[HN Gopher] School is Not Enough: Learning is a consequence of d...
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School is Not Enough: Learning is a consequence of doing (2021)
Author : Gooblebrai
Score : 154 points
Date : 2024-10-27 15:02 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (map.simonsarris.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (map.simonsarris.com)
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| While I agree that doing is a great way to learn some things.
|
| I have to point out the fallacy in the first paragraph. He cites
| a bunch of people who began working in their teen years who later
| went on to become famous, presumably because they started "doing"
| things so early. As a counterpoint, there are many millions of
| young people throughout history, and even now, who began "doing"
| at a young age and were nothing more than average, at best.
|
| Dropping out of high school to go be a "doer" is a great way to
| become a high school dropout, not a prodigy.
| Ekaros wrote:
| You would expect there to be lot more people making their
| living in many passion fields say sports, gaming, music, art
| and writing... There is lot of young people there, but in the
| end those making reasonable living is small fraction...
| treflop wrote:
| The people I've seen drop out of something and succeed are like
| out-of-this-world fucking good. I think if you have to ask, you
| shouldn't.
| ItsMonkk wrote:
| It's useful here to split up these people into different
| categories. Terrance Tao was a prodigy and was allowed to
| succeed within the school system beyond what others are given
| access to. Zuckerberg and Gates succeeded and didn't require
| finishing college - not really dropping out.
|
| Indie Gaming slant on these following examples, and I suspect
| that this sector is above average for this type of thing, but
| I suspect if I looked I could find many dropouts in other
| fields. On the other hand, Carmack dropped out of college,
| Jonathan Blow dropped out of college. Markus Persson dropped
| out of high school. Eric Barone never found a job despite
| graduating from college. All of these people are out-of-this-
| world fucking good, but were not at the time that they
| dropped out, which means according to your guide should not
| have gone on to create what they did.
| treflop wrote:
| They shouldn't have. Not everyone needs fit an example.
|
| Let's take Markus: before he made Minecraft, he made
| relatively mediocre games that didn't get much traction.
| Minecraft was an exact copy of someone else's game
| (Infiniminer) that was posted on the same forum that he
| went to. He saw potential when its original creator did not
| (the creator of Infiniminer got angry that people extended
| his game so he shut it down). Minecraft blew up. The games
| that Markus made after Minecraft? Relatively mediocre
| again.
|
| So what can you learn from the example of Markus? Nothing.
| Nothing at all. Sometimes you just get lucky.
| treflop wrote:
| FYI the creator of Infiniminer did eventually make some
| moderately successful games.
|
| SpaceChem is one of his games. Some of you may have
| played it.
|
| I think he has openly admitted that he Fucked Up.
| mhuffman wrote:
| >The people I've seen drop out of something and succeed are
| like out-of-this-world fucking good.
|
| And frequently from connected and/or rich families. That can
| be very useful in success, it turns out.
| wheresmycraisin wrote:
| And staying in school through college is a great way to be in
| debt for the rest of your life and regret having a useless
| degree.
| electriclove wrote:
| So true.. we need to make college ultra low cost, accessible
| to all, AND useful
| fallingknife wrote:
| We have already dumbed college down so much to make it
| accessible to so many. The last thing we need to do is dumb
| it down further so that everybody can go. 17 years of
| education isn't really any better than 13. The only reason
| a college degree was ever worth anything was because it was
| taught at a high level that most people would never be able
| to pass.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Ultra low cost means colleges will get filled with students
| who are more interested in partying than learning.
|
| When it costs one money, one is going to be motivated to
| get the value out of it. I.e. people do not value things
| they get for free.
| drakonka wrote:
| Are students less motivated or disciplined in the US than
| other parts of the developed world where higher education
| is free/compensated?
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| Many educators have pointed out that cuts in government
| funding for higher education in the US now mean that the
| student is the paying customer and, as they say, "the
| customer is always right". Institutions have financial
| motivations to overlook students' incompetence, cheating,
| and other misbehavior as long as they keep paying tuition
| fees.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I bet those students with free rides (and free loans)
| would do better in college if they were required to hold
| down a job to pay for some of that.
|
| I know I became more diligent with my studies when I
| started writing tuition checks out of my earnings.
| WalterBright wrote:
| It's just human nature, and human nature is the same
| everywhere.
|
| I know a German who spent over 20 years in the German
| university system, taking advantage of every free program
| so she wouldn't have to get a job.
|
| For a well known trope, the spawn of first generation
| wealthy people tend to dissipate that wealth. They didn't
| work for it, and so they don't value it. It's why people
| look down on nepotism. Things not earned are not valued.
