Taiwan is 3% foreign immigrants, Japan is 2%.
Also, if diversity is the problem (hypothetically) why can't we implement Swedish/Japanese/Taiwanese stuff in those American towns with no diversity?
Without any more explanation this sounds like one of those things where you find two statistics about two countries and say "this explains the difference."
This principle is why most of the information that our government has is public, but not everything is in a database accessible by anyone on the Internet, but some information is. If I want to know what a private person makes I can call Skatteverket and ask, but this info is not available on the Internet, though some companies provide services for this.
If you have a registration number for a car you can get information about it using the link below, but owner info requires me to login with my bankid (online identity service that most government and banks, etc, use). I just did this and got an email with the owner and owner history within a few minutes. I did it for a Tesla that has BITCOIN as reg number that I've seen before, you can also try it.
https://fu-regnr.transportstyrelsen.se/extweb/UppgifterAnnat...
Why would it be crazy for that to be available for everyone? I genuinely don't get what the big idea is.
Even in the US you can look up the salary of many people (public university employees come to mind).
One of the most important moments early in my career was learning the salary of the people above me. It let me evaluate the upside of climbing that ladder for the next 5-10 years and ultimately helped me make a critical decision to leave and take a higher risk role where the upside was greater.
It could be argued that transparency in taxes collected is a positive thing for a society.
Is it just the case that the Brits have more of an appreciation for print culture than we do?
Private organizations have their own failings, but at least when they fail they can be penalized or go bankrupt. There is no mechanism like bankruptcy for the government and so we are stuck with an agency forever once it is started.
Oh my! I can imagine some bureaucrats playing "Lord-Master of Administration", enjoying the small power, they have, while burning through tax provided money and, generally, making a career. There may be sides, I do not understand, but, from the article, it just looks like this.
$400K sounds like nothing when it comes to something this serious, but then the fine also got reduced? Reduced to what I wonder, and for what?
Adding both in at once? Watch out!
99% of apps suck and are horrible to work with. Government apps are probably worse than average.
Interacting with the government shouldn’t require the use of any particular tech device. It sounds like in this case there is no alternative.
Schools have managed for hundreds of years without this additional complexity, so there’s probably not a good justification to start adding this complexity now. Usually school/government initiatives like this are just driven by hype/someone wanting to make an “impact”/nepotistic job provision/etc.
The article description of the open-source alternative reads
> The app shows school calendars and events such as music concerts, a daily schedule for pupils, notifications from teachers that link out to grades and news updates, food that’s being served in cafeterias, and an option to report if children are sick.
Apart from privacy sensitive student specific stuff like grade reports (which our school does on paper), it seems all this stuff can be published just as well on the school website, email lists and/or paper brochures. I really don't see the need for a separate phone app here.
Our school does have a school-specific app for some limited school <-> parent and parent <-> parent messaging, and scheduling the occasional parent-teacher meetings. In my experience it doesn't do anything better than plain old email.
Developing a website isn't much different from an app these days with the React monstrosities being created
> email lists
Where everything gets caught in spam filters
> paper brochures
Which get lost
My kids' daycare switched from paper-and-telephone to an app and it's been all positive. The idea isn't bad.
Thats why they managed so well when COVID came along and remote schooling became nessesary.
Something like 5% of Swedish-born residents are descended from Finns if you go back a few generations (not counted among foreign-born immigrants).
2 million are not born in Sweden.
Of these, the top 10 are:
Syrien 193,594
Irak 146,440
Finland 140,337
Polen 93,762
Iran 81,301
Somalia 70,184
Jugoslavien 63,419
Afghanistan 60,858
Bosnien och Hercegovina 60,161
Turkiet 52,628
Then there's "born in Sweden, both parents from the same foreign country"
Finland 62,042
Irak 58,864
Syrien 32,829
Jugoslavien 30,903 (Yugoslavia)
Somalia 30,743
Jugoslavien 13,111
Irak 10,530
Syrien 7,880
Libanon 7,604
Turkiet 5,969
Finland 13,968
Jugoslavien 10,696
Syrien 9,381
Polen 5,949 (Poland)
Libanon 5,645
Finland 65,872
Danmark 29,235
Norge 27,275 (Norway)
Tyskland 23,670 (Germany)
Förenade kungariket 16,965 (UK)
Finland 113,178
Norge 39,676
Tyskland 25,560
Danmark 22,990
Polen 16,279It isn’t the only factor; China does it through culture, or Sinofication. https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinicization “Han Chinese” isn’t based on genetics it’s many different races that call themselves Han because they share culture. This is historically what happened in China and is now happening in Africa and South America.
Not quite. Han Chinese is a specific ethnicity. But it is true that "Chinese” isn’t based on genetics, it’s many different races that call themselves "Chinese" because they share culture. Or to cover all cases, it's many different races that the Chinese government calls "Chinese" to push a facade of homogeneity, marginalize minority peoples like Uyghurs, and marginalize minority languages and cultures in China that aren't Han Chinese, though their current nationality is Chinese.
The authors hand wave his data by saying white people are to blame.
> In other words, greater distrust may stem from prejudice rather than from diversity per se. Therefore, Putnam’s conclusion that racial diversity leads to less altruism and cooperation amongst neighbors was incorrect. If there is a downside to diversity, it has less to do with the behavior of racial minorities and more to do with how Whites feel when living amongst non-Whites.
They attempt to decouple diversity and prejudice, but that is completely illogical. Their logic is if you asked a minority if they feel more comfortable with a jury that is made of people who are not of a similar culture and racial background as them they would, but white people wouldn’t. That is ridiculous.
The linked article has a lot of stuff about how the Putnam study misinterprets its data.
So swedes are cool with this, but what about people from different backgrounds? As the GP hints, people working in Sweden who are not Swedish are not comfortable with this, so perhaps in countries with much more diversity these things would never get off of the ground due to the sheer number of competing opinions on what is acceptable/unacceptable etc
I'm not personally much of a fan of private sector salaries, income tax paid, etc. being a matter of public record but it's also not obviously "crazy" either. There are reasonable debates about transparency at the margins and this is a margin.
Think bigger, you are missing the forest for the trees.
It is not about Tom finding out Joe is getting paid 5% more.
It's about Joe finding out his employer took advatage of his inexperienceand lied to him, and everyone in the industry gets paid 2x what he does.
Corporations have a massive data advantage and leverage over you, they know how much everyone is paid, and how much their competitors pay. This data helps level the playing field.
It also helps detect illegal price fixing, breaches of minimum wage, makes plain effectiveness or ineffectiveness of unions, etc. It informs journalism and policy.
Every time you refuse to tell your colleague your salary, you are not helping yourself, you are helping your boss.
For example, seeking new employment your new employer would be able to see your previous salary. That means people who start out in the lower wage markets could have a much harder time improving their salaries.
Not saying either approach is necessarily wrong. But it probably works better in public sector which tends to be very seniority based. In the US, it would breed a lot of resentment towards people who you thought were overpaid relative to yourself for many people.
Senior citizens are also targeted by criminals in Sweden, because the age and address of almost all citizens is publicly available. They might be visited by a couple who ask for a glass of water or whatever, and then one of the visitors distract the senior citizen while the other searches the place for jewelry.
I find this unconvincing - firstly, most crime happens in poor neighbourhoods.
Secondly, you don't need to know someone's salary to tell apart a rich neighbourhood or house from a poor one.
Thirdly, high salary does not mean you have anything to steal, my friend earns a lot but all him money is in mortgage, stocks or in the bank. All you could steal from his house is a laptop.
