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I think the author of this post is making the same mistake that a lot of other people (particularly smart folks) make whenever they are thinking about the ills

by pen2l 10y ago

I think the author of this post is making the same mistake that a lot of other people (particularly smart folks) make whenever they are thinking about the ills of modern education system and what can be done to improve it. Like Peter Thiel and others, I don't think they understand how and why students are failing in classrooms today. Take for example the author's suggestions on how school systems can be improved: Create a set of free, online high school and college degree programs that any American could enroll in, and pursue at their own pace. Can you really expect high school students to perform well in online classes? The most elite companies in the valley have correctly found out that remote doesn't work (in most cases)... and yet we're going to do remote with our students? I took online classes when I went back to complete college at an older age... it was the worst mistake of my life. As a human, I needed the social imposition of a disappointed teacher telling me that I performed poorly on my test, I needed the camaraderie of students with whom I could study somewhere. Online classes, especially at high school stage are very bad (perhaps with the exception of "gifted" students who probably would benefit from being in a fast-tracked line). At age 13, give everyone a $100k education voucher. You're giving too much credit to students, they don't know what is best for them. This $100k will be exploited in some way by profit-seeking companies before you have a second to glance back at the money. Legalize and normalize apprenticeship contracts. I agree with this.

kazagistar 10y ago
Aren't apprenticeship contracts functionally slavery? You think free money will be abused, but this won't be?
- Grustaf 10y ago
  Slavery? More like paid education. The best possible education in many cases.
- ryanmarsh 10y ago
  Graft is a constant in human endeavors. It's like a scaling problem, you deal with it as it presents itself.
- brianwawok 10y ago
  So I don't know about all fields, but I know about programming. Do you know how much value a high school type person has in writing computer programs for an actual software company? Something fairly negative. Say -$10 an hour or -$50 an hour, based on how much experienced person time they take up and how much damage they do. If you run a small profitable business, even if you could get high schoolers to work for free to write you code, you should not do it. If you need to pay them minimum wage... even MORE reason not do it. I feel this is a situation that other industries have dealt with for 100s of years. For example the day 1 statue carver was probably a huge negative value also. I suspect they had to sign something like "I will work for enough pay to feed myself for 2 years, and then work for a industry standard wage for 2 years after that if you agree to train me". So all in agreeing to 4 years of work for training. (And some pay, but not really break the bank pay). At the end of the 4 years, the company got a decent amount of value out of the statue carver, and the statue carver learned a bunch of skills without going to college. Not really anything like this in programming. Not even sure it would be legally enforceable. But I think that is a big reason why there is a gap in needs of programmers vs people willing to train people to do the job. It really would suck for most people to train someone how to do a job for a year (losing tons of money), and then the person job hops to someone who pays higher and bears none of the training cost. This is why so many jobs advertise 1-3 years of experience required. They want people over the initial learning hump, but not making the big bucks yet. So perhaps I am proposing a way to bring back bonded labor apprentices? Hum, seems terrible. But also seems like it could work...
  - kazagistar 10y ago
    It sucks for the big corps to not be able to contractually force labor out of workers who they have trained. But it sucks far far more if you are stuck in an abusive contract.
    - toehead2000 10y ago
      Yeah contracts suck in general. What if I sign a contract and then decide I don't like it? Contracts should be illegal.
    - 10y ago
- sremani 10y ago
  Is apprenticeship where you do not get into debt but not remunerated for you work any worse form slavery than the 4-year degree that leaves the student with 100K debt, which the student has to service the next decade or so of his life? Not only you are cheapening "slavery" as a word, but mis-framing the issue.
  - kazagistar 10y ago
    > Is apprenticeship where you do not get into debt but not remunerated for you work That is not apprenticeship, it is unpaid internship, and it is much worse then taking on debt to get an education because it creates a vast gap in opportunity based on existing wealth.
- smoe 10y ago
  Don't know how apprenticeships work in the US, but in Switzerland where they are very common (about two-thirds of youths coming out of mandatory school) for all sort of fields (carpenter, nurse, draftsman, business clerk, programmer, etc), they are paid and heavily regulated, since your are only 15-17 years old when you start. In Switzerland an apprentice on average costs the company more than what they bring in value for the first two years, but make that loss up in the final two.
ethanwillis 10y ago
Disclaimer: I haven't read the article yet. However, I wanted to say that my kid sister is in 9th grade and is doing online high school.. It's been a bit more stressful but she's been learning a lot more because she has to actually go through all of the lessons herself each day rather than zoning out in class. All of her grades have improved at least 1 letter grade versus a traditional classroom (and from what I've seen it's not because the work is any easier, it's actually harder and there's a lot more of it). So, I think that free online high school could definitely work. But also definitely not for everyone
- sanderjd 10y ago
  I'm curious - does she have an engaged "education supervisor" of some sort for this? Like you or a parent? I have no educational experience, but my thinking is that these things are likely to work well with someone engaged and capable in motivating progress. This (again, in my non-professional opinion) is the most important role of a teacher. The presentation of material is much easier to replace with books, videos, and published exercises.
JDiculous 10y ago
> The most elite companies in the valley have correctly found out that remote doesn't work There are enough companies out there with remote employees and even remotely distributed teams to disprove the assertion that "remote doesn't work".
- phkahler 10y ago
  OK, lets change it to "remote work doesn't work for everyone". There are plenty of cases where it didn't work too.
- k__ 10y ago
  I have the feeling remote works only for people who have an intrinsic motivation to be good at what they do. I met a whole bunch of people who want to be a dev because it pays well. Most of them need constant supervision.
  - _yosefk 10y ago
    I'm in it for the money and haven't failed hard enough to prompt much supervision in a while. Intrinsic/extrinsic has nothing to do with it (I struggle with some things I'm intrinsically motivated to do more than programming.) Certainly "person X doing Y" requires different amount of supervision depending on X and Y but I think we know little about exactly how and why it varies. One source of variability: some care about impact on coworkers, some don't. Guess who will upset you more. Intrinsic/extrinsic is orthogonal to this.
