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Discussion (8 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
The author is essentially saying "you're doing education wrong" to students who never signed up for the author's version of what education is for. Students are making a rational economic calculation: they need a degree to get a job.
Except it's not true. They don't need a degree to get a job. Maybe they need a degree to get a very specific job, but then they will be doing what the degree taught, and so they might as well learn how to do it.
This whole "I need a degree to get a job" is the problem. It's how people end up with $200k in student loans working front line retail.
The default natural state rewards value creation. Corrupt/artificial systems don't, so there are exceptions. If students reframe their reasoning from "get a degree to get a job" to "learn how to create lots of value for others in a way I find sustainable and satisfying" they are far more likely to enjoy the lives they build for themselves.
The author is more right about this than you give them credit for. Students who are getting a degree just to get a job are doing it wrong. If they don't enjoy doing the things the degree teaches, they really won't enjoy what comes after they graduate.
I agree some do, but I am very skeptical about most. It's also changing rapidly.
To be clear I'm not disagreeing that a manufacturing engineer role would require a degree in engineering (and countless other examples). I'm pushing back on specifically "most white collar jobs require any degree regardless of what it is".
I believe that assumption is incorrect and harmful.
So maybe the real question is why we ever expected “teaching at scale” to be effective.
I think that it’s quite clear that for an individual, curious student, the ability to use modern LLMs probably makes the ability to be 1-1 tutored (by a human!) cheaper/better. But I don’t think anyone claims that watching random videos on the internet will be as effective for LeBron James as having a personal trainer focused on him.
It seems like the overriding issue is to understand whether students need to take courses they’re not interested in. If the answer is yes, perhaps we need find ways of having these topics be taught by tutorial…
Everything else should be about exposure. So children are lectured on science, history, or whatever other subject; but they don't actually need a grade in these subjects during elementary school. This would reduce the work burden on students and teachers. The only purpose is to light a spark in those with true curiosity.
In high school, students should be able to choose topics of interest that they learned about in elementary school to do more intentional learning with tests and grades. Everyone else continues on a general path with the core subjects being tested and non-core subjects simply being lectured.
In college, those who chose a specific focus in highschool accelerated their learning for that subject. For others, if they didn't find anything interesting, they can go into a trade or whatever else they choose. If they are late bloomers, they go to college and cultivate their newly found interests with a larger back log of pre-reqs.
There's no point in "teaching" children things that they immediately forget only for them to go on to become a generic office worker or retail employee. We should cultivate those with the desire to be cultivated, and stop pretending that it's actually feasible to have an entire society of "intellectuals." There is a place in the world for those who don't care about learning, but there is little sense in throwing significant education resources at them.