Lastly, even if everything you said was true, it doesn't mean we should cower and hide, it means police are not doing their job well enough.
That's kind of my point. Let's say you live in a poor neighborhood but do some stock trading and suddenly make a large profit. That will be shown in public records, it's not just salaries that are public. You now have a target on your back. Criminals will not come to your house looking for a laptop, they will come looking for you, putting a gun to your head telling you to transfer your assets to them.
> it means police are not doing their job well enough
Principles are nice, but pragmatism is better at keeping you alive...
The whole privacy system is geared towards supporting employers and people in the upper echelons of salary.
... HOAs enforce strict driveway maintenance codes? I don't think there are any suburbs with a national healthcare system or a social safety net.
> the northern and southern Han Chinese are genetically closest to each other and it finds that the genetic characteristics of present-day northern Han Chinese were already formed as early as three thousand years ago in the Central Plain area.[22]
>Among some southern Han Chinese varieties such as Cantonese, Hakka and Minnan, a different term exists – Tang Chinese (Chinese: 唐人; pinyin: Táng Rén, literally "the people of Tang"), derived from the later Tang dynasty, regarded as another zenith of Chinese civilization.
>The term "Huaxia" was used by Confucius's contemporaries, during the Warring States era, to describe the shared ethnicity of all Chinese; Chinese people called themselves Hua Ren.
Regionally they called themselves people of the area they grew up in, the Baiyue who are now called "Han Chinese" did not call themselves Han. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baiyue When reading this section I noticed a "Han Chinese" bias.
>The Han Chinese referred to the various non-Han "barbarian" peoples of southern China as "Baiyue", saying they possessed habits like adapting to water, having their hair cropped short and tattooed. The Han also said their language was "animal shrieking" and that they lacked morals, modesty, civilization and culture.
The actual book linked calls them "citizens of Han" not "Han Chinese". https://books.google.com/books/content?id=Y3oSAQAAIAAJ&pg=PA...
Han Chinese is like Apple retronaming all of the OSes that run on iPhone as iOS, the same way the Chinese government is doing the same for all the people's historical names of what they called themselves.
When I say Han, I'm referring to the genetic group XYZ. I understand that some people say Han and mean the nation ABC. I also agree that calling all people from the modern country of China Han is propaganda and "Han"-washes (to make a parallel to white-wash) a number of different ethnicities and cultures.
To bring it back to the original points:
> (you) “Han Chinese” isn’t based on genetics it’s many different races that call themselves Han because they share culture
> (me) Not quite. Han Chinese is a specific ethnicity. But it is true that "Chinese” isn’t based on genetics, it’s many different races that call themselves "Chinese" because they share culture. Or to cover all cases, it's many different races that the Chinese government calls "Chinese" to push a facade of homogeneity, marginalize minority peoples like Uyghurs, and marginalize minority languages and cultures in China that aren't Han Chinese, though their current nationality is Chinese.
You were talking about the ABC Han, or Han as the name of the Han nation, while I was talking about the Han ethnicity. I don't think we really disagreed, just got tripped up on semantics. Although if you still disagree with the scientific belief that there is a Han ethnicity in spite of all the data, then I think we can't go much further here.
I don't think its a very useful classification, but I do not think its stictly scientific, its more cultural since ethnicity is a social heuristic, classifying races isn't scientific but its has uses. If we classify it as a group of Y-haplotypes it can have a scientific basis, but its still classified by social norms. https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Y-chromosome-haplotype...
If I know I am a better employee than you, and you make that much more, if I am unwilling to do anything about it but grumble, that's a personal problem. I would argue that anyone who is willing to stay in a shit situation without trying to remedy said situation (being underpaid and knowing it for a fact) sort of brought those problems on themselves. It's a problem to complain about only if you have tried to fix it and couldn't.
Systematically, it would allow people to see which businesses pay best, where their particular skills would be best reimbursed. Therefore, anyone in that shit situation who wants to grumble would have even more information available to them to be able to shop for jobs.
I still don't see a downside.
Also you don't know you're a better employee than me. You think you are but you may not even be aware of a bunch of stuff I do.
>Also you don't know you're a better employee than me. You think you are but you may not even be aware of a bunch of stuff I do
This is actually still a pro-, in my opinion, on public salary information. If I know you make more and approach the manager, it opens up a line of discussion on expectations versus outcomes versus perceptions. I think it actually makes the process of helping staff improve much easier!
In general default to private is the norm in the US and there isn’t a general sentiment to generally change that with respect to salary, tax returns, etc.
You talk about pragmatism but give a crime scenario out of Hollywood movies.
Do you mean bank transfer? Am I transferring a million dollars into an official bank account registered in the criminal's real name?
Do you mean I should sign a deed giving them possesion of my house, and that would hold up in court?
Any large transfer will trigger a multi-day KYC and security process at the bank. Are they going to hold me hostage for weeks?
There is a much easier crime that pays better and does not involve risk of death and leaving your fibgerprints all over: stealing a car, an expensive car.
That's why there are more car thefts than home robberies.
https://www.expressen.se/kvallsposten/krim/man-misshandlad-o...
There are of course other ways to transfer assets than the ones you describe. And yes, one guy was held hostage for weeks:
The second "Bengtsson, 32, was abducted on January 17th in Gothenburg on his way to work at Siba, a family-owned nationwide home electronics retail chain of which he is managing director and which he will one day inherit."
Is your suggestion that if this information weren't public then no one would know that those men were rich and so they wouldn't have been robbed or abducted?
Because 1) poor people get robbed too, and 2) I usually think someone who lives in a castle, is often profiled in the news for one's wealth-related activities; or someone who is the managing director of a large chain store; probably has money - without having to check their tax records.
Were the attackers of Count Carl Piper ever found? You mentioned "foreign criminals" earlier, but why couldn't they be domestic?
Earlier you wrote "Senior citizens are also targeted by criminals in Sweden".
I'm from the US. Senior citizens are also targeted by criminals in US. Eg, see https://www.fbi.gov/scams-and-safety/common-scams-and-crimes... .
There's no need to know the person's age and address - go to a neighborhood with decent-looking houses and knock on doors pretending to offer services like re-roofing or driveway sealing. If the person who answers is old, and alone, try exactly the same technique you mentioned.
Or, take a down-payment for the roofing work then don't do it, like in https://www.stgeorgeutah.com/news/archive/2021/10/07/cgb-sus... .
Frustratingly, wage theft is very common in the US but not covered under criminal law. Quoting https://www.epi.org/publication/wage-theft-bigger-problem-fo...
> Wage theft—employers’ failure to pay workers money they are legally entitled to—affects far more people than more well-known and feared forms of theft such as bank robberies, convenience store robberies, street and highway robberies, and gas station robberies. Employers steal billions of dollars from their employees each year by working them off the clock, by failing to pay the minimum wage, or by cheating them of overtime pay they have a right to receive. Survey research shows that well over two-thirds of low-wage workers have been the victims of wage theft.
Even in the US, different regions have different ways to measure the clearance rate, and as I pointed out with wage theft, even the concept of what is measured differs between jurisdictions.
I therefore find it hard to judge that a raw number like "14%" is easily comparable with other countries.
In researching this I found https://bra.se/bra-in-english/home/publications/archive/publ... from 2014, which makes a similar point:
> The aim is to find explanations for why Sweden has a lower clearance rate than the other countries, despite the fact that victim surveys show that real crime levels are roughly the same.