| drakonka wrote:
| And I know an American who spent years trying to get
| through a degree program that he never ended up
| completing because he was too burned out having to work
| multiple jobs to live at the same time. Just like I know
| plenty of Swedes who have and continue to study,
| developing their knowledge and curiosity for free while
| being enthusiastically productive members of society. We
| all have anecdotes.
| haccount wrote:
| There's large parts of the world where college and
| university have zero tuition fees and still doesn't turn
| into ceaseless roman orgies.
| WalterBright wrote:
| One then wonders why so many foreign students come to
| American universities and pay high tuitions when there
| are better free ones at home.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Cheap studies don't turn students into mindless
| debauchery-loving zombies, but they also put a pretty
| hard cap on the professors' salaries. As long as your
| school is really a not-for-profit organization, salaries
| will be mediocre.
|
| Elite American universities can attract top scientific
| talent from overseas with good salaries and very well
| equipped labs, because they have the money. This, in
| turn, attracts foreign students.
| pyrale wrote:
| Money is not the only way to weed out underachieving
| students, or to motivate the good ones.
|
| It's not a theoretic point either, plenty of universities
| do it right now.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I never said it was the only way.
|
| But it is effective.
| WalterBright wrote:
| My dad (career military) told me that army boots lasted 3
| times longer when the GIs bought them out of their
| uniform allowance (and could keep unspent funds), rather
| than being issued boots. He always laughed about that.
|
| When I was old enough to do work, he'd have me buy my own
| shoes :-)
| WalterBright wrote:
| It's easy to distinguish the worthless degrees from the
| valuable ones. Google the starting salaries of each major.
|
| If a person picks a useless major, the decision is on them.
| huuhee3 wrote:
| Society (and parents) still should have some responsibility
| on educating young people about career prospects of
| different degrees. Too many in older generations think any
| degree will land their children a job, and thus encourage
| them to study whatever they like.
| Ekaros wrote:
| I think school system is hugely failing students if they
| are not instructed and then capable of spending one or
| two afternoons on simply googling and looking at career
| prospects and what different jobs actually might entail.
| And then at least with minimal criticality thinking is
| that for them.
|
| I am pretty sure there is no careers you cannot find some
| information on with rather simple searches.
| ryandrake wrote:
| This belief that "a degree, any degree" is sufficient
| must have started after I went to University (mid-90s),
| because when I was a teenager, it was drilled into us
| that we need to not only go to University, but we need to
| major in something lucrative. Nobody, from parents to
| guidance counsellors, was saying "Oh, just go to college
| and major in anything, it doesn't matter!"
| WalterBright wrote:
| The younger generation that grew up with Google never
| think to google "starting salary for [my] major"? They
| need to be coached to do it?
|
| Try it. Gott im Himmel!
| Nevermark wrote:
| > It's easy to distinguish the worthless degrees from the
| valuable ones. Google the starting salaries of each major.
|
| Agreed.
|
| > If a person picks a useless major, the decision is on
| them.
|
| Not just them. Their parents, the school, etc. There are so
| many "simple" things to know. Too many for them to always
| be obvious, even when they "obviously" should be.
|
| A mistake that a million young students make is a mistake
| worth updating the educational system to handle better.
|
| And as an objective practical matter, it is always on
| society. Society systematically loses masses of individual
| potential by not providing more guidance when it matters.
| (And perversely turning education into an easy loan
| factory, regardless of expected income, the opposite of
| good guidance.)
| WalterBright wrote:
| I picked my major entirely on my own. My parents didn't
| advise me about it, nor did the school.
|
| I have been known to advise young people that their
| intended major was akin to taking a vow of poverty, and
| they all insisted they were following their dream, and
| are now working at minimum wage jobs.
|
| I don't have a whole lot of sympathy for students who
| discover after they graduate that their chosen major has
| no value. How do they go through 4 years of college never
| checking such things? Google "starting salary for history
| majors", for example.
|
| At Caltech, everyone knew that ChE paid the best, and AY
| degrees were worthless (this was long before google). The
| AY majors usually did a double major - AY for fun, and
| the other degree for money.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| So which undergrad majors do you propose Caltech abolishes?
| I can think of a couple with awful starting salaries.
| WalterBright wrote:
| As I mentioned before, there are no jobs for AY majors,
| even from Caltech. I don't suggest abolishing it. There
| were many AY majoring students, and they had open eyes
| about it. There wasn't any whining about it.
| derbOac wrote:
| These kinds of essays resonate with me but there's always
| something about them that seems really off and misguided at the
| same time.