    - k__ 10y ago
      "Intrinsic/extrinsic has nothing to do with it (I struggle with some things I'm intrinsically motivated to do more than programming.)" Sounds like you got intrinsic and extrinsic mixed up, at least unknowingly.
  - nebabyte 10y ago
    > I have the feeling remote works only for people who have an intrinsic motivation to be good at what they do. Have you met kids? Many (most?) of them have an innate curiousity which is not hard to channel into a passion for learning given they get to learn things they enjoy, and if you tell them how well they're doing, they can get quite competitive about doing better. Self-motivation wasn't instilled by a system of proscribing to kids what and how they had to learn, but that doesn't mean a system can't be built around nurturing it.
joefourier 10y ago
Perhaps the reason many students require the imposition of an authority is because the educational system does not encourage the development of self-learning skills? From the first year of elementary school onward, students are explicitly told what to learn and when to learn it; even homework assignments are generally just the completion of predetermined exercises. It should come as no surprise that many will then fail with self-directed learning, as they have not practiced the required skills before.
- analog31 10y ago
  Oddly enough (and anecdotally of course), I actually needed the classroom environment to learn some subjects, but not others. So it can't be that my brain is locked into a particular mode of learning. I learned computer programming and electronics, completely on my own, except for one introductory course in each subject. On the other hand, it would have been hard for me to learn math and physics on my own, and those subjects became my college majors.
  - joefourier 10y ago
    Perhaps this is related to the more theoretical nature of math and physics? With computer programming especially, you can immediately apply the concepts you learn and get instant feedback and satisfaction from seeing simple programs actually achieve things. With math and physics, I've found that I am far motivated to learn concepts when having an immediate practical application for them, say in the context of computer graphics. Being able to apply what you're learning to create things is tremendously motivating, while if you remain in the pure theoretical domain, it can seem abstract and aimless without an external structure to direct you.
  - nebabyte 10y ago
    Which is exactly the argument FOR letting kids choose their own path. There are a few subjects which kids have 'forced' on them which they end up 'never using', and certain others which they do end up needing later but are introduced to in a different way or context which makes it actually interesting. It's not a bad idea to let them start with the subjects they like, give them the assurance and security of knowing that a stable life exists for them having that basis, then encourage them to pursue other subjects at their leisure if and when those things become relevant.
astrodev 10y ago
What makes you think that you would have done better in a brick-and-mortar programme?
overgard 10y ago
> Can you really expect high school students to perform well in online classes? The most elite companies in the valley have correctly found out that remote doesn't work... and yet we're going to do remote with our students? I took online classes when I went back to complete college at an older age... it was the worst mistake of my life I think this really depends on the person. I learned coding on my own as a teenager off the internet, I was entirely employable at 19, so I think its totally reasonable for this setup to work... if the kid is interested in the subject. Thats really the unspoken weakness of modern education -- we feed kids into an environment that resembles a prison, stamp out their natural curiosity about what adults actually do, and then act surprised that our glorified state run day-cares have taught the children nothing.
- deepnotderp 10y ago
  This x1000, I've seen 15 year olds learn about semiconductor lithography because their interested about it.
snuxoll 10y ago
> The most elite companies in the valley have correctly found out that remote doesn't work... The success of remote workers is entirely dependent on the culture of the company and team. I may not work for some hotshot silicon valley startup or Google, but our entire development team works remotely without issue. Daily standups ensure work is getting completed, and we all have GoToMeeting licenses so we can jump on a call and talk when IM doesn't cut it. > and yet we're going to do remote with our students? Probably not a wise idea for every student, I'll agree with you on this part. However, I don't think the idea of self-paced curriculum is a bad idea either - and it can be offered both in-person and online with ease. Before I dropped out in my sophomore year in high school I attended a self-paced program for a semester, and it was amazing - I could burn through the topics at which I excelled leaving me time to focus one ones that gave me difficulties without pressure of getting the assignment in on-time. All in all, had I stuck with it I could have easily graduated a by the end of my Junior year. Now, this is my personal anecdote - so take it for what it's worth. > You're giving too much credit to students, they don't know what is best for them. This $100k will be exploited in some way by profit-seeking companies before you have a second to glance back at the money. One only needs to look at for-profit universities to see how this is a bad idea. It would have to require you use it on a state-run institution or one that has been properly vetted, at that point why not just offer free tuition at public universities and call it done?
noonespecial 10y ago
>You're giving too much credit to students, they don't know what is best for them. This $100k will be exploited in some way by profit-seeking companies before you have a second to glance back at the money. Like the near limitless non-dischargeable loans those same students are able to take right now? At least after it was taken by those same bad actors that are taking it right now, they wouldn't have to spend the rest of their lives "paying it back".
- pzone 10y ago
  1) Those loans are offered mainly to 18-22 year olds, not 13 year olds 2) Subsidized loans are far less prone to moral hazard than handing out large vouchers to everyone. 3) Yes there are already bad actors exploiting students with federal benefits. We don't want to make it any worse.
bogomipz 10y ago
>"The most elite companies in the valley have correctly found out that remote doesn't work (in most cases)... and yet we're going to do remote with our students?" I'm curious do you have a citation for this? Have those "elite companies" - Google, FB, etc ever actually embraced a remote work force? My impression was they were always on-site shops. But maybe someone here knows more?
- ryanSrich 10y ago
  There's no source because it's a completely false claim. The "remote doesn't work" trope is perpetuated by Silicon Valley Culture[1][2]. Remote work is like security. You can't bolt it on and expect it to work. You can't half-ass it and expect it to work. The companies that do it correctly make it a foundation of their culture. I will cede the fact that remote work isn't for every individual, but I think even that can be overcome with the right company culture and support network. 1. http://startupclass.samaltman.com/courses/lec07/ http://startupclass.samaltman.com/courses/lec07/ 2. https://www.amazon.com/Peopleware-Productive-Projects-Teams-Second/dp/0932633439 https://www.amazon.com/Peopleware-Productive-Projects-Teams-...