> One factor of relevance to differences in the clearance rate is the issue of differences in the way the police register crimes. In Sweden, for example, the method used to count the number of reported offences is less restrictive than those employed in the other countries. Several of the countries also use a definition of cleared offences that differs from that employed in Sweden. In some countries, it is sufficient to have registered a suspect on reasonable grounds for the offence to be considered cleared. In Sweden, however, an individual must either have been prosecuted for the offence or issued with a summary sanction order or a waiver of prosecution.
> Finally, the chapter presents an alternative method of measuring police effectiveness in the countries studied, namely the number of conviction decisions per 1,000 of population. Using this measure, Sweden is no worse than the other five countries; in fact, all of the countries lie at approximately the same level.
In that report the official clearance rates were:
Sweden 17
Norway 47
Denmark 18
Netherlands 25
Germany 54
England & Wales 27 / 29
Or, in Germany, "If the police consider that a reported incident does not meet these requirements, it is not registered as an offence in the crime statistics. In addition, statistics on reported offences do not include open cases.", and "The procedure employed to produce offence counts is also more restrictive than in Sweden, and employs the principal offence meth-od. Thus, if a perpetrator assaults two men on the same occasion, this is only counted as a single offence in Germany, while in Sweden it would be counted as two separate offences."
These are just some of ways that biases the official statistics in ways that make it difficult to compare numbers directly.
1. Who owns the data?
2. Should public funds be used for the creation of private APIs that manage the data?
The answer to (1) has consequences for (2).
I think many HN readers, including myself, and certainly these parents would argue that the data is the property of the parents. If you see the data as being the property of the parents then you would see the APIs as being the means for retrieving and manipulating your data - data that's protected by this national BankID identification.
It appears the school system believes the data is their data, and not the parents' data. Therefore retrieving the data through any other means than the "official" app is a potential data breach.
So who is right? Think about the data we manage on behalf of our customers, for example. Who owns that data? What rights do our customers have in accessing and managing that data?
This is a really interesting case and hopefully will force the answer to these questions.
You are right, the city believes they have ownership of the data, mainly because they fail to understand that they aren’t showing data in an app, but rather publishing data in an API. In Swedish law, once you have released data from a government, the receiver have the right to do whatever they want with the that data (as long as it isn’t violating any other laws).
The city in this case is responsible to check that the data is safe to share publicly and once they have- the data is not theirs. This is regulated in the constitutional law regulating free speech which goes back to year 1766.
This means that they can’t really apply the same logic as a private company can when publishing data in their api. A private company can still keep license over what can be done with the data they publish. A city can not do that because of these constitutional laws.
Christian, it's not about the data and has never been. The data is a legal tool they are using.
The municipal administration is trying to save face. It's layers and layers of non-technical bureaucrats who have to justify their salaries.
A few talented software engineers running in circles around some multi-million dollar contract they gave to a large offshored operations with probably close to a hundred individual programmers doesn't look good for them at all.
For example if their system includes an app that lets you see your students grades and disciplinary issues, presumably you would not want that published. Is it simply impossible to build an app with such data in Sweden now as it would be “published”?
Edited to add: and just to be clear, I am fully supportive of this use case. Just trying to understand the restrictions better.
I could do the same thing and write an app for, say, the tax agency by scraping its website but it would be a legal gray area.
If there is an API that grants access to data by passing in a valid auth token, then it doesn’t matter if it’s called from a SPA app or postman or curl.
As long as you are using the public API and haven’t forged an auth token then it doesn’t matter how you call the public API.
SEO providers should take a note here.
> It warned parents to stop using the app and alleged that it might be illegally accessing people’s personal information
If your API allows data extraction, it probably isn't a fault of any client. Perhaps they meant that creators could steal credentials. A problem with any software.
I think this digital child managing system sounds moderately dystopian to be honest. I would have hated to give my parents access to anything like this. Kids will of course learn from how their parents behave...
An open API is a must in my opinion, but the rest of the App should be open source too.
That said, I don't really see the Swedish strategy as a model for other countries to follow. You don't need to give children chromebooks to learn. These are skills they have already mastered far better than their parents. They will learn about domain specific apps and there are indeed some really good ones, but such platform can also limit creativity because they are essentially sandpits. Depending on age that might be appropriate, but kids may have greater ambitions than their parents.
[0] https://www.iris.co.uk/education/engagement-suite/iris-paren...
I was in edu-tech world for a while in Sweden. The most frustrating thing is that even if you have a good product that your users enjoy you will fail because you can't sell it to individual schools. You have to sell it to all the schools in the entire county, which just means that some giant actor will swoop in promise the world for a dollar and then we have this.
It should be perfectly possible to have the same underlying system across the entire country.
And in a perfect world, there would be some kind of common API for all schools, and a competing app ecosystem where parents and teachers and children can pick the one they like the best.
So JIRA for Schools failed. It's a top down system, where people on top decide to solve problems for all people below, without really knowing how to solve it, or what the problem even is. And then contractors get involved.
People are willing to put up with this if you can press them, e.g. they are at work, they are in the army etc. so they have to put up with it, but it's not going to work for anything else. It attempts to solve everything for everyone, where it's questionable if most of these things are even worth solving. E.g. from the article, what is somebody's child doing in school, what do they need in gym class. You might just ask them, no? There are quarterly or so meetings with the teacher to discuss things, progress, problems? The problem is not that the menus are convoluted, but that maybe most of this stuff is not worth categorizing, not worth having an UI other than a piece of paper.
Sure you do. You just don't know it yet.
JackFr's law: With sufficiently angered users of a private API, they will build an better, open API around it.
The official system has a mobile app, where it takes effort to figure out the API, and a SPA web app, where it is absolutely trivial to see which endpoints it is hitting and how.
And the ridiculousness of the city's defense that it's not open is made greater by the fact that if they had made an open API from the start, security should have been baked in from the start, which means they would have avoided embarrassing security incidents along the way. They already have all the components needed for a proper, public API. They're so close, and yet they're insisting that it's private, and that it's illegal to access their private API.
When I was a subcontractor, the most I had to do was 3 (customer and 2 consultancies), and even that was a major hassle.
Big consulting firms involved, billions spent, horrible products shipped.
Licensing does nothing to guarantee that your systems are secure, and the overall law is what enforces the correct handling of personal data by outside parties. But in this paper pusher's head, anything she cannot control through a contract must be a threat. And so she will spend public money wielding the police department against individuals actually building stuff, to force them into signing her safety blanket of a contract.
In 2021, it behooves us to remember that this type of gatekeeper used to be in control of nearly every technology organization - empty suits who knew nothing technical, thinking security is about checking off certifications and qualifications. It was a rare gem to find someone with a clue who held enough organizational pull to set policy.
I remember having a meeting with the head of the campus network at my university, who was concerned about me running Linux on my own machine. He just couldn't understand the point of Linux - he could never trust it because "there is no one to sue". As if suing Microsoft would have ever been a sensible path. But that was his worldview - how do you think he responded to security reports?
But the thing that we need to realize in 2021 is that it's not like these people just left and found honest jobs - their existence was eclipsed by the much larger technical-first community. They're still out there, controlling their little fiefdoms, reacting in the same destructive ways to stop themselves from looking "bad". And with the calcification of technology, they might even be poised for a comeback.
Well, I guess enterprises can just "buy" linux from RedHat/Suse and get some corp to sue.