|
| The survivorship bias you point to is a big part of it. Reading
| the biography of Carnegie, just as one example, strikes me as
| kind of egregious because it quickly becomes obvious he was
| part of a child labor system and by counterargument succeeded
| largely because he was one of the lucky poor given access to
| private education by a wealthy benefactor. You could just as
| easily turn Carnegie into a counterexample, of what happens
| when you give a child an education with lots of attention. He
| also happened to be in the right place and right time, in the
| railroads just as they were taking off.
|
| The focus on the schools too seems really misguided to me. Most
| of the problems with society today, in my opinion, are due to
| all the formal roadblocks placed up by bureaucratic red tape,
| instantiated by the labyrinths of government or private human
| resources departments.
|
| There are just so many things that require such and such
| degree, or such and such experience, not because they're
| _actually_ necessary, but because various legalistic
| bureaucracies require them. Some of the examples in the essay
| could happen today, but most of them probably not. The essay
| seems to quietly acknowledge this but then turns attention away
| from it, probably because it undermines its thesis.
|
| In my own career I've heard lots of stories like this from the
| past, both close to me institutionally and more distally.
| People just sort of showing up somewhere and chatting and then
| getting a career because they came there to do the work, were
| respected on the basis of conversation, and had a path forward.
| None of that would happen today. There would be rubber stamping
| required, certificates and degrees in a specific field or
| subfield, with no attention to whether or not the person has
| the actual ability and background in the area to do the tasks
| involved.
|
| Schooling today I think has problems, and I agree with the
| premise that doing things is important. But I think schools
| teach to what is out there in the world, and students are doing
| things in school curricula all the time with no acknowledgment
| later because you're seen as commensurate with a degree. It's
| not a problem with schools, it's a problem with having
| vocational paths with opportunities be open to people who have
| the skills and abilities, but just don't have quite the right
| credentials or connections. Maybe it's always been that way,
| but something about today's society makes the examples provided
| in the essay seem irrelevant today for all sorts of reasons
| that have nothing to do with the schools themselves.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| > Most of the problems with society today, in my opinion, are
| due to all the formal roadblocks placed up by bureaucratic
| red tape, instantiated by the labyrinths of government or
| private human resources departments.
|
| There must be a balance. Without regulation bridges collapse,
| trains of toxic chemicals derail, and people get poisoned
| even just by eating and drinking. With too much regulation,
| innovation is stifled, usually because regulators were
| captured.
|
| The US seems to have the worst of both, decades of captured
| regulators and people being harmed by powerful business
| interests. Meanwhile the public education system gets
| undermined constantly by a self fulfilling cycle of neglect
| and deverting funding to private schools.
|
| (Of course in a polarized electorate it's risky to admit both
| sides have a point, and try to work toward a productive
| compromise. After all, we can't have our candidate in the
| wings lose because our opponent incumbent got a 'win'--even
| if it is most of what we wanted anyway.)
| em-bee wrote:
| it's not the regulations that are at issue, but people
| demanding irrelevant credentials.
|
| after a few decades working as a programmer, do my
| highschool or university grades really still matter? yet
| some companies ask for them (notably canonical, they are
| also asking how i did in math in highschool. wat!?)
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| It can be both.
|
| University credentials probably have more to do with
| proof one has grit, or social signaling. Unless it's for
| a specialized role that needs a certain degree.
| ryandrake wrote:
| > The US seems to have the worst of both, decades of
| captured regulators and people being harmed by powerful
| business interests. Meanwhile the public education system
| gets undermined constantly by a self fulfilling cycle of
| neglect and deverting funding to private schools.
|
| > (Of course in a polarized electorate [...]
|
| Although the electorate is polarized, the two major parties
| do not significantly differ on support for things like
| regulatory capture, the revolving door between business and
| government, and the ability to frictionlessly convert back-
| and-forth between corporate money and political power.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| They do differ, as Lina Kahn is proving and others before
| her. Sadly their efforts are too often sabotaged by
| Republicans who stand in the way or roll back the work.
| fallingknife wrote:
| > Dropping out of high school to go be a "doer" is a great way
| to become a high school dropout, not a prodigy.
|
| That is only because our system is so heavily built around
| bureaucracy and credentials. Regardless of his skills or
| intelligence, the HS dropout will face discrimination for not
| having his pieces of paper so intense that it would be illegal
| if done against any other group.
| pyrale wrote:
| Could it be that education actually has value sometimes?
| Aerroon wrote:
| Considering how little most adults seem to remember about
| what was taught in high school I'm not entirely sure how
| much value it provides. It sends me up the wall when people
| can't help their kids with the excuse of "I don't know how
| to do that" despite having done that same thing in school.
