngest and oldest student in any given class; if you want your children to do well, make sure they’re among the oldest.
The problem is it might come too late to change their self-perception. A year is a lot of time when you’re nine
TY is typically at 15ish.
A year is still a lot then. You can do a lot in a year if you don't have to worry about earning a living and have the time to engage in things that are interesting.
Sounds like a great idea.
In England, I've seen education get consistently more rigid and inflexible over the years. All about tests, tests and more tests. Teachers leave the profession, children turn off. And as it consistently fails to produce better results, the answer is always to do more of what has failed.
Bring something like this to England, please!
> tests, tests and more tests
Same in the USA. The old student question "will this be on the test?" is now also asked by teachers and administrators. If the answer is "no" they skip it.
Is this not the same as a gap year?
I’m Irish but unfortunately never bothered with TY. I live in the UK now so I’ve a limited understanding of TY and the ‘Gap year’.
The article says it is like a gap year, but during secondary school.
Clearly not the same as taking time off before university when you are already an adult though. Participation in some activities is required, so it's a bit more structured - and I don't think you can take off on your own to travel the world!
The Gap Year is a year-long deferral from university or college. Sometimes, it occurs directly after finishing High School, and other times, it occurs in the middle of your course.
Many countries allow young people (under 30) to live and work in-country under a Working Holiday visa. Both are effectively Young People travelling (aka backpacking).
A gap year is normally between the end of secondary school and starting college (so 18-20 or so). TY is between junior cycle (junior cert, or inter cert if you're older) and senior cycle (leaving cert). So 14-16 year olds (who couldn't legally take a gap year)
> it consistently fails to produce better results
The performance of the English education system has improved markedly over the past couple of decades. At least, as measured by tests!
my physics A level teacher did something really interesting with us.
we spent a whole class looking at an old O Level question from an exam.
all of us, including the boffins in the class, were completely stumped by it.
he explained it to us at the end, but it did solidify an appreciation in me that, at least 20ish years ago, we definitely had it easier than folks before us.
The other 5 years of schooling at that level is all about the tests.
Sounds like Bill Gates has gotten a hold of your school system as well.
sounds like you have something to say but can't be bothered to say it
Gates Foundation put an outsized amount of money into getting support for Common Core, standardized testing and merit pay for teachers.
- https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/got-dough-how-billio...
I was curious, so I googled it. I'm guessing GP is talking about this:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2018/06/...
The aim was to create teacher evaluation systems that depended on student standardized test scores and observations by “peer evaluators.” These systems, it was conjectured, could identify the teachers who were most effective in improving student academic performance.
(it's not clear to me if this created any standardized tests for students, or just depended on existing ones)
Sounds like it ran from 2009-2015ish. If Bill Gates is going to be brought up, then I guess George W. Bush should be, too, with No Child Left Behind. AFAIK that's what kicked off the trend of standardized testing for students in the U.S.
I took a year off after high school in the US to work part time and take welding and accounting courses at the local community college. Great experience that convinced me that I did actually want to go to university.
I'm pretty sure that if I had taken auto shop or welding in high school (it was still offered, but I was "college-bound" and steered away from anything in that wing of the building) or in a "gap year" I would have ended up doing something in that field. I love making stuff and repairing stuff. I also was interested in computers and programming them, I think there's a lot of overlap there in terms of motivations.
It seems like such a year could be either revelatory or totally miserable, depending what you got and what type of person you are. Just the thought of many of those activities brings me back to all my school year anxieties.
The Cillian Murphy reference seems off. He might have been too old when it was mandated in 1994, even though it was available earlier. Anyone know for sure?
I think a lot of the mental illness for young boys is that the education ladder deprives them of responsibility until way past maturity.
Out of curiosity, why do you think that's a problem for boys, in particular?
It works on the other end of the spectrum too. Much of my class just wanted to leave school at 16 to work on the family farm. TY gave them practical experience of running a business, stripping an engine, how to use an manage credit etc. before they went out in the world.
TY was good to me, but I think it could have been better. As the article says, each school does it differently. We did a mini company, where we created knick knacks and tried to sell them. But the entire class of 30 students was one company, which was therefore quite badly organised. I remember the teachers saying that they wouldn't do it that way in future years. There was also orienteering.
And we still did some academic classes. Maths, anyway. And I think some others.
In my school, most of the kids didn't do TY, so there was just one class in TY, which meant that the maths, in particular, was fairly basic: there weren't enough of us for streaming. And jumping back into higher level maths in Fifth Year was, frankly, a bit of a shock to the system.
https://archive.is/duzFR
My child is too young for school but my partner and I expect to homeschool. We've talked about gap years in the childs early/mid teens for travel/backpacking/nature excursions. I wish fellowship and apprentice work was more commonplace in the younger years too. Get out of the classroom and experience the real world.