User interfaces seem bad enough that I think it might be better to design the API primarily and even only the API; you can then just use that. If it is simple enough, it can be used from command-line interfaces, and others, easily enough if a protocol is designed well enough to support such multiple uses in a simple way. (It can even make the form automatically too, with the user's display settings rather than using the form author's CSS or whatever.)
However, they also should not require schools to use such a app, especially to require one of their locked systems only. You can do education without it, too. That doesn't mean such a system is useless (you can use it if you find it useful), only that it is possible to work without it, too. They didn't used to have such a app in the school and shouldn't require it now either; it can be voluntary.
This story is amazing because it shows society at it's best, people got together organised and resolved a common problem.
They did this without corporate or government power structures. We should remember importance of this third institution and cherish it, it gets little lime in the limelight, and it's the most precious of them all.
You can only lose.
Why are the defending their own poor quality program? Do they want Sweden to fail?
The system was originally procured by city administrators who had way too little understanding and experience dealing with IT projects.
The contract was awarded to one of the big consultant behemoths who specialize in winning government contracts and executing them shoddily.
Parents hate it, because it is shit.
Anyone in the industry with a brain hates it, and laughs at it, because it is shit.
Elected city politicians hate it, because it is shit, and their voters are constantly telling them it is shit.
But the vendor is of course defending their contract and the sweet, sweet tax money they're getting.
And the people with power to actually do something about it, unelected city administrators, are defending it, because they feel they have to double down on their earlier shit decisions.
Why would they make such a crappy program, don't they have any incentive to have a good reputation or to get more contracts? If it sucks and their history sucks, why would anyone want to hire them?
Shame on those who work there.
The simple dynamic of negative monetary feedback for shitness in private enterprise and positive monetary feedback for shitness in government determines this entirely.
If that is possible, then your API is at fault. Period.
To legislators, everything is a legislative problem to be solved with legislation. Government must be democratic, but boy it would be so helpful if those in office knew enough about technology to be a little more humble.
Every time I work with a bureaucracy, I realise there are a lot of people, many of whom are average at best but all want to make their mark on the product, have their say, cement their value to the organisation.
Whoever then has to build it produces something rubbish by definition, not because they are bad devs but because they have to do what they are told.
Sad really that when we have done so much work on making the development process super slick and agile, we haven't been able to formalise the interface between customer and suppliers to avoid conflicting requirements and inconsistent UX.
Unless someone has solved this but most of us don't know how?
I swear we just had an A4 piece of paper with my lessons on it on the fridge.
As you mention, I guess it can be a useful tool for a parent to keep their kid on track, because yeah obviously they're learning and they'll be forgetful. But IMO it would also make it too easy for an overbearing parent to prevent their child from learning important life skills, thinking they're helping.
Homework and test prep was supposed to be managed by the students, not their parents, anyway, but most classes had just printed exercises and/or a sheet of what to expect in tests, so parents could always just check that. Test were also in about the same weeks of every semester, so my parents might not have known the exact dates unless they asked and I told them, but they knew that tests were happening. My parents kept interest, asked me how it was going regularly, if I needed help with something, when the tests are and what my results were, and so on. I think so it makes a big difference in the kid's experience if the parent asks them, or if the parent essentially goes over their head and consults some online resource.
I personally was too proud to want help with school work from my parents from an early age on, and even felt that it only slowed me down; I wanted to be outside with my friends not slowly working through the homework as a team exercise. My grades were good, so my parents let me do my stuff. My sisters (they are twins) needed some help in some areas (they are very likely partially dyslexic), and got it.
Should the grades of a student change abruptly for the worse or remain at a low level, teachers would just call up parents and discuss the situation and suggest ways to improve, and the semester reports had to be signed by a parent anyway, and that signature had to be presented at school.
This was mid to late 90s by the way, my mid and "high" school time. In elementary school my parents were still more hands-on, of course.
I too find "digital child managing systems" rather dystopian, enabling parents to micro-manage their kids even more, which I am convinced is not good for the kid's overall development. There has to be a balance between the parents need to care for a kid (and the care a kid actually needs, of course) and letting the kid grow up, and I feel such systems push that balance too much away from teaching kids self-reliance and let them make minor "educational" mistakes on their own.
Then again, I of course realize that each kid has it's own needs, and some need a fair bit of micro-management at times.
>what to dress them in
May I ask, how old are your kids? Sounds like they are still young, if you dress them? Then of course, more micro-managing makes more sense. The younger the more care kids need.
Usual common sense caveats still apply: Privacy and authentication are still valid aspects but not to block those who could reasonably expect to successfully authenticate, eg a parent of a kid in school.
How do you expect they'll develop these sorts of self-starter skills and mental models, besides experiencing things like the (comparatively low-impact!) consequences of not handing in your 5th grade homework....?
Hopefully you're going full parabola and also providing disproportionately strong incentives to do the "right" behaviors, because otherwise it's as likely they'll succeed as they'll become sand through your tight grasp.
I think you misunderstand the point of the system. It's much more mundane than that. The system just replaces paper notices going home with kids and getting lost in their book bags, looking phone numbers to report you child out sick, etc. It's not brave new world, it's simply replacing paper and phone tasks with an app.
A lot of the reactions and rebuttals to this comment are from HN childless people, whose perspective is their memory of being a child age 12-17, talking past HN people with children, whose perspective is about their kids age 5-12. At one end of the range you are educating about drugs and sex and good decisions, on the other end of the range you are worried about clean butts and walking across busy streets.
The method of CREATING an older child who can be an independent and functional adult is by "MICROMANAGING" early-on so they develop good habits (especially good habits of independence!). And I am a Montessori parent which is fairly radical compared to the normal US system.
But if look at a purely educational value any notebook beats a tablet aside for art. Purely technical knowledge is also better gained in more open environments. Depends on age I guess.
Part of being a parent is helping your child navigate and learn about the world. Having this sort of information - what are the details about what this institution is offering on a daily basis - sounds invaluable.
I don't really disagree but we are in an era where children's academic outcomes are based entirely on parental involvement. Scratch any surface of any under-performer lightly and the cry will go up "The schools can't be blamed for poor parenting!"
I think we rarely acknowledge that this is a recent development. Ask most Gen-Xers ( me ), ask boomers, ask greatest generationers if you know any. "How involved were your parents in your schoolwork?". You'll probably get a blank stare - "None?".
I suspect it started with the "Asians are going to beat us" panic from the 80s. They were killing us in math scores and if we weren't careful we'd all be working for them someday. In retrospect the danger was exaggerated.
Now, however, heavy parental involvement is required for kids to succeed. If the kids don't finish their homework - could it be that they are getting to much homework? Nah, it must be bad parents. If they can't pass the tests, could it be their teachers have not prepared them? Nope - the parents should have been spending their evenings going though flash cards.
It only exacerbates the difference between that haves and have nots. If you don't have a parent who can devote time every day to overseeing your education, you're out of luck.
Why aren't you equally as mad at the personnel at your child's school? It's one thing for a national or semi-national rollout of broken enterprise junk, it's another thing for your child's instructor to go along and demand that you use this broken system instead of providing reasonable affordances (e.g. low-tech, paper-based notices/forms that get sent home with your kid).
For that matter, how do your school systems handle the situation where no one in the household is able or willing to install the damn thing because e.g. you don't own an iOS or Android device, or you have no smartphone at all? Is there an actual legal requirement for you to contribute on an ongoing basis to the bottom-line of select tech companies like Apple and Google in order to participate in public life—as if it's on par with the necessity to pay for e.g. renewing your government-issued ID?