| Pick up the damn book and refresh your memory then.
| pyrale wrote:
| You barely remember anything from your toddler years, but
| they were some of the most impactful in your education.
|
| Having had to get back into electricity recently, sure I
| didn't remember a thing, but it came back much faster
| than the first time.
| fallingknife wrote:
| I remember what I learned. I know how to walk, talk, and
| use a toilet.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| I don't remember many of the advanced algebra classes
| anymore and I wouldn't be able to tell you why precisely
| the polynomial equations of 5th and higher degree aren't
| solvable in radicals (has something to do with sequences
| of normal subgroups, eh...)
|
| But studying advanced maths forced me to learn to think
| rigorously and take various minuscule details into
| account, and that skill is valuable.
| fsckboy wrote:
| > _Considering how little most adults seem to remember
| about what was taught in high school I 'm not entirely
| sure how much value it provides._
|
| maybe it's an elite small percentage who push society
| forward and improve it, and it's important that they are
| discovered and learn by learning and not as important
| what the rest do with their education.
|
| I think society should be organized around the common
| (wo)man, but the common man wants the best doctor when he
| needs medical care, and the common woman wants the best
| aircraft designer to have designed any plane she flies
| on.
|
| that's not to say that we should not look for better ways
| to educate people, perhaps we can find more doctors and
| plane designers, but just because 10% (or whatever) is
| all we get out of education doesn't make our education
| system a bust.
| hinkley wrote:
| With one exception, my favorite CS classes, by the test of
| which ones engaged me and changed my trajectory later in my
| career, had no programming. One was a sequence of classes
| about logic and set theory, the other distributed computing.
| The latter in particular has come up again and again and
| again as a blind spot for coworkers, many of whom did finish
| their degree or even a masters.
|
| I got much more vocational coding in than the vast majority
| of my classmates before I dropped out, and not all of the
| theoretical stuff has been applicable. But what was has been
| invaluable.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| I wouldn't say it's a fallacy. Something can be necessary
| without being sufficient. Doing is necessary to learn to do,
| and certainly to learn to do well, but it's no guarantee of
| outcome.
| hinkley wrote:
| The world is full of "rules" that the best among us break.
| There is no progress from following exactly the path of people
| before you, but the world also has little capacity for people
| who break too many rules.
|
| You have to really understand why you can break the rules and
| still succeed. And if you have to use the word "stupid" or
| "sheep" in your explanation you're most likely wrong.
| unglaublich wrote:
| This article heavily relies on the assumption that schools do not
| allow for other learning modalities than passively consuming
| information, which is false.
| barry-cotter wrote:
| School is not a place for being creative or productive. It
| prepares students for tests that they will eventually use to
| either get a job or go to university. In those places some
| people will make something people want (be productive) or have
| the opportunity to do something new (be creative).
| Jap2-0 wrote:
| This sounds like a dismissal based on a personal anecdote,
| rather than knowledge of what can be (and increasingly is!)
| done in a school. Many working in education have encouraged
| more interactive and project-based learning, such as PLTW[1]
| in STEM, and others[2] in other areas. Of course, it turns
| out that designing that while also teaching 6-8 classes a day
| to a couple hundred students is rather challenging.
|
| I wouldn't disagree that school isn't a place for being
| productive, if productivity is defined as "making something
| people want." By that definition all learning is
| unproductive.
|
| [1] https://www.pltw.org/
|
| [2] For maths, reference the works of Jo Boaler, Peter
| Liljedahl, etc.; most standards I have seen in social studies
| in recent years have inquiry as a key component, and I know
| several teachers who make use of projects there; there is
| often agency in choosing projects in art, particularly in
| upper grades; and so on.
| fallingknife wrote:
| Forcing someone to sit in school all day and then do homework
| after that renders the fact that they are technically also
| allowed to learn on their own in their remaining free time
| pretty much irrelevant.
| fjasdyfs wrote:
| Not everyone has access to preparatory STEM schools
| nwhnwh wrote:
| Why it is false?
| inshard wrote:
| Agency is also possibly an innate ability not necessarily
| cultivated at school or by focusing on some useful early pursuit.
| qball wrote:
| >not necessarily cultivated at school
|
| Agency is actively suppressed at school; that's one of its core
| functions.
| alwa wrote:
| I'm confused as to how this argues that precocious kids'
| situation today is different from the past. Is the idea that the
| situations of self-made tycoons past--telegraph operator
| supporting his family by age 16, and so on--were somehow typical
| of youth in those days?
