Where do the children play?

Reading the US 8-12 year olds' stats made me flinch, because as someone grow up in the middle east this is inconceivable. I guess I'll dive into rabbit hole about modern-day stats of Europe and other places to compare.

Same phone addiction in Europe as elsewhere. No way to fight addictive stuff. Most parents don’t even try or care. Add tragic demographics and 8-12 year olds are all alone with their phones.

Let’s talk about special school system here in Bavaria (Germany). Kids from specific area go to same school for the first 4 grades. Afterwards they are divided between little geniuses going into „Gymnsasium“, average ones going to „Realschule“ and good-for-nothings going to „Mittelschule“. For the first years kids move between schools and later between classes according their preferred specialization. No way to make friendships when kids come and go. Obviously there is nobody to play with left. Only reliable phone and games there. And nice videos there. Education system actively pushes kids into phones since real connections can’t happen.

I see lots of negativity here. Folks, do you really believe, that throwing a child into new environment every other year is the way to craft friendships in the real world?

agreed. the whole system is bonkers and screams of elitism. like you are either born smart or you'll never make it. fortunately there is also gesamtschule. which does away with that, there is no distinction between levels. only your grades have to be good enough by grade 10 to make it into the oberstufe (yrs 11-13).

i barely made it through, and i would not have made it without that because neither my parents nor me had any ambitions, so switching schools would not have worked for me.

when i was younger we moved around a lot. different problem but same result, i didn't make any friends in school because we kept witching schools. by the time we stayed in one location it was already to late.

The other side of the coin is that you have ambitious kids in a class who are distracted and sometimes even bullied by kids with zero ambitions.

You think that's more fair to the ambitious kids when 2/3 of the class think it's cool to NOT learn anything and playing pecking order games all day?

that's not the other side of the coin. that's the other end of the extreme. there are other solutions that can accommodate both needs. the problem with splitting up schools is that kids are not always ambitions and faster, nor always slower or lazy. that changes over time. a better system needs to have the flexibility to adjust for kids as they are developing and growing. switching schools back and forth is the worst way to achieve that. i'd rather find extracurriula activities that keep the kids interested than force them to switch schools. the problem is teacher training and an inflexible education system. the ability to switch schools does not make the system any more flexible.

a better school lets you choose a more or less academic focus if that is what the kids want.

the best system btw is montesori where kids really can learn at their own pace. it is designed in such a way that even within a class different kids work on different projects. they even mix ages so that younger ambitious kids can work with older ones.

I agree on the needed flexibility part.

> the best system btw is montesori

I disagree on that. See a recent HN discussion on Montessori: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45674002

tl;dr: it works for some kids, just like the current German system works for some (other) kids.