How do you plan on your child building out their social skills? Surely a couple of playdates a week with a few other kids isn’t going to cut it.
From what I've seen, surely going to school doesn't cut it either :-)
Let's not cherry pick. Plenty of people have adverse social outcomes due to school.
Plenty of family/friends nearby with young families. I'm in a rural area with a tradition of homeschooling so there's weekly/biweekly events/classes. Not really worried about the socialization. Over socializing can be bad too.
We homeschooled. When we worried about our kids' socialization, we yanked them into the bathroom and beat them up for their lunch money.
I'm kidding, but... you want school to build your kids' social skills? Apart from all the pathologies common in schools, you want your kids to grow up to live in an adult world, which is almost completely unlike school.
Yeah, homeschooling can be done where the kids are isolated and never interact with anyone outside the family. It doesn't have to be, though.
> I'm kidding, but... you want school to build your kids' social skills? Apart from all the pathologies common in schools, you want your kids to grow up to live in an adult world, which is almost completely unlike school.
I mean... yes, it seems reasonable to learn social skills from a school setting? Interacting with other people, some of whom dislike/disagree with each other, interacting with other adults, etc. This seems like a reasonable step toward what you describe as 'the adult world' - which, yes, is rather different from school, but that seems a good thing; throwing a child into 'the adult world' without preparation would be crazy, right?
(I'm not trying to deny that one can learn the necessary social skills while being homeschooled, just disagree with the implication that school is not also a good place to develop them)
“Children learn what they live. Put kids in a class and they will live out their lives in an invisible cage, isolated from their chance at community; interrupt kids with bells and horns all the time and they will learn that nothing is important or worth finishing; ridicule them and they will retreat from human association; shame them and they will find a hundred ways to get even. The habits taught in large-scale organizations are deadly.” ― John Taylor Gatto
And put those children in an invisible cage with two adults who will tell them when to get up, what to wear, what to eat, what to read, and when to go to bed, and these kids will learn...... what?
I think homeschooling could work for some combinations of parents and kids, but so many discussion sounds like "Of course it's going to work for my kids because I'm different!"
> And put those children in an invisible cage with two adults who will tell them when to get up, what to wear, what to eat, what to read, and when to go to bed, and these kids will learn...... what?
Sounds like a typical day for a regular school kid. Most school kids up to a certain age need a parent to wake them up, and don't get to pick their clothes or their food. And get shepherded into the bed.
Not sure what any of this has to do with homeschooling. It's just basic life.
In fact, from the parents I know who home school, the kids actually have more freedoms than school kids do. Their work is tailored to their skill level, so no BS tedious homework. As long as the parents have time, the schedule is flexible as well. If your kid performs better at noon - great! Start then.
> cage > isolation > interruptions > ridicule > shame
I wonder if this person's view on schools is at all biased.
I'd say someone who taught in NYC public schools for 30 years and won teacher of the year award is a good resource to learn from? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Taylor_Gatto
So biased toward American public education, in New York City of all places.
For what it's worth, I look back on my time in school with relative fondness. Certainly I don't agree with anything like it 'being a cage' or feeling isolated from other people (????)
> What he really wanted to close was the cultural gap between rich and poor
This sounds great!
> Then there is the financial aspect of TY: some parents just can’t afford it.
oh for fuck's sake
Yep! Good extracurriculars are expensive.
I remember taking part in Debate, MUN, XC, DECA, Wrestling, Quiz Bowl, Volunteering (NHS/CSF), and a bunch of Olympiads in HS and there was always a cost associated with participating (either a fee or the need to travel to the place hosting the EC).
Unsurprisingly, this meant ECs would skew upper middle class and upper class. Sadly, these same ECs are also blockers for college admissions.
I might get hate for this on HN, but this is why I support unweighted GPA, relative class ranking, and SAT/ACT for college admissions - sort of like what the UCs do. It's the least bad option out of the other options. Alternatively, going open entry with university admissions and then ramping up the difficulty with weedout classes is a good option as well.
Open entry would change a lot of things - lots of schools and rankings use drop out rate as a proxy for how useful attending there is, because of the assumption that if the dropout rate is higher, there's a worse education. It would at least upend the old saying about the hardest part about some colleges is getting in.
I agree with the SAT/ACT part - they pushed "holistic review" during Covid but ultimately SAT prep is way lower barrier (Khan Academy) than gobs of ECs.
Open admission is an interesting way to do things. I spent a bit of time in Belgium where the main universities will accept anyone who has a high-school level education. The first year dropout rate can be 70% in some courses. This system seemed to be very well loved by Belgians.
https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/docserver/eag_highlights-2010-...