|
| Isn't the more apt comparison between "pointless" schoolwork
| today and the "pointless" menial labor that would characterize
| more typical adolescences in early industrial times?
|
| For that matter, between interest groups and national contests
| and wholesome YouTube role models aand makerspaces and even open-
| source, where kids can ease their way into meaningful
| contributions--all against a backdrop of world-historical
| material security--isn't it an even larger handful of exceptional
| kids today with the means to break out and "do" than in the past?
|
| Why should we look to the experiences of the exceptional few to
| understand what works best for kids on average?
| simonsarris wrote:
| > I'm confused as to how this argues that precocious kids'
| situation today is different from the past.
|
| Later I invite the counterfactual:
|
| "Imagine if Carnegie and Da Vinci were instead compelled to
| stay in school for 10 more years. What would have happened?"
|
| and,
|
| "A 13-year-old Steve Jobs once called Bill Hewlett--whose
| number was simply listed in the phone book-and received a
| summer job at Hewlett Packard. This would be unsurprising in
| Carnegie's time, was certainly surprising for 1968, and is
| culturally verboten today."
| chowells wrote:
| > "Imagine if Carnegie and Da Vinci were instead compelled to
| stay in school for 10 more years. What would have happened?"
|
| Impossible to predict accurately, since so much of
| opportunity is luck. Maybe they would have made better
| connections in school. Maybe they would not have. Maybe they
| would have made the exact same connections.
|
| It's possible to make a statistical argument that since they
| got such ridiculously unlikely opportunities, any deviation
| from the path they took would have been bad for them. But
| then you're no longer arguing about the value of education,
| you're just making observations about a pair of lucky people.
| And that's not compelling at all, when you don't address the
| entire outcome distribution for people making the exact same
| choices.
| nobodyandproud wrote:
| > This would be unsurprising in Carnegie's time, was
| certainly surprising for 1968, and is culturally verboten
| today.
|
| A telephone was only accessible to businesses and the wealthy
| during Carnegie's time, so no surprised there.
|
| A better analogy would be a postal letter.
| tialaramex wrote:
| Trivially untrue. Inability to learn except by doing is a defect,
| which renders you extremely vulnerable to critical errors - you
| won't be able to learn about these errors since making them
| (which you find you need to do in order to learn) is fatal.
|
| That doesn't make learning by doing a bad idea, or even
| necessarily a poor first choice, but if it's the only way for you
| to learn that's a problem.
| pluto_modadic wrote:
| Saying that a whole style of learning for neurodivergent folks
| like Temple Grandin is kinda misguided. They don't need to
| learn by doing by everything, and I'm sure you knew that.
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| It's even more nuanced than that, there's the type of task,
| the person's learning style, the makeup of the specific task,
| the manner of feedback from performing it, whether there's
| flexibility in performing it quickly or slowly. Only chronic
| take-havers and bloggers will reduce it to one or two
| variables.
| ehnto wrote:
| I don't think they were suggesting that at all. It is not an
| on/off feature flag, people learn in different ways. People
| learn in different measures of many ways, even in the one
| person.
|
| School typically only caters to one type of learning, and it
| actually wouldn't matter which type since only focusing on one
| always leaves out the other.
|
| Lastly, if you can only learn one way, and it is a defect, what
| do you expect them to do? Genetically modify themselves?
| Chemically correct themselves? They're kids, they need to be
| catered for, they can't do it for themselves.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| So your claim is that one can learn how to do something simply
| by being told, and not doing any practice problems, thought
| exercises, reviewing solutions, etc?
|
| No, your claim is even stronger - that anyone who doesn't learn
| that way has a learning disability?
|
| I think either version is far too strong a statement.
|
| Regardless I think it's trivially true that one learns by doing
| primarily or possibly exclusively. When I think of all the
| practice problems or "think through implications" that I have
| to do before being competent enough to claim i know
| something... Let alone my first attempt at applying the
| knowledge. That's all "doing".
| wrs wrote:
| Based on my several decades of life experience, I would say the
| point is there's hardly anything useful that you can learn
| _without doing_. And there are many things that you can't do
| without leaving the traditional classroom environment. That's
| why schools have chem labs, wood shops, kitchens,
| orchestras...oh wait, do they have those anymore?
|
| Another point is that you can't really learn a skill unless
| there are _stakes_ - a real goal you need to accomplish, real
| customers, real coworkers. Grades aren't real stakes; at least
| I didn't regard them as such.
|
| I've seen this over and over through the years as new college
| grads arrive who know a lot _about_ things but have no idea how
| to _do_ those things. Unless they went to a school with a good
| co-op program.