  - bogomipz 10y ago
    I agree with you completely and suspect there is no evidence to corroborate the claim. I thought I would ask though.
  - ghaff 10y ago
    I honestly think that even that is too binary. Clearly there are fully remote and no/minimal remote companies. But there are also a lot who (mostly) started with an onsite culture and as they've grown/acquired teams/etc. they've become more distributed and remote work-oriented organically. And they usually find it works better for some teams and roles than others.
srssays 10y ago
You're ignoring the quality of the teacher. If you learn remotely, you can learn from good (or at least adequate) teachers, at a pace that is right for you. I wish that resources such as Khan Academy existed when I was at school. I don't know about you, but many of my high school teachers barely understood the material they were teaching.
- matwood 10y ago
  > I wish that resources such as Khan Academy existed when I was at school. I say this so often. And it's not that my teachers were dumb, but in a class full of people they may not have time to help those who are struggling on a topic or need a prior topic review. I've always thought an interesting experiment would be to tell students to go watch the Khan videos before the class lecture. That way the teacher can focus on helping everyone get the deeper understanding in person rather than going over the basics. This seems like it would work particularly well with math.
  - sanderjd 10y ago
    This is called an "inverted classroom" and it is well known and popular amongst teachers I know. I feel like it would have worked particularly well in college, where a huge amount of classroom time was spent passively watching a professor lecture.
colmvp 10y ago
It is absolutely true that for a lot of people, having a structured environment with someone keeping you honest via evaluations and social pressure is a real benefit of college. That said, it's clear that online education has the potential to transform millions of lives for people who have the discipline, vigor, and intention of going into a specific field. Many people around the world are learning on their own time, be it linear algebra or Python programming, without needing to spend thousands of dollars on a formalized education. The current explosion in peoples interest Deep Learning is in no small part because of the availability of information on the internet, such as free or inexpensive textbooks, free video and written tutorials from dozens of high quality sources, research papers on Arxiv, and tons of written information by the leading researchers of our time. If you're interested in Deep Learning, going to a local college that isn't an elite institution is unlikely to have significantly larger benefit over spending the next few years studying and learning on your own. I can honestly say that from my college education, only a small % was truly applicable to my eventual career. Was it worth $40k+? For the social network, yes, but for the practical methods of improving my own skillset, hardly. Most of my professors were quite frankly lesser skilled than the students who eventually graduated. Clearly, I didn't go to Stanford or MIT! On the topic of the "camaraderie of students," there's nothing that says people can't form their own groups without the need of a university environment, such as through Meetup.com or Facebook. I'm currently part of a study group that's going through an online Deep Learning course, where we meet every week to discuss the weeks work. And we sometimes bring in a PhD level practitioner to answer questions and give feedback. I'll also just underline this: the level of teaching of particular subjects varies from college to college. You are not guaranteed to get a good professor on the topics you truly care about. A lot of people will never have the experience of going to an elite institution that has industry leaders or excellent teachers. The wonder of online education is that you can find a teacher who absolutely has a style and process that works for you and you may learn a lot more through that process than going to a class where the teacher sucks the life out of the topic. Or just simply makes you do work that isn't structured well. For example, look at comments written on highly popular math videos on YouTube, where students lament the fact that they're taught basic things in a way that is extremely abstract, pushing them to just learn rote memorization. It takes people like 3Blue1Brown and Sal Khan to open up their minds to the intuition.
marze 10y ago
The author's suggested improvements may not be perfect, but they are 100% in the right direction.
matwood 10y ago
What you're really pointing out is that people are different. Some need more structure than others. For whatever reason, I'm a pretty motivated person. Remote work is great for me because any time I can save is more time I have to do the list of things I want to get done that day. My wife OTOH, requires structure. She's smart and works hard, but if she was left to work at home she would procrastinate until the 11th hour. She needed a brick and mortar college, and in that structure managed to get her 4 year degree is 2.5 years. One thing not discussed is that quality online degree programs can significantly lower the cost bar for students. I was lucky enough to have a decent school near my parents, so I lived at home for my entire undergrad degree. We simply did not have the money to do anything different, and I refused to take out loans unless absolutely necessary (I worked instead). It would have been amazing if there had been self paced online degrees offered by big name colleges at the time I was in undergrad.
- flattire 10y ago
  Yeah, the parent comment basically just described the optimal learning environment for their personality type, and then intentionally or unintentionally ignored the fact that another person's optimal environment may be different from theirs. I've always been naturally inclined to teach things to myself, at my own pace, so online education enabled me to thrive while I would have struggled with conventional schooling structure. ...and I'm not sure what evidence lead them to believe that "most companies" in silicon valley have discovered that remote doesn't work, but I'm willing to bet it's anecdotal.
  - hueving 10y ago
    Optimal for the majority of people is what I believe the parent was arguing. The vast majority of people are not self motivated and forward thinking enough to learn calculus all by themselves.
    - arcticbull 10y ago
      Fundamentals like Calculus are difficult because they're almost never presented in the context of a problem a person wants to solve. I had a difficult time feeling motivated until I picked up something I wanted to achieve, saw course material as tools to get there, then all of a sudden it was a very different matter. Math isn't fun by itself IMO, but using it to solve problems I actually want to solve is a lot of fun (even the fundamentals).
hatsunearu 10y ago