I am not sure, but it might be that the teachers are not only encouraged but required to use these systems?
>you don't own an iOS or Android device, or you have no smartphone at all? Is there an actual legal requirement for you to contribute on an ongoing basis to the bottom-line of select tech companies like Apple and Google in order to participate in public life—as if it's on par with the necessity to pay for e.g. renewing your government-issued ID?
That really became a problem here in Germany, when politicians proclaimed that "digital/remote learning" will safe the day in covid times. Not realizing that a lot of kids, especially in the poor neighborhoods, nor their parents, actually have any capable devices for that. Or fast enough internet (with enough mobile data) to support zoom meetings and such each day.
I lecture at a Uni and it has not reached me yet but am expecting it.
You don't expect people who face no consequences for anything short of criminal conduct to change their behavior. Being mad at civil servants is like being mad at the weather and only slightly more likely to accomplish anything.
The Google Play listing should have had a "Mismanagement Count" prominently displayed that incremented every time this happened. The log, and the time spent, should be in court.
The parents decided to build this front end for free. They did not decide to play hide and seek with the interfaces, and for this they deserve compensation.
I don't get the point of non web apps because usually they are just a subset of the website.
OMG, I do not miss filling out three fucking timesheets as a salaried employee.
One via MS Access, which was believe it or not, the least painful. One on fucking paper, because why shouldn't programmers use paper for timesheets? And last, but definitely not least one via PHONE. Where you have to enter your employee number and hours via a fucking PHONE KEYPAD. Oh, and they would nag a company of 250,000 to do it early so that the accounting team of like 5 could go home on time on Friday.
One of the many reasons I don't miss that job.
And I’m sure the vendor they paid a billion to also had sales people insisting that what the open source people were doing was illegal.
Whether you utterly don't care, midly care but not enough to do anything, or care enough to do something only when someone goes first, it is the passionate people that preach to the choir because that's how you get them to sing.
> The principle of public access to official documents serves as a guarantee for transparency in the work of the Riksdag, the Government and the public authorities. The principle is set out in the Freedom of the Press Act, which is one of Sweden's fundamental laws, and means that everyone is entitled to access official documents.
> Everyone is entitled to contact a public authority and request a copy of an official document. Anyone requesting access to an official document does not need to provide their name or any details of how the document will be used.
The government can opt-in to secrecy.
> The Public Access to Information and Secrecy Act contains provisions on secrecy to protect public interests, for example, national security. It also contains provisions on secrecy to protect individuals’ personal or financial circumstances.
Source: https://www.riksdagen.se/en/how-the-riksdag-works/the-riksda...
States and cities are a bit trickier because of the weird way the constitution interacts with states, but things still tend towards open access.
"This was mid to late 90s by the way, my mid and "high" school time" You are probably the same age as me. :)
"I too find "digital child managing systems" rather dystopian, enabling parents to micro-manage their kids even more, which I am convinced is not good for the kid's overall development." The system in question is just a digital calendar essentially I think far to much malevolence is being attributed to such a simple tool.
I very much don't think packing the kids a lunch, reviewing their homework and seeing when their next tests are is micro managing, but obviously everyone is coming from different starting points.
My parents did not involve themselves in my schooling much at all. I graduated with straight A's, skipped school all the time, only did homework if it was graded and barely studied except for classes like chemistry or physics and went to college on a full ride. Then I failed out of college twice because no one had ever sat down with me taught me how to study and learn or made me think that study was important. I think I would have done much better at college if my parents had worked with me as a kid. Still love my parents though and think they were good parents.
My approach to other parents is I generally assume they are doing the best they can, mean well for their kids and will use whatever tools they have in that spirit.
What would have been helpful to me as a parent (while my children were enrolled in school) would have been a short weekly email, one from each teacher/class, simply summarizing the topic for the next week or two. That* would be useful in helping parents engage with their children before the material is covered in class. Instead my experience over the past four years has led me to believe that most teachers and school administrators are very poor communicators.
* Another option would be for teachers to provide a course syllabus at the start of each semester. But for whatever reason teachers no longer provide those, either because they think the online stuff is sufficient (it's not) or because they haven't planned ahead.
This is the important point most everyone here glosses over. It's hard to discipline a child and make them cooperate in a system of trust. It's much easier to eliminate the trust out. As a stressed parent (and lets be honest, every parent is a stressed parent) you don't have the time and patience for this. I think most of us on the opposite end of this discussion lament this.
In my opinion this is a type of failure you cannot, and should not optimize out. Children's personalities are different. Certain behaviors induce certain rewards and consequences. Failure is part of the development process of their personalities.
Even is wealthier neighborhoods, with what we thought as pretty decent cabled internet, having everyone log in full-time and YouTube/video conferencing like crazy killed the connection speeds to a rate we haven't seen since the 90s.
"it's as likely they'll succeed as they'll become sand through your tight grasp" lol, I have no idea how my statement on working with my kids on their homework and liking to know what is going on has evolved into an image of me being some sort of god king in my house, but hey whatever makes you happy.
My kids have homework, I sit down with them and work on it with them, we bond, we joke around, they learn and they turn it in the next day. The horror.
Edit: "How do you expect they'll develop these sorts of self-starter skills" To add some color, my 9 year old decided at the spur of the moment while they were asking who wanted to stand up and give a speech to be on student council to do it and he won. I had no input and he just made the decision in the moment so I very much don't think sitting down with kids and doing homework with them or keeping an eye on their schedule kills any self-starter skills. There are always extremes but the overall reaction to this is a bit silly.
You literally demand the system in which kids are expected to be well organized. If they are not they will be punished until they learn to be organized. If they don't despite punishments in school, parents won't be told until end of year. Then they get the surprising final report and only thing they can do is to yell at kids or something.
That is rather poor pedagogy.
Everything once done on paper is now done electronically - and revisions (fixes) happen much more quickly to boot.
Frankly there are some aspects of it I miss...
Even when doing PE I’d always bring a separate bag of gym clothes.
Sweden has separations of power like every other liberal democracy, but the cake isn't cut the same way as it is in the US. Government offices are much more independent and protected from political interference than in the US, for example.
Basically, elected city officials set the budget and general guidance, and can appoint some administrators, but most people on the administrative side rise up through the ranks based on their merits (or not) like in any other organization.
The current head who is ultimately responsible for how the thing is handled right now started her career as a teacher, became a principal, and then moved into the city's school administration. I'm sure she's great at those parts of her job, but she's obviously not competent enough when it comes to overseeing or procuring IT projects of this magnitude.
So it's not the case that someone incompetent was rewarded with a comfy position, it's that the city's organization as a whole isn't competent to handle projects of this type and size.
By pension off I meant is there a possibility for someone mediocre, or promoted beyond their level of competence, to be immediately dismissed with a generous pension. And to replace them with someone else selected for fixing the problem?
Well, same answer, actually. The elected politicians can't really interfere with personnel matters for either getting rid of people or hiring people, so no.
The idea is that people working for the city should be immune to changes among the elected officials, for better or worse. And this time it's for worse.
This policy won't help.
Well we have already made the source code open and free and also encouraged the city to release an app with our source code as base. They weren’t interested in that. They would rather license the app, support and maintenance to us. We have quoted a fixed sum per month for that service and we plan to use that money to reimburse everyone sending PR:s we merge.