| OutOfHere wrote:
| School was the most hated period of life. It's so much more fun
| to learn by oneself, by reading and watching coupled with doing.
|
| I think we've yet to stumble upon a form that combines these
| three actions into one medium. Perhaps AI-guided doing (in
| simulation) will be the way.
| pxc wrote:
| > It's so much more fun to learn by oneself
|
| Maybe if you're stuck in a classroom with unmotivated people,
| or your classmates are much slower than you, or the class is
| huge and your teacher doesn't give a shit about teaching. But
| in the absence of a severe case of some incidental problem like
| that, I've found the opposite to be true.
|
| Besides that, a lot of classes _are_ centered primarily on
| learning by oneself anyway. Many of my favorite classes in
| college were simply too fast-paced to allow students to rely on
| lecture time to pick up the material. Most of the learning was
| driven by out-of-class study, while lecture time was
| essentially used (along with office hours) as a chance to ask
| questions and catch up. In those classes I had the dual
| pleasures of exploring the material in solitude and testing my
| understanding with others who likewise were exploring the same
| wonders (and sometimes struggling with them) for the first
| time. It was great!
|
| Admittedly, I was generally extremely unhappy in high school,
| and even in college I often felt frustrated with the
| arbitrariness of assignments and grades. But for me, as
| studying _with others_ , especially people who were smart and
| passionate, was one of the best parts of both. (Generally,
| college was better due to a greater sense of freedom and
| (eventually) classes that were much more challenging in a way
| that felt meaningful.)
| Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote:
| Not sure about you, but in class I was forced to study an
| enormous amount of stuff I didn't care about, so I needed to
| memorize and pass the test, that's it.
|
| Wasted time.
|
| Yeah the class composition probably matters, I wish a
| universe where what you described make sense.
| xrd wrote:
| Does this mean I shouldn't worry about my 11 year old son and his
| fixation on video games right now? It looks like you either
| figure out when you are 12 or 13 or you don't. That's the moment
| parents should be watching carefully.
| Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote:
| It's so hard. My passion for videogames funnelled my passion
| for programming, which eventually became stronger, but there is
| no doubt I played too much videogames at that age (damn
| mmorpgs)
| youoy wrote:
| School is not enough, learning by doing is not enough... The
| sweet spot lies as always in the middle. Certain things can only
| be learnt by doing, some things are learnt x100 faster if you
| learn the theory first.
|
| The most valuable thing is learning when to apply each type of
| learning, and the best way to learn that is with different kind
| of mentors. I guess the well known people that he lists as
| examples had a lot of those. For me that is the differentiator.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Those that can't do, teach.
| youoy wrote:
| And those that can't teach?
| fallingknife wrote:
| A lot of them teach
| cryptoboy2283 wrote:
| Become scrum masters
| treflop wrote:
| I present a different analysis:
|
| - All of us are more naturally talented at some things.
|
| - When you end up working with your natural talents, you have it
| easier than everyone else.
|
| - Working in your talents often translates to passion, and that's
| how you get the so called "agency."
|
| - To find your talents, you have to try everything once (e.g.
| wakeboarding, tennis, programming, accounting).
|
| - More well off parents can offer their kids more opportunities
| to find their talents.
|
| - Schooling and "doing" are orthogonal to finding your talents.
| Neither learning or doing will tell you your talents, passion, or
| give you agency, but you should do them both anyway.
| have_faith wrote:
| Not sure if I agree with this. Obviously if you have a natural
| talent for something, it's easier to be good at it. Most people
| though can be very good, great even, at something they simply
| decide to practice. Most people don't "actively" practice
| though, even if they are "doing" something. Purposeful practice
| is very different from doing.
| treflop wrote:
| I'm not saying talent is enough.
|
| I'm just speaking from my experience. I put a lot of practice
| into things that I am also talented at and life is good.
| _shrug_
|
| I put practice into other things like cooking and music too
| but I'm not going to become a chef or play music for anything
| but fun.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| There is a point he's not making that's important here: the
| ability to learn and absorb knowledge peaks when people are
| young. What you do around that time matters. If you waste your
| time, you never get it back later.
|
| The modern education system emerged as part of the industrial
| revolution. It's purpose was not to produce enlightened
| individuals but to produce productive/obedient laborers. People
| needed to know how to read/write and do simple calculations.
| Maybe a bit of math on the side. And there had to be some kind of
| system to rescue the really smart boys (mostly at the time) from
| being wasted on blue collar work and get them on some track to
| higher education. But mostly universities were for the upper
| class. You were born into that, not cherry picked from the lower
| classes. Education was about getting lower class kids up-to a
| lowish standard so they could be productive. And modern education
| hasn't really improved that much.