Notably the US has the lowest dropout rate, so obviously they are pre-filtering students hard. That necessarily means that there are lots of people who /could/ have succeeded but were excluded at the admissions stage. The degree to which that's the right choice probably depends on whether you think doing a year of university and then leaving is a huge waste, a horrible failure, or a worthwhile experiment.
(The unique economics of US universities obviously interact with this calculus in pretty major ways.)
Relative class ranking is a poor measure for students who gained entry (by merit) to a selective high school.
Like if you do well in middle school and get into Lowell by the skin of your teeth, should you be penalized for being in the bottom 10%?
> UC admissions decisions don't use SAT or ACT scores.
Ope. I forgot that changed after COVID.
Pre-COVID SAT/ACT was required.
> Like if you do well in middle school and get into Lowell by the skin of your teeth, should you be penalized for being in the bottom 10%?
Someone is always going to be penalized no matter what. Most schools in California as well as nationally are not specialized or gatekept via entrance exams like Lowell was.
Imagine the top 10% of middle school students in SF go to Lowell. Half of those will be in the bottom half of the graduating class.
So 5% of students in SF (half of the best 10%) might not get into their UC of choice, just because they managed to get into Lowell.
That's a lot of students' futures we're talking about. Why penalize half of the best students in SF?
Folklore?
[dead]
[flagged]
I ran it through ChatGPT with a prompt to remove "unnecessary linguistic complications"
Niall Hare, a 63-year-old headteacher in Dublin, explains the importance of bike maintenance and philosophy in Irish culture while discussing what students do during their "transition year" (TY), which is the optional fourth year of the Irish secondary school system. After completing a three-year junior cycle, students can either go straight into the two-year senior cycle or take a transition year, seen as a sort of gap year.
Transition year has no set curriculum but includes mandatory subjects like Irish, English, maths, and PE for two hours a week, along with work experience and career guidance. Schools are free to design the rest of the program. Hare's TY program for 2024-25 includes subjects like Chinese, folklore, law, and workshops on consent and relationships. Students explore a variety of activities, from arts and coding to aviation and boxing.
Although not graded, participation is required. Notable Irish actors Paul Mescal and Cillian Murphy both discovered their love for acting during TY. The year provides opportunities for students to explore new interests and develop life skills. Kacey, a current student, talks about overcoming her fear of driving, while others highlight learning practical skills like preparing a CV and using a bus timetable.
TY, which began as a pilot program in 1974 and was rolled out nationally in 1994, now has 99% of schools offering it, and nearly 80% of students participate. It was the brainchild of Richard Burke, who wanted to create a space where students could take a break from the academic grind and explore the arts. The program has evolved to include work experience, reflecting changes in market expectations.
Despite some criticism, including complaints about its cost and accessibility, TY is widely regarded as a positive experience. Studies suggest TY participants score higher on their Leaving Certificate exams. The program allows students to discover new passions, build confidence, and gain life skills, benefiting both students and teachers. However, challenges remain in ensuring equitable access for all students, especially those from lower-income families.
Thanks for providing that. I did read the article, but that is actually a pretty good summary.
I do agree with the other commenter -- despite all of the downvotes they got -- I did find that article especially cumbersome to read. A browser button to rewrite articles in different styles could actually be useful.
> Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.
I suggest you re-read this list: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I wouldn't call the quality and readability of the written text "tangential", it's not about the CSS styling.
I don't think it's quite as bad as the above commenter seems to think it is, but they're welcome to that opinion.
> I wouldn't call the quality and readability of the written text "tangential"
The topic in this comment section is the "transition year" in Irish secondary schools. The format of the website which introduces that topic is tangential to that topic. I don't know where one would get the idea that a tangent that's not about CSS styling is not a tangent.
The topic is also a specific article about that transition year. I don't think that commenting about an article being particularly well-written, easy to understand, or having nice examples would be against the guidelines here.
If discussion of anything but the underlying subject of the link - including references to the writer, quality, and content of the writing - were considered tangential to the point of being against the guidelines to discuss, then surely so would commenting that another comment is against the guidelines.
Is the overall quality tangential?
I'd say so, it doesn't develop any discussion or conversation, it's bike shedding. Even more that overall quality is a question of judgment, I read the article perfectly fine and the writing style wasn't a distraction.
What do you think we gain in the discussion by debating the quality of writing (which was entirely passable) instead of the substance of it? To me it's quite clear: absolutely nothing.
'Bike shedding', in the context of the current Irish bike shed controversy - heh
What is the Irish bike shed controversy?
https://www.irishtimes.com/life-style/2024/09/06/its-not-eve...