How interesting :- ) I wonder how you'll distribute the thanks-for-the-feature (PR) money — e.g. per PR, or per lines (hmm I guess not) or maybe some impact / "severity" system like for bug bounties? (but this time "feature bounties")
(From Sweden me too. How nice that you built the app and that apparently things seem to end in a good way :- ) I felt a bit upset when reading the article)
Did we finally decide to stop shoveling money into the F-35 or is that still ongoing?
There's a whole industry of companies who cater to these kinds of projects, and they don't give a shit about their reputation, because they're busy making sweet, sweet, money.
And if you think US military contractors aren't wasteful and shoddy, I have a bridge to sell you!
Not necessarily, because they're throwing the most amount of money at the problem.
one in an instant adds thousands of bugs :- )
Student grades and disciplinary issues become official documents as soon as the teacher documents them regardless of form (i.e. paper, audio recording, IT-system, etc). The school is then obligated to provide those official documents to anyone upon request.
The school could argue that this information should be kept secret but student grades are not explicitly protected by law and it has already been established that this type of information is in fact public. I don't know about disciplinary issues but interactions with social services and psychologists are explicitly protected by law.
The Swedish government has always been obligated to make information accessible to humans and with new regulation regarding Open data and Digital government that obligation has increased to also make information accessible to machines. Attempting to create an application that makes this difficult would be misconduct - the Swedish government is obligated to provide APIs.
Edit 1: I figured I should back this up with a source but all the ones I could find are written in Swedish. So either accept my translation or ask a trustworthy Swede to translate it for you.
> Skolbetyg är allmänna handlingar, och vem som helst kan beställa fram betyg från arkiven. Journalister brukar t ex ofta vilja se på nytillträdda ministrars skolbetyg.
Source https://riksarkivet.se/skolbetyg
Translation:
School grades are official documents, and anyone can request grades from the archives. Journalists often like to see the school grades of newly elected government officials.
This source is the Swedish National Archive but this also applies to non-historical grades.
Edit 2:
> Or is there still some level of privacy where only certain parties are allowed to view certain documents even if they are official.
The government can, and will, opt-in to secrecy for things like social services and medical records.
Grades are "public documents" in all schools in Sweden. With other things like disciplinary issues it varies depending on whether the school is run by the government or a private company.
Naively it seems to me that a government API could contain docs that are not published/public docs. But maybe that is so, and the argument here is simply that _in this case_ everything was in fact public, including some personal data that would seem non-public to people familiar with other legal systems.
This can, in principle, be solved with a permission system that makes suitable decisions based on the identity of the API user (well, the identity on whose behalf the API queries are done).
For medical secrecy, should you stumble over information that you should not have, you are then legally obliged to not disclose the information, but I cannot recall to what extent you have an obligation to tell relevant document owners about the possible breach, it's simply been too long since I was working in medical IT (where, by necessity, I would occasionally stumble over secret things doing things like DB repairs or helping users with application problems).
Personally, I'm not seeing why this is a huge issue. In the 1980s, parents of at least the private school that I used would get a syllabus containing all the homework and class plans for the year.
If you wanted to know what was happening on week #7, you just had to look it up on paper without having a handy app to put it on your calendar. It wasn't seen as surveillance, but rather normal planning. If the teacher and school system know what's upcoming, then why shouldn't parents. It was seen as obvious that parents would help their children with homework, and that education necessarily involved parental support.
Along the way if there were any disciplinary or academic issues, parents would have to sign-off on handling minor problems, and would get a personal phone call from the school for major ones. This is in addition to monthly meetings, PTA, etc.
Has the world changed so much nowadays that people just drop off young children at school and can reasonably expect to be totally uninvolved?
Now to contrast, in my country, secondary school (13-17) is usually boarding so kids are 100% outside of your view for 4 years and are forcibly made independent.
As a kid this is exactly what I believed. Parents believe otherwise, of course.
Micromanaging the completion of their school-assigned busywork is something different.
There is a fine, fine, fine line to walk between the two. Knowing how your kid is doing, asking questions, and being interested in their schooling is okay. Using it to force action without learning consequence is not.
It is, sometimes, okay for a kid to miss an assignment because they're not great at time management. That's how they learn consequences for their actions.
Anyway, you two have a fundamental disagreement, I believe, about the level of interaction and control required to be involved.
This isn't a black and white issue and as I said, it depends on their age. As I understand it we are talking about more or less preteens here.
Some people here (not you) seem to think that one shoe fits all -- that because they didn't want the parents to be involved, that's what best for everyone.
When in fact kids (and grown up people too) can be very different from each other
See the Aaron Schwartz trial which was about essentially the same thing.
No, you may not in this case :) That is why people keep emphasising the way in which the data was published. This is Sweden, not the US.
> the city didn't publish their information through an API
Yes, they did.
> and also explicitly stated that they did not want Christian's app to access their information
If you cannot reasonably be said to have circumvented any technical measures to secure the data (cryptographic keys, some sort of login, IP range blocks, etc) it is not a breach. In that case, it is just you consuming what is there for everyone (like unencrypted wifi - harvesting those signals using SDRs is not an issue because you are not bypassing any security), which is okay.
Edit: Legally okay, that is. How you feel about it ethically is up to you, I'm not talking about that.
If you don't want to make an API that exposes raw data just write a SSR app. If you want to deploy a SPA, well, you have to deploy an API as well and you need to plan around the fact that when you throw an API out into the wild and authorize people to use it (by handing out auth tokens), well, people are gonna use it.
Also it's easy to poke holes: does this mean that scraping data from html is always hacking, regardless of the expressed intent? (See recent Missouri case for what that might degenerate into.) What if it's "semantic web" and the html contains metadata specifically designed to aid data extraction?
I think the parents should own the data, and that's why it should be open. But I don't think drawing the line based on which kind of technology is used to deliver the content is a good method of adjudicating published intent.
Q) Are you able to retrieve a document using the credentials issued to you by the API? A) Yes: Then you're authorized to view it. No: You're not authorized to view it.
An API is the encoding of business rules around data access and modification. If your API is allowing access that you don't intend a user to have, fix your authorizations.
Apart from other reasons, it would almost certainly result in providers obfuscating data or reverting to SSR which is a perverse outcome.
If you want to stretch the terms, everything on and off the web that does communication is basically an API - it's just that some of those APIs use JSON to encode their data and make it really easy to access... and some of them bury it in mountains of HTML - but if the data is there the data is there. There really isn't a functional difference between a scraper that goes from TEXT => DATA and a json decoder that goes from TEXT => DATA except how easy it is to write and maintain it.
One outcome of this fight might be that government organizations are directed to use more proprietary communication methods which would be a poor outcome for everyone involved.
One implication of this project could be that government agencies in Sweden can not have private API:s.
To use more proprietary methods (private api:s) will have no effect on the constitutional law. You still have received a public document as a citizen.
I agree with the rest of your argument, but I think that this part is not necessarily a good example of the risks. Far easier would be to use a shared key between the app and the site, and thus use encryption to prevent reading the data, while still sending it in JSON over HTTPS. A pinned certificate would do the trick, at least on phones which prevent the user from inspecting app bundles.
The only way to not make an API out of publicly available data, is to encrypt it. Then nobody can read it unless they have the right keys.
Not if you're using a public key cryptosystem and the user generates their own private key. Only the public part is communicated (from the user to the source of the information), and that isn't enough to decrypt the document.
I'm pretty sure you can't request information about minors, so you can't look up the grades of your neighbour's kids or something like that.
I thought the primary school final grades were protected until you're an adult, but apparently not.