|
| We have an opportunity to rethink education. Like many, I had
| lots of different teachers in high school and in university. Some
| really amazing, some not that great. Being a high school teacher
| is a tough job. It's a very rigid program that is sort of
| standardized for everyone. Mostly there isn't a lot of wiggle
| room to go beyond that. Lots of kids have trouble dealing with
| that and they kind of drop out or fail.
|
| The opportunity with AI is that education can be much more
| personalized now. Anybody can get access to that. For free even.
| Education no longer has to be a group thing where everybody does
| the same things, gets the same tests, and then get the OK stamp
| of approval to be unleashed on an indifferent job market. Lots of
| people just coast through high school so they can finally start
| their lives not realizing that they just burned up their most
| important quarter of it.
|
| I love Neal Stephenson's the The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's
| Illustrated Primer which is about a poor young orphaned girl
| getting her hands on an AI powered book that starts teaching her
| and adapts to her context. That's slowly becoming science fact
| with modern LLMs.
| grugagag wrote:
| Don't throw the babies with the bath water, education as a
| group thing is good as long as all in the group are at the
| similar level, it becomes even efficient when students
| stimulate one another. Also being part of the group students
| learn more about interacting in groups. Then problem is that
| these groups are mostly made up of students at different
| levels, abilities and so on.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > There is a point he's not making that's important here: the
| ability to learn and absorb knowledge peaks when people are
| young.
|
| Maybe that's true, maybe it's not.
|
| Either way, at 60, on a daily basis in my life, almost all the
| skills I use were thing I learned after I turned 25 (and most
| of them after 30). That includes cooking, woodworking,
| programming, swimming and host of others.
|
| My stepfather used to say (he probably still would if given the
| chance) that the point of school (by which he meant what in the
| US is called K-12) is _learning how to learn_. I agree with
| 100% (surprise!) - the reason I have been able to learn things
| in later life is because I got an excellent opportunity to
| learn how to learn when I was younger.
|
| > The opportunity with AI is that education can be much more
| personalized now.
|
| I don't even know what this means. The best education consists
| of a situation (sometimes created by a teacher) that provides a
| given individual with the opportunity and motivation to acquire
| some knowledge about something. I do not see what AI can
| possibly have to do with creating such situations.
| botanical76 wrote:
| Introducing AI into education will be non trivial. This is
| difficulty is observable already in my experience.
|
| When offering advice on how to learn how to program, I have to
| heavily recommend that students try their best to avoid the use
| of AI. Whereas previously the best advice I could give was to
| "build something", it is now possible to build a piece of
| software without understanding it at all. I have observed this
| myself with Rust; I have built a few programs now by repeatedly
| prompting AI models. I have even been quite engaged in
| designing the architecture, guiding the programs towards
| patterns that my intuition as a programmer says will be good
| for Rust too. The software works, but I can't help but feel I
| have learned nothing at all. Building something is now
| insufficient to learn, at least in the domain of programming.
|
| I feel there will be far more compilations we will have to
| address in order to benefit from AI in education. That said, I
| am still optimistic that it will be a net positive force.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > It's purpose was not to produce enlightened individuals but
| to produce productive/obedient laborers.
|
| I hear this all the time, but I've never seen any evidence of
| it.
| swatcoder wrote:
| In reflecting on the history of formal education, it's
| necessry to separate the Oxbride tradition of grooming future
| aristocrats and nobles from the rise of compulsory public
| education at the end of the 19th century, which is a responds
| to a variety of challenges raised by both industrialization
| and modern cities.
|
| For a retrospective review of that history, with extensive
| citations, Ivan Illich's Deschooling Society can get you
| started on your own research. His book is fundamentally
| polemical because he was invested in his opinions about the
| past, the present, and the future, but the bibliography and
| citations prove useful for this topic even if you don't buy
| his summary perspective.
|
| There are of course many other primary and secondary
| treatments contemporary to the time, that you can review
| without reading through Illich's polemics, some of which are
| very easy to find in the Harper's Magazine archives.
|
| What you'll find, broadly, os that there was very little said
| of the idealism we now attribute to enlightment and almost
| all of the dialog about modern public education, especially
| compulsory -- by both proponets and critics -- was quite
| practical, focused on what schooling and education would
| acheive (or sacrifice) for industry, social cohesion,
| cultural diversity/uniformity, crime, child welfare,
| political alignment, and national identity.