It's weird, I'm closer to the opposite. I never get motivated unless it comes deep within myself--if I feel like something is worth my time, be it because to groom my GPA, because it's interesting material, I feel a drive to do it (which sometimes makes me unhappy because it's grueling work). The social interactions at school are great in its own right, but I feel like that bit is decoupled from my work. You know one of those clicker games, like cookie clicker? It's hilariously dumb if you think about it--it's kind a parody of what a video game really is. You click, and then you get a reward, and you use that reward to do the click thing better, faster, and automated. Some people love it because they are really receptive to operant conditioning and self-motivated just to see that number rise (however stupid it may be), and some people feel like they need a deeper reason to play something like that. That was kind of my analogy for the whole shebang.
bougiefever 10y ago
Remote work is changing. With better video chats, slack chats and such, I don't feel that remote is that much different than being there. If the whole class does get together from time to time, and the whole class is remote, I think it can work. Especially if they are in the same geographical region so they can get together and do things outside of class. The "pursue at their own pace" is probably the part I disagree with as well. Most young people just don't have enough internal motivation to actually finish on time. You still need the structure a class and school provides. I just think it doesn't have to 100% on site.
padobson 10y ago
Can you really expect high school students to perform well in online classes? Does it matter? At what point do we put the failure of the student on the student? Education being unaffordable is a broadly sympathetic position. Not getting an education because you couldn't be troubled to take advantage of a free education is an unsympathetic position. You're giving too much credit to students, they don't know what is best for them. This $100k will be exploited in some way by profit-seeking companies before you have a second to glance back at the money. This plays right into the author's point. It's exploitation to culturally coerce young people into large amounts of debt to purchase a degree in communications or international studies, only to end up tending bar or hauling trash. Instead, under the author's plan, they could have tested the waters of secondary education at 14 or 15, decided it wasn't for them, got a job hauling trash and be a mortgage-free home owner before they're 25.
- intopieces 10y ago
  >Does it matter? At what point do we put the failure of the student on the student? Education being unaffordable is a broadly sympathetic position. Not getting an education because you couldn't be troubled to take advantage of a free education is an unsympathetic position. Sympathy is besides the point. Look at the bigger picture: if US citizens are unprepared for the jobs the world economy demands, the country fails economically, putting it in the position to be exploited by others. Education is important. This weird attitude that college is worthless somehow is not illustrated in the numbers: earning potential, mate selection, general career advancement.
  - toast0 10y ago
    College clearly has value for those who graduate, although sometimes not much compared to what they paid (in dollars, and opportunity). A bigger issue with '100% college' is the dollar and opportunity cost for those people who attend college and don't graduate. I've known many people that just didn't get much benefit out of their year or two of failing out of college, which also cost them thousands of dollars.
- landryraccoon 10y ago
dbg31415 10y ago
> The most elite companies in the valley have correctly found out that remote doesn't work (in most cases)... and yet we're going to do remote with our students? I can't name a single "elite company" that doesn't rely on consultants at some point. Most of these consultants do work remote. So... if it works for some people, why can't it work for every person? It's not correct that remote work doesn't work. Remote work doesn't get embraced by a lot of companies because they care about things outside of the results. Managers / decision makers care about "seeing" people work (I suspect this has more to do with narcism than anything else, but probably also a bit because they don't know how to use Google Hangouts and / or can't put the same level of emotional pressure on people via a monitor), HR cares about establishing "culture" and somehow that's accomplished by having people play foosball (but not Overwatch) together. Anyway, because of all this crap, we're forced to waste 2 hours a day commuting -- and who knows how long shaving, dropping off dry cleaning... and all that other crap we do just so we can go into an office). Then we sit in shitty big open spaces that are horrible for introverts or anyone who needs focus to get their job done and waste a ton of time trying to figure out who to go out to lunch with and what to have for lunch and how to decorate our cubes / desks... Anyway, look... all I'm saying is that every company uses remote workers when the shit hits the fan and results are all that matter. The fact that they don't embrace it for all employees... it has more to do with management being petty and insecure, or technologically short sighted, or trying to make the drones look busy to investors than it has to do with anything else.
jupiter90000 10y ago
I don't doubt online learning wouldn't work well for some or maybe most high schoolers, but to use your own one-off experience of making a mistake of doing online school (which apparently doesn't work well for you), and if I'm not mistaken, generalizing it to mean that everyone has to do it your way is not helpful at all. I had a usual on campus undergraduate degree experience, except I also took some fully and partially online courses, and I did great in them and enjoyed them even more as I didn't need to spend time physically putting myself into a classroom. I also got a master's degree which was mostly online in a math-heavy discipline, and I did fine because I do the work necessary. I've just been working remote for weeks, and have done remote days many times for my job, and honestly I can usually get more done because I'm not distracted by everyone interrupting me and making smalltalk around the office. So remote works well for me, and probably for many others. It doesn't work well for you, and possibly many others. Please, let's not impose our 'best way of doing things' on everyone else (I'm including myself here).
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charles-salvia 10y ago
I experienced pretty much the exact opposite of what you're saying. Most of the skills I have I learned by researching/studying by myself. College was mostly useless to me. And I'm much more productive when working remotely. So obviously, people are configured differently.
wu-ikkyu 10y ago
>Can you really expect high school students to perform well in online classes? The most elite companies in the valley have correctly found out that remote doesn't work (in most cases)... and yet we're going to do remote with our students? Perhaps the reason why a remote work setup is difficult to execute is because students are never trained for it in the first place.
amptorn 10y ago
> At age 13, give everyone a $100k education voucher. Good lord, how about just give that money to schools?
- randomdata 10y ago
  Some of the most valuable education one can receive isn't offered at school. If the $100k can be spent freely on education, that becomes quite powerful.
  - amptorn 10y ago
    > Some of the most valuable education one can receive isn't offered at school. Yes, but all the rest of it is.