I feel like one of those old people complaining that "kids these days aren't allowed to go play on their own, climb a tree, scrape their knees, etc". But this seems really troubling on a whole new psychological level. IMO kids need autonomy to mature, which can't happen if their parent can "magically" know anything.
The stress you are talking about seems to me like the hallmark of an overbearing parent. Let your child fail sometimes. That's ok, they need to experience that, that's how you learn. You can't let them think that someone else will always take care of the things they don't. You're not doing them any favors by ensuring they always succeed.
Where are you from?
In the 7 different (pre-university) schools I went to in Sweden, none of them had paper folders, and only one had a digital platform like this. And that one was only for teachers and students, parents didn't have access.
Here is the relevant paragraph:
"För dataintrång döms den som olovligen bereder sig tillgång till en uppgift som är avsedd för automatisk behandling eller olovligen ändrar, utplånar, blockerar eller i register för in sådan uppgift"
The requisites are: "olovligen", "bereder sig tillgång till", and "uppgift som är avsedd för automatisk behandling". Christian's app full fills the requisites.
API means "Application Programming Interface" and if you think the city created or intended to create such a thing you don't know what an API is.
> If you cannot reasonably be said to have circumvented any technical measures to secure the data (cryptographic keys, some sort of login, IP range blocks, etc) it is not a breach.
You have no idea what you are talking about. There are several precedents that show that circumventing technical measures is not required for data breach to have occurred.
>For data intrusion, a person who illegally prepares access to information that is intended for automatic processing or illegally changes, deletes, blocks or registers such information is sentenced
This app does not appear to meet this definition as the data they are exposing is not intended for automatic processing, but it is exposing manually consumed data (i.e. the parents were already consuming this data manually) in a different, more accessible way.
I agree the city obviously wasn't intending to expose an API.
Which precedents are you talking about. I don't know much of anything about Swedish law so any precedent you can show would be educational for me.
Given that you know significantly more than me perhaps you could give me some examples. I'm always interested to see countries in which such jurisprudence is different from the norm, especially in Europe. Thanks :)
Would you consider `ls` an API for exposing your filesystem?
I don't see why not.
It has an interface for input and output, conforms to well known specifications and is publicly documented.
There's also multiple implementations behind the API.
We've seen such bizarre technical decisions from high courts before.
Uh, also, IANAL.
I know technologists like to think that way but very often the law doesn't work like that. They will think about intent - was the intent to give you the raw data or was the intent to convey a specific representation of it that may omit some parts or further transform or presentation layer changes to achieve a different final result to what the raw data would have conveyed?
If it is the latter then that is the "public document" you have access to, not the raw data from the API.
Seems you're saying it might be illegal to convert a HTML file to PDF format, or to use a screen reader to read the text.
I wonder in which country you are (where apparently there can be laws like that)
Say the education department has a requirement that where ever a student's grades are displayed, the legend to explain their meaning and a disclaimer about limitations is included. It could even be a hard requirement (like, they got sued once for not doing it so their lawyers have told them they must enforce this). So they are careful that in their app, that requirement is always satisfied, since failing to do that could lead to harmful confusion that could impact a student.
So in their view the "document" they made public is the fully rendered version of that. If you print it out you are effectively doing a transformation that preserves its form and essential characteristics. If you screen shot it, cut out the disclaimers and legend and then paste it on a public web site ... you could create the same problems that you are by taking raw data out of the API.
If a spy is filling out an expense report via secure email after an undercover mission to Norway (trying to figure out if Norway is hording lutefisk, I assume) which ends up resulting in a bombshell report to the public about international lutefisk accessibility then that report is clearly public - but the spy's expense report (including, I'd assume, their identity) is something that should logically be kept secret. There's some press secretary in the middle that takes the raw information and turns it into the scandal we all know it would be.
The data being transmitted over an API is not intended to be directly consumed by the public - there is, instead, an application that exists to take that raw data and transform it into something that is publicly viewable. That application is the corollary for our press secretary here.
I am concerned this might be a bigger rabbit hole than you expect. I totally agree that the town shouldn't flip out and be stupid calling in legal authorities like it currently is - but I think this might be more complex.
"The stress you are talking about seems to me like the hallmark of an overbearing parent" Maybe but I have kids, and most of the parents I know are the same way, so I guess there are a ton of us that are wrong. Your opinion may change once you have kids.
"Let your child fail sometimes. That's ok, they need to experience that, that's how you learn." Appreciate the advice and I accept it as its advice I would have given when I did not have kids, thought I had it all figured out and believed raising kids was easy.
You feed the toddler.
You pack and give food to the 5-10 year old. They feed themselves.
You supervise the 10-teenageish to gather/pack their own food.
After "teenageish" you do in fact leave them out on the hills to fend for themselves...
... and part of fending for yourself, is to know when to ask for help. But the terms of help is hopefully between two capable humans at that point.
In the school system, I would expect that teachers are not asking 5-10 year olds to do complicated tasks. But to do simple tasks outside of school hours (homework) and know how to dress on any given day is totally appropriate. Parents can assist their kid to be so organised as and how they can. But the kid themselves are responsible to the school if they aren't.
No, 5year-olds can't [all] track the three different "special" outfit days in a week and know whether to take in the clothes or dress in them in the morning. Many five-year-olds don't know which day comes after which, and most don't have literary skills to write themselves a reminder or to log on to a computer calendar and check. They need parental help. I can tell you that some of us parents find it difficult to track these things and keep everything straight, too.
Teachers absolutely do ask children to do tasks they can't achieve on their own (eg. I guess maybe rich families might have all the stuff to do an impromptu craft project but if you need pipe-cleaners and black card to make a spider for Hallowe'en then you need an adult to shop for/with you). But parent-child cooperative projects lead to better outcomes and children feel more engaged when their parents take part with them.
In our house there's no space in our kitchen for each person to make their own sandwiches, and that would be super inefficient. But yes, teenagers could take turns making for everyone; that's not good for our family though.
Little children need the habit formation brought on by asking if their homework is done everyday, how they're doing in school, and if there are any upcoming projects because they just don't have the discipline at that age usually. As they get older these checks can lessen if they've formed the correct habits. It also emphasizes that their education is important to you so that they realize it probably should be important to them.
Some children form it earlier than others but you're setting your future kid up for failure and being behind early if you think you should be totally hands off with their education.
Also all the other good parents will be ensuring their kids succeed and children start getting sorted out by grades fairly early in their education. Letting them take a bunch of preventable failures early on before they even realize the importance of education, when you do just seems cruel.
To do all the things you said, does not require me to have an itinerary app or sheet.
It requires me to ask my kid, be involved with my kid, support my kid to be organised.
The goal of school isn't just to pass the tests. If a kid fails to revise for a test, but it doesn't matter because their parent will just look up the schedule and force them to revise, then they learn nothing beyond what's in the test.
If they fail to revise and as a result do badly at the test, then next time they might actually take the initiative and revise through their own motivation, and that's a far more valuable skill than anything that might actually be in the test.
Not really. Schooling is largely targeted towards the great masses in the middle of the Bell curve. These kids will need help, prodding, and other forms of encouragement in order to keep their basic schoolwork up.
There are a smaller number of kids on the left and right tails that will, for the former, never make any effort; and for the latter, will require nothing other than support. That's just the way things are, I didn't make it that way, and there is nearly nothing that can be done to change it, and recognizing that fact will do more for most children than trying to pretend it doesn't exist.