|
| IOW, "I've never seen any evidence" is understandable (we
| each only have so much time to study), but it's not for some
| lack of that evidence.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > Education no longer has to be a group thing where everybody
| does the same things
|
| The problem with self-directed education is one does not know
| which direction to go. By following a program, you're following
| a path of learning what you need to know that you don't know
| you need to know.
|
| For example, what kind of math would you need to know to do
| mechanical engineering? Hydraulics? Electronics? Physics?
| Astrogation? Signal processing? It's all different.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| It doesn't have to be self directed but it can still be
| individualized. One on one teaching is the goto solution for
| the rich and wealthy. With AI that can be extended to
| everyone.
|
| Schools don't really adapt to the individual currently. It
| works for the average student but there are lots of students
| that don't do well with that. And it doesn't really get the
| best out of people.
| Nifty3929 wrote:
| I think the title doesn't go far enough, as it removes the
| "sufficient" part but leaves alone the "necessary" part.
|
| School is neither necessary nor sufficient for achievement.
| Certainly education, in some form, must be required. E.g.
| learning to read and perform basic math, but "school" as it's
| known today is not the only way, nor likely even a good way, to
| learn those skills.
| vm wrote:
| The author hits on a powerful point that is getting missed in
| this HN discussion. That is: talented and driven students are
| limited by the US education system.
|
| Some of those young people cultivate skill by getting practice
| during youth. Doing that while young builds a compounding machine
| of personal interest + confidence + progress.
|
| I have never seen broad data to support this, so discussions
| revolve around anecdotes[1]. That's fine by me though because we
| have countless examples of the legends of their craft who fit
| that mold: bill gates, zuck, warren buffett, taylor swift,
| mozart, da vinci... the list is long.
|
| No single system will work for every single student. But that
| isn't the point. The point is that the best of the best deserve
| to feed their interests at a young age, which the current US
| upbringing limits. How many more bill gates and zuck-level
| creators could the world have if more talented youths could
| cultivate their talents very early in life?
|
| [1] Although not broad data, the thinking behind these works
| build on a similar point: Thiel Fellowship
| [https://thielfellowship.org/]; PG's essay How to Do Great Work
| [https://paulgraham.com/greatwork.html]
| heroprotagonist wrote:
| Well, just look at the design. State education is designed to
| get ~97% of pupils to some minimum education level.
|
| That means the coursework and schedules are designed
| specifically for the lowest common denominator of a student.
|
| This means that if you're anything but, say, the bottom 20% of
| students, public school isn't an efficient use of time for you.
| You should be learning more in the same amount of time.
|
| There are a lot of other problems with it too, but that's the
| most egregious. If education was more efficient, a lot of the
| other problems with it could be solved as well.
| haccount wrote:
| With a competent tutor, material and emotional support you
| don't need to cultivate talents, you simply create complex
| skills. You typically don't search so much for a hidden talent
| in a child as leverage their neuroplasticity and accelerated
| learning to lay a life-long foundation.
|
| But this doesn't come cheap, and tutoring is also going a bit
| out of style, regrettably.
| pyrale wrote:
| Well I wouldn't mind a few less Zucks and a few more e.g.
| Doudna.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| There's a fundamental reason why doing, and learning from doing,
| is necessary to learn (to do), and can't be replaced with book
| learning.
|
| Maybe stated like this it sounds obvious, but it runs counter to
| people expecting LLMs to learn to do things for themselves by
| "book learning" (pre-training), unless regurgitating artifacts
| from the training set is all you need.
|
| The issue is that intelligence and action are prediction (with
| motor cortex output predictions driving muscles and becoming
| action - a useful insight/framing from Jeff Hawkins)... In order
| to act well, you need to learn to predict/react well, but these
| predictions need to be based on your OWN state per the sensory
| inputs you are receiving. Learning to predict what someone else
| would do (being book smart) doesn't help when you're the actor,
| where the predictions need to be based on your own internal
| state.
| dang wrote:
| An earlier version of this article was discussed at the time:
|
| _The most precious resource is agency_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27695181 - July 2021 (325
| comments)
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| High school dropout, here.
|
| I didn't drop out, because I was wildly successful.
|
| Exactly the opposite, in fact.
|
| The process of climbing out of the wreckage is what helped me to
| become _[moderately]_ successful.
|
| I doubt anyone here, would be impressed by my career path, but
| I'm happier than I ever thought that I could be, now.
|
| I think the apprenticeship model is really the best way to learn
| in a practical manner.
|
| But that involves things like staying with employers for more
| than a year, and also, employers treating their employees in a
| way that makes them want to stay.
|
| It also works with unions, because they have a whole
| infrastructure, wrapped around it.
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