by pen2l 10y ago

kazagistar 10y ago

Aren't apprenticeship contracts functionally slavery? You think free money will be abused, but this won't be?

Grustaf 10y ago
Slavery? More like paid education. The best possible education in many cases.
ryanmarsh 10y ago
Graft is a constant in human endeavors. It's like a scaling problem, you deal with it as it presents itself.
brianwawok 10y ago
So I don't know about all fields, but I know about programming. Do you know how much value a high school type person has in writing computer programs for an actual software company? Something fairly negative. Say -$10 an hour or -$50 an hour, based on how much experienced person time they take up and how much damage they do. If you run a small profitable business, even if you could get high schoolers to work for free to write you code, you should not do it. If you need to pay them minimum wage... even MORE reason not do it. I feel this is a situation that other industries have dealt with for 100s of years. For example the day 1 statue carver was probably a huge negative value also. I suspect they had to sign something like "I will work for enough pay to feed myself for 2 years, and then work for a industry standard wage for 2 years after that if you agree to train me". So all in agreeing to 4 years of work for training. (And some pay, but not really break the bank pay). At the end of the 4 years, the company got a decent amount of value out of the statue carver, and the statue carver learned a bunch of skills without going to college. Not really anything like this in programming. Not even sure it would be legally enforceable. But I think that is a big reason why there is a gap in needs of programmers vs people willing to train people to do the job. It really would suck for most people to train someone how to do a job for a year (losing tons of money), and then the person job hops to someone who pays higher and bears none of the training cost. This is why so many jobs advertise 1-3 years of experience required. They want people over the initial learning hump, but not making the big bucks yet. So perhaps I am proposing a way to bring back bonded labor apprentices? Hum, seems terrible. But also seems like it could work...
- kazagistar 10y ago
  It sucks for the big corps to not be able to contractually force labor out of workers who they have trained. But it sucks far far more if you are stuck in an abusive contract.
  - toehead2000 10y ago
    Yeah contracts suck in general. What if I sign a contract and then decide I don't like it? Contracts should be illegal.
  - 10y ago
sremani 10y ago
Is apprenticeship where you do not get into debt but not remunerated for you work any worse form slavery than the 4-year degree that leaves the student with 100K debt, which the student has to service the next decade or so of his life? Not only you are cheapening "slavery" as a word, but mis-framing the issue.
- kazagistar 10y ago
  > Is apprenticeship where you do not get into debt but not remunerated for you work That is not apprenticeship, it is unpaid internship, and it is much worse then taking on debt to get an education because it creates a vast gap in opportunity based on existing wealth.
smoe 10y ago
Don't know how apprenticeships work in the US, but in Switzerland where they are very common (about two-thirds of youths coming out of mandatory school) for all sort of fields (carpenter, nurse, draftsman, business clerk, programmer, etc), they are paid and heavily regulated, since your are only 15-17 years old when you start. In Switzerland an apprentice on average costs the company more than what they bring in value for the first two years, but make that loss up in the final two.

ethanwillis 10y ago

Disclaimer: I haven't read the article yet. However, I wanted to say that my kid sister is in 9th grade and is doing online high school.. It's been a bit more stressful but she's been learning a lot more because she has to actually go through all of the lessons herself each day rather than zoning out in class. All of her grades have improved at least 1 letter grade versus a traditional classroom (and from what I've seen it's not because the work is any easier, it's actually harder and there's a lot more of it). So, I think that free online high school could definitely work. But also definitely not for everyone

sanderjd 10y ago
I'm curious - does she have an engaged "education supervisor" of some sort for this? Like you or a parent? I have no educational experience, but my thinking is that these things are likely to work well with someone engaged and capable in motivating progress. This (again, in my non-professional opinion) is the most important role of a teacher. The presentation of material is much easier to replace with books, videos, and published exercises.

JDiculous 10y ago

> The most elite companies in the valley have correctly found out that remote doesn't work There are enough companies out there with remote employees and even remotely distributed teams to disprove the assertion that "remote doesn't work".

phkahler 10y ago
OK, lets change it to "remote work doesn't work for everyone". There are plenty of cases where it didn't work too.
k__ 10y ago
I have the feeling remote works only for people who have an intrinsic motivation to be good at what they do. I met a whole bunch of people who want to be a dev because it pays well. Most of them need constant supervision.
- _yosefk 10y ago
  I'm in it for the money and haven't failed hard enough to prompt much supervision in a while. Intrinsic/extrinsic has nothing to do with it (I struggle with some things I'm intrinsically motivated to do more than programming.) Certainly "person X doing Y" requires different amount of supervision depending on X and Y but I think we know little about exactly how and why it varies. One source of variability: some care about impact on coworkers, some don't. Guess who will upset you more. Intrinsic/extrinsic is orthogonal to this.
  - k__ 10y ago
    "Intrinsic/extrinsic has nothing to do with it (I struggle with some things I'm intrinsically motivated to do more than programming.)" Sounds like you got intrinsic and extrinsic mixed up, at least unknowingly.
- nebabyte 10y ago
  > I have the feeling remote works only for people who have an intrinsic motivation to be good at what they do. Have you met kids? Many (most?) of them have an innate curiousity which is not hard to channel into a passion for learning given they get to learn things they enjoy, and if you tell them how well they're doing, they can get quite competitive about doing better. Self-motivation wasn't instilled by a system of proscribing to kids what and how they had to learn, but that doesn't mean a system can't be built around nurturing it.