The mass of kids who need the aid of their parents are helped when the parents can follow along. I have to use a system similar to the broken Swedish one for my kids. It's a mishmash of various systems, and sometimes teachers just give up and use something else, or use a less appropriate method (like a shared Google doc or similar). Keeping up with simple things like "when is the next math test" is a real chore.
While it would be great to be able to instill "initiative" into the souls of kids, it's unlikely to work. Unless you happen to know of a magick elixir that can do so, in which case there are a crapload of adults who could use a dose of this wizardry.
It helps to not romanticize children. Kids are dumb. Even the smart ones. They have little life experience, and their brains are still wired in such a way that they struggle to see consequences. Most of schooling is just a grind to slowly teach them enough basics that they can operate relatively efficiently. Left to their own devices, they will play games, eat candy, and believe that they will make a living as a Twitch streamer or something equally ridiculous.
A school will grade a student down, but often kids will simply just not care about that unless there's impetus to do so from their peer group or people they rely on as a role models (e.g. parents).
Also, when talking about kids... I think it's useful to clarify what age group you think a particular standard applies to. Kindergarteners need more parent care and management than secondary schoolers. It's more okay for a 6 year old to fail a test, than a 17 year old prepping for university. The stakes are different, and the mental abilities of the child are different. What is reasonable for one is not necessarily reasonable for another.
I don't want an itinerary app. I don't want to know the schedule/homework directly.
But I will absolutely ask my kid if they know, and make the point that they should know, and work with them to remediate that if required.
And as they learn I will get to step back a bit at a time and let them go for it.
Hahaha no. Have you met an 8 year old? Homo economicus they are not.
The thing is, hands off approach really works and motivates kids - but it still requires attention and correction. And it does not work with all kids at all ages.
Most people remember 15 years old self and assume kids all ages are as mature as they remember themselves. Meanwhile, most 6 years old are much less developed.
(US review) to study again something you have already learned, in preparation for an exam: We're revising (algebra) for the test tomorrow.
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/ja/dictionary/english/revis...
Expecting more from a child's brain than you do of yourself is folly.
...And how do you think that happens?
"Sarah, I can't help but notice that you have emotional regulation issues. Go get better at it."
Looking up their schedule on a website is passive involvement.
I'm relieved these systems didn't exist when I was a child.
One bad test, one missed homework, turns into a spiral of shame that makes children hide the truth out of a fear for their parent's and other trusted adults' disappointment (real or imagined). If my parents knew the truth - when I know the truth - we can fix it before it spirals into an unfixable situation, and not after.
Not all children are perfect, nor perfectly able to remember every event and assignment they have.
> study for their weekly spelling tests for 10 minutes a day
Aside: Spending 1.5+ hours per week between home and school studying spelling per se in the way students typically study spelling is an outrageous waste of time.
Arguably studying spelling per se is a waste of time in any quantity (as compared to spending that time on intrinsically motivated reading and writing, and learning how to spell as a side effect), but anyone who cares enough about this to devote hundreds of hours to it should set up some kind of spaced repetition system.
You are doing your child a disservice by ensuring they are always prepared for every challenge they face.
"so you're too close to the situation to have an unbiased view, but realize that the math is only a small part of what your child is learning here" I appreciate the perspective, on the other hand you don't have kids so have not experienced the situation at all. The idea that a parent is doing a young child a disservice by sitting with them, reviewing their homework and discussing their day is pretty strange. I wish you well when you have children of your own. Now if you will excuse me I have to go and tell Brady how to improve the snap in his throws.
Edit: "I know you have kids, so you're too close to the situation to have an unbiased view, but realize that the math is only a small part of what your child is learning here". Your argument boils down to people without kids are the best people to know what is best for kids as people with kids are too close to the situation. That makes no sense and I disagree.
It turns out that kids are not adults. Part of raising them is teaching them life skills such as time management is something that takes a of time and management. You may be lucky and have a child that manages time well, or you may have a contrarian that does what they want. Part of being that manager, is knowing exactly what you are managing and having readily available data is part of that.
Rejoice if your kid is difficult. They see a problem. Adults need to help them understand it.
You’ll pay back your initial time investment within a month or two, and you’ll end up with a dramatic improvement to efficiency and long-term retention, as well as teaching a useful tool/skill that can be put to good effect if the kid ever needs to memorize trivia for med school or bar quizzes.
Trying to cram-learn a new list of miscellaneous things every week is a fool’s game. The key to human memory is connections, context, and repeated exposure, not brute-force effort.
Personally I always just read science fiction books hidden in my lap during spelling time in school, and my teachers gave up on trying to get me to study lists of words I already knew how to spell. My older brother’s strategy was to just do poorly on spelling tests because he thought it was a waste of time: never seemed to hurt him, and decades later he can spell as well as anyone. YMMV.
Part of being a good parent in this scenario is being able to tell the difference. Data can probably help- is my kid getting a D because he doesn't turn things in, or because he can't do long division?
Sir Humphrey: Well I should have thought that being bored stiff for three quarters of the time was an excellent preparation for working life.
- Yes Minister (Season 2, Episode 7 : National Education System)
And much like their calendars, we do not ourselves set every event that appears on our calendars.
I was also absolutely terrible at remembering what's for homework and when the school exams are... so I learned to write it all down in a notebook so I didn't miss anything. No fancy parent control required. That was basically standard practice ingrained from first grade onwards.
"I feel like she would be missing out on important aspects of life; the pride and comfort that comes with self sufficiency and personal accomplishment." letting kids fail a ton of stuff in school so that they can learn better strategies sounds good in practice but in reality it will probably end up in the kid feeling terrible about themselves, and mentally resigning themselves to academic failure. Kids don't need strategy they need to know their family cares about them and are actively there to support and work with them.
On the other hand, you seem to be anti-strategy but you say that you need to 'sit down with them, go over the subject matter and discuss it with them to ensure they understand'. Isn't going over the material a strategy to do better next time?
It may be that the word 'strategy' is just ill defined here. I mean, this isn't the military, so isn't a valid strategy the application of any plan whether it be as simple as "hey kid, study before the test" or "let me teach you English-comprehension personally"?
That sounds like a reasonable approach for some parent-kid combinations. But as far as this discussion goes...
It was about an app that provided information like grades and that a test was coming up with the parent. It sounds like it would be a perfectly fine complement to your approach, no?
I don't see how it is some sort of replacement that is going to make everyone into helicopter parents. (And the problem with helicopter parents is not caused by some app.) In fact, I have trouble seeing how it intrudes more than the entirely nondigital approach to school-parent communication used when I was a kid - bring back this piece of paper with a parent's signature.
School age kids don't start at 14 when you can discuss strategies. It starts at 6 when the kid starts mostly confused and excited.
The other option is to ask in the evening "have you done homework". One of my kids would never lie and other only rarely, so it worked.
To add to it, old system was not freedom. One feature of old "parents know only what kids tell them" system was that many parents learned about issues only when inevitable end of semester report/grades came. At that point, issues grew large. Even worst, parents were surprised and shocked, tended to react badly, punish the kid , yell, beat them etc. I remember reading about flux of kids running away each time reports come.
The whole point of child raising is to raise the child. Not to go "kiddy, if you are not born organized and attentive, tough luck, we gonna do nothing and then blame you for being bad in school when you grow".
My point is that by the standards of that comment, you are micromanaging. I think those standards are ridiculous, though.
Plainly, parents of successful kids are all very involved. This sort of “you sink or swim on your own merits” nonsense is moronic bullshit.