joefourier 10y ago

Perhaps the reason many students require the imposition of an authority is because the educational system does not encourage the development of self-learning skills? From the first year of elementary school onward, students are explicitly told what to learn and when to learn it; even homework assignments are generally just the completion of predetermined exercises. It should come as no surprise that many will then fail with self-directed learning, as they have not practiced the required skills before.

analog31 10y ago
Oddly enough (and anecdotally of course), I actually needed the classroom environment to learn some subjects, but not others. So it can't be that my brain is locked into a particular mode of learning. I learned computer programming and electronics, completely on my own, except for one introductory course in each subject. On the other hand, it would have been hard for me to learn math and physics on my own, and those subjects became my college majors.
- joefourier 10y ago
  Perhaps this is related to the more theoretical nature of math and physics? With computer programming especially, you can immediately apply the concepts you learn and get instant feedback and satisfaction from seeing simple programs actually achieve things. With math and physics, I've found that I am far motivated to learn concepts when having an immediate practical application for them, say in the context of computer graphics. Being able to apply what you're learning to create things is tremendously motivating, while if you remain in the pure theoretical domain, it can seem abstract and aimless without an external structure to direct you.
- nebabyte 10y ago
  Which is exactly the argument FOR letting kids choose their own path. There are a few subjects which kids have 'forced' on them which they end up 'never using', and certain others which they do end up needing later but are introduced to in a different way or context which makes it actually interesting. It's not a bad idea to let them start with the subjects they like, give them the assurance and security of knowing that a stable life exists for them having that basis, then encourage them to pursue other subjects at their leisure if and when those things become relevant.

astrodev 10y ago

What makes you think that you would have done better in a brick-and-mortar programme?

overgard 10y ago

> Can you really expect high school students to perform well in online classes? The most elite companies in the valley have correctly found out that remote doesn't work... and yet we're going to do remote with our students? I took online classes when I went back to complete college at an older age... it was the worst mistake of my life I think this really depends on the person. I learned coding on my own as a teenager off the internet, I was entirely employable at 19, so I think its totally reasonable for this setup to work... if the kid is interested in the subject. Thats really the unspoken weakness of modern education -- we feed kids into an environment that resembles a prison, stamp out their natural curiosity about what adults actually do, and then act surprised that our glorified state run day-cares have taught the children nothing.

deepnotderp 10y ago
This x1000, I've seen 15 year olds learn about semiconductor lithography because their interested about it.

snuxoll 10y ago

> The most elite companies in the valley have correctly found out that remote doesn't work... The success of remote workers is entirely dependent on the culture of the company and team. I may not work for some hotshot silicon valley startup or Google, but our entire development team works remotely without issue. Daily standups ensure work is getting completed, and we all have GoToMeeting licenses so we can jump on a call and talk when IM doesn't cut it. > and yet we're going to do remote with our students? Probably not a wise idea for every student, I'll agree with you on this part. However, I don't think the idea of self-paced curriculum is a bad idea either - and it can be offered both in-person and online with ease. Before I dropped out in my sophomore year in high school I attended a self-paced program for a semester, and it was amazing - I could burn through the topics at which I excelled leaving me time to focus one ones that gave me difficulties without pressure of getting the assignment in on-time. All in all, had I stuck with it I could have easily graduated a by the end of my Junior year. Now, this is my personal anecdote - so take it for what it's worth. > You're giving too much credit to students, they don't know what is best for them. This $100k will be exploited in some way by profit-seeking companies before you have a second to glance back at the money. One only needs to look at for-profit universities to see how this is a bad idea. It would have to require you use it on a state-run institution or one that has been properly vetted, at that point why not just offer free tuition at public universities and call it done?

noonespecial 10y ago

>You're giving too much credit to students, they don't know what is best for them. This $100k will be exploited in some way by profit-seeking companies before you have a second to glance back at the money. Like the near limitless non-dischargeable loans those same students are able to take right now? At least after it was taken by those same bad actors that are taking it right now, they wouldn't have to spend the rest of their lives "paying it back".

pzone 10y ago
1) Those loans are offered mainly to 18-22 year olds, not 13 year olds 2) Subsidized loans are far less prone to moral hazard than handing out large vouchers to everyone. 3) Yes there are already bad actors exploiting students with federal benefits. We don't want to make it any worse.

bogomipz 10y ago

>"The most elite companies in the valley have correctly found out that remote doesn't work (in most cases)... and yet we're going to do remote with our students?" I'm curious do you have a citation for this? Have those "elite companies" - Google, FB, etc ever actually embraced a remote work force? My impression was they were always on-site shops. But maybe someone here knows more?

ryanSrich 10y ago
There's no source because it's a completely false claim. The "remote doesn't work" trope is perpetuated by Silicon Valley Culture[1][2]. Remote work is like security. You can't bolt it on and expect it to work. You can't half-ass it and expect it to work. The companies that do it correctly make it a foundation of their culture. I will cede the fact that remote work isn't for every individual, but I think even that can be overcome with the right company culture and support network. 1. http://startupclass.samaltman.com/courses/lec07/ http://startupclass.samaltman.com/courses/lec07/ 2. https://www.amazon.com/Peopleware-Productive-Projects-Teams-Second/dp/0932633439 https://www.amazon.com/Peopleware-Productive-Projects-Teams-...
- bogomipz 10y ago
  I agree with you completely and suspect there is no evidence to corroborate the claim. I thought I would ask though.
- ghaff 10y ago
  I honestly think that even that is too binary. Clearly there are fully remote and no/minimal remote companies. But there are also a lot who (mostly) started with an onsite culture and as they've grown/acquired teams/etc. they've become more distributed and remote work-oriented organically. And they usually find it works better for some teams and roles than others.

srssays 10y ago

You're ignoring the quality of the teacher. If you learn remotely, you can learn from good (or at least adequate) teachers, at a pace that is right for you. I wish that resources such as Khan Academy existed when I was at school. I don't know about you, but many of my high school teachers barely understood the material they were teaching.

matwood 10y ago
> I wish that resources such as Khan Academy existed when I was at school. I say this so often. And it's not that my teachers were dumb, but in a class full of people they may not have time to help those who are struggling on a topic or need a prior topic review. I've always thought an interesting experiment would be to tell students to go watch the Khan videos before the class lecture. That way the teacher can focus on helping everyone get the deeper understanding in person rather than going over the basics. This seems like it would work particularly well with math.
- sanderjd 10y ago
  This is called an "inverted classroom" and it is well known and popular amongst teachers I know. I feel like it would have worked particularly well in college, where a huge amount of classroom time was spent passively watching a professor lecture.

colmvp 10y ago

It is absolutely true that for a lot of people, having a structured environment with someone keeping you honest via evaluations and social pressure is a real benefit of college. That said, it's clear that online education has the potential to transform millions of lives for people who have the discipline, vigor, and intention of going into a specific field. Many people around the world are learning on their own time, be it linear algebra or Python programming, without needing to spend thousands of dollars on a formalized education. The current explosion in peoples interest Deep Learning is in no small part because of the availability of information on the internet, such as free or inexpensive textbooks, free video and written tutorials from dozens of high quality sources, research papers on Arxiv, and tons of written information by the leading researchers of our time. If you're interested in Deep Learning, going to a local college that isn't an elite institution is unlikely to have significantly larger benefit over spending the next few years studying and learning on your own. I can honestly say that from my college education, only a small % was truly applicable to my eventual career. Was it worth $40k+? For the social network, yes, but for the practical methods of improving my own skillset, hardly. Most of my professors were quite frankly lesser skilled than the students who eventually graduated. Clearly, I didn't go to Stanford or MIT! On the topic of the "camaraderie of students," there's nothing that says people can't form their own groups without the need of a university environment, such as through Meetup.com or Facebook. I'm currently part of a study group that's going through an online Deep Learning course, where we meet every week to discuss the weeks work. And we sometimes bring in a PhD level practitioner to answer questions and give feedback. I'll also just underline this: the level of teaching of particular subjects varies from college to college. You are not guaranteed to get a good professor on the topics you truly care about. A lot of people will never have the experience of going to an elite institution that has industry leaders or excellent teachers. The wonder of online education is that you can find a teacher who absolutely has a style and process that works for you and you may learn a lot more through that process than going to a class where the teacher sucks the life out of the topic. Or just simply makes you do work that isn't structured well. For example, look at comments written on highly popular math videos on YouTube, where students lament the fact that they're taught basic things in a way that is extremely abstract, pushing them to just learn rote memorization. It takes people like 3Blue1Brown and Sal Khan to open up their minds to the intuition.

marze 10y ago

The author's suggested improvements may not be perfect, but they are 100% in the right direction.

matwood 10y ago

What you're really pointing out is that people are different. Some need more structure than others. For whatever reason, I'm a pretty motivated person. Remote work is great for me because any time I can save is more time I have to do the list of things I want to get done that day. My wife OTOH, requires structure. She's smart and works hard, but if she was left to work at home she would procrastinate until the 11th hour. She needed a brick and mortar college, and in that structure managed to get her 4 year degree is 2.5 years. One thing not discussed is that quality online degree programs can significantly lower the cost bar for students. I was lucky enough to have a decent school near my parents, so I lived at home for my entire undergrad degree. We simply did not have the money to do anything different, and I refused to take out loans unless absolutely necessary (I worked instead). It would have been amazing if there had been self paced online degrees offered by big name colleges at the time I was in undergrad.

flattire 10y ago
Yeah, the parent comment basically just described the optimal learning environment for their personality type, and then intentionally or unintentionally ignored the fact that another person's optimal environment may be different from theirs. I've always been naturally inclined to teach things to myself, at my own pace, so online education enabled me to thrive while I would have struggled with conventional schooling structure. ...and I'm not sure what evidence lead them to believe that "most companies" in silicon valley have discovered that remote doesn't work, but I'm willing to bet it's anecdotal.
- hueving 10y ago
  Optimal for the majority of people is what I believe the parent was arguing. The vast majority of people are not self motivated and forward thinking enough to learn calculus all by themselves.
  - arcticbull 10y ago
    Fundamentals like Calculus are difficult because they're almost never presented in the context of a problem a person wants to solve. I had a difficult time feeling motivated until I picked up something I wanted to achieve, saw course material as tools to get there, then all of a sudden it was a very different matter. Math isn't fun by itself IMO, but using it to solve problems I actually want to solve is a lot of fun (even the fundamentals).

hatsunearu 10y ago

It's weird, I'm closer to the opposite. I never get motivated unless it comes deep within myself--if I feel like something is worth my time, be it because to groom my GPA, because it's interesting material, I feel a drive to do it (which sometimes makes me unhappy because it's grueling work). The social interactions at school are great in its own right, but I feel like that bit is decoupled from my work. You know one of those clicker games, like cookie clicker? It's hilariously dumb if you think about it--it's kind a parody of what a video game really is. You click, and then you get a reward, and you use that reward to do the click thing better, faster, and automated. Some people love it because they are really receptive to operant conditioning and self-motivated just to see that number rise (however stupid it may be), and some people feel like they need a deeper reason to play something like that. That was kind of my analogy for the whole shebang.

bougiefever 10y ago

Remote work is changing. With better video chats, slack chats and such, I don't feel that remote is that much different than being there. If the whole class does get together from time to time, and the whole class is remote, I think it can work. Especially if they are in the same geographical region so they can get together and do things outside of class. The "pursue at their own pace" is probably the part I disagree with as well. Most young people just don't have enough internal motivation to actually finish on time. You still need the structure a class and school provides. I just think it doesn't have to 100% on site.

padobson 10y ago

Can you really expect high school students to perform well in online classes? Does it matter? At what point do we put the failure of the student on the student? Education being unaffordable is a broadly sympathetic position. Not getting an education because you couldn't be troubled to take advantage of a free education is an unsympathetic position. You're giving too much credit to students, they don't know what is best for them. This $100k will be exploited in some way by profit-seeking companies before you have a second to glance back at the money. This plays right into the author's point. It's exploitation to culturally coerce young people into large amounts of debt to purchase a degree in communications or international studies, only to end up tending bar or hauling trash. Instead, under the author's plan, they could have tested the waters of secondary education at 14 or 15, decided it wasn't for them, got a job hauling trash and be a mortgage-free home owner before they're 25.

intopieces 10y ago
>Does it matter? At what point do we put the failure of the student on the student? Education being unaffordable is a broadly sympathetic position. Not getting an education because you couldn't be troubled to take advantage of a free education is an unsympathetic position. Sympathy is besides the point. Look at the bigger picture: if US citizens are unprepared for the jobs the world economy demands, the country fails economically, putting it in the position to be exploited by others. Education is important. This weird attitude that college is worthless somehow is not illustrated in the numbers: earning potential, mate selection, general career advancement.
- toast0 10y ago
  College clearly has value for those who graduate, although sometimes not much compared to what they paid (in dollars, and opportunity). A bigger issue with '100% college' is the dollar and opportunity cost for those people who attend college and don't graduate. I've known many people that just didn't get much benefit out of their year or two of failing out of college, which also cost them thousands of dollars.
landryraccoon 10y ago

dbg31415 10y ago

> The most elite companies in the valley have correctly found out that remote doesn't work (in most cases)... and yet we're going to do remote with our students? I can't name a single "elite company" that doesn't rely on consultants at some point. Most of these consultants do work remote. So... if it works for some people, why can't it work for every person? It's not correct that remote work doesn't work. Remote work doesn't get embraced by a lot of companies because they care about things outside of the results. Managers / decision makers care about "seeing" people work (I suspect this has more to do with narcism than anything else, but probably also a bit because they don't know how to use Google Hangouts and / or can't put the same level of emotional pressure on people via a monitor), HR cares about establishing "culture" and somehow that's accomplished by having people play foosball (but not Overwatch) together. Anyway, because of all this crap, we're forced to waste 2 hours a day commuting -- and who knows how long shaving, dropping off dry cleaning... and all that other crap we do just so we can go into an office). Then we sit in shitty big open spaces that are horrible for introverts or anyone who needs focus to get their job done and waste a ton of time trying to figure out who to go out to lunch with and what to have for lunch and how to decorate our cubes / desks... Anyway, look... all I'm saying is that every company uses remote workers when the shit hits the fan and results are all that matter. The fact that they don't embrace it for all employees... it has more to do with management being petty and insecure, or technologically short sighted, or trying to make the drones look busy to investors than it has to do with anything else.

jupiter90000 10y ago

I don't doubt online learning wouldn't work well for some or maybe most high schoolers, but to use your own one-off experience of making a mistake of doing online school (which apparently doesn't work well for you), and if I'm not mistaken, generalizing it to mean that everyone has to do it your way is not helpful at all. I had a usual on campus undergraduate degree experience, except I also took some fully and partially online courses, and I did great in them and enjoyed them even more as I didn't need to spend time physically putting myself into a classroom. I also got a master's degree which was mostly online in a math-heavy discipline, and I did fine because I do the work necessary. I've just been working remote for weeks, and have done remote days many times for my job, and honestly I can usually get more done because I'm not distracted by everyone interrupting me and making smalltalk around the office. So remote works well for me, and probably for many others. It doesn't work well for you, and possibly many others. Please, let's not impose our 'best way of doing things' on everyone else (I'm including myself here).

deleted 10y ago

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charles-salvia 10y ago

I experienced pretty much the exact opposite of what you're saying. Most of the skills I have I learned by researching/studying by myself. College was mostly useless to me. And I'm much more productive when working remotely. So obviously, people are configured differently.

wu-ikkyu 10y ago

>Can you really expect high school students to perform well in online classes? The most elite companies in the valley have correctly found out that remote doesn't work (in most cases)... and yet we're going to do remote with our students? Perhaps the reason why a remote work setup is difficult to execute is because students are never trained for it in the first place.

amptorn 10y ago

> At age 13, give everyone a $100k education voucher. Good lord, how about just give that money to schools?

randomdata 10y ago
Some of the most valuable education one can receive isn't offered at school. If the $100k can be spent freely on education, that becomes quite powerful.
- amptorn 10y ago
  > Some of the most valuable education one can receive isn't offered at school. Yes, but all the rest of it is.