3 ms·

Oh boy. Just wait for Gen X. It’ll be a retirement crisis. At-same-age savings levels for generations after the boomers start at “catastrophic” for X and are ma

Oh boy. Just wait for Gen X. It’ll be a retirement crisis. At-same-age savings levels for generations after the boomers start at “catastrophic” for X and are markedly worse for each generation after them. This’ll hit around the same time as we can no longer pretend our healthcare system isn’t a total disaster (keeps increasing in price faster than the rate of inflation—there exists a point at which it becomes a crisis), and probably not long after it becomes common knowledge that you need private tutors or your kids aren’t gonna get into any but a very low-tier university, if they go to public k-12 schools (we’re easing into that problem now—give it five years, the trend will be clear by then, and beyond obvious in 10, I doubt any of the things that might avert this new state of affairs are gonna happen)

rcarr 3y ago
I still hold out hope that Silicon Valley will take over the education system before then. I've recently started Math Academy and I'm quite impressed with it. Duolingo still needs work but it's improving. I think (hope?) tools like this will eventually take over - they're certainly better than the dire excuse for an education I received.
- hotnfresh 3y ago
  My expectation is that SV will siphon off quite a bit of money, but have little effect on outcomes. I expect it will be part of how some school districts try to deal with staffing shortages without significantly increasing wages—I think we’ll see several different tech-enabled attempts at fixes—but that all will basically fail. I do expect a few model schools will succeed with them, and be used to sell the rest, but it’ll be the usual story of unusually-competent leadership and above-average staff making something work well that does not work when those elements are absent, which is the usual case with school reform success stories. But, a bunch of systems and a bunch of training seminars and manuals will be sold to a lot of school districts. Folks are gonna make money off this.
  - rcarr 3y ago
    But isn't the hope that if we get these apps right, then the competence of the leadership and the staff doesn't matter so much anymore, just the drive of the individual student?
    - hotnfresh 3y ago
      We have tools that do awesome for driven individual students. We’ve had them since before computers. The problem is we expect to have a fair amount of success educating students who are not driven, which is a large majority of students. Almost anything works with driven students.
      - rcarr 3y ago
        > We have tools that do awesome for driven individual students. We’ve had them since before computers. If you're referring to books then I disagree. I think the computer opens up a whole new way of teaching that is far more interesting. Maths concepts are far easier to understand with good graphics and animations for example. Stuff like Duolingo is far more engaging than than a Spanish textbook (even if does need work on how it teaches grammar). Even stuff like electronics and computers, you would have been limited by your budget for parts, whereas now you can launch up virtual labs or learn networking in the cloud. And now these things are available to everyone now, across the globe. If you're a kid in a small town of a few thousands residents, you may not even be guaranteed to have a library, let alone a library that has multiple books on a topic you want to read. Nowadays, you've got all the information you want at your fingertips. Personally, I think the key to making driven students is to let them study more of what they want to study, within reason. When a kid starts showing a passion for something, let them go down the rabbit hole and let them drop other studies to compensate if necessary. If I remember rightly, the American system of schooling is already a lot better at doing this than the UK system of schooling.

rcarr 3y ago

I still hold out hope that Silicon Valley will take over the education system before then. I've recently started Math Academy and I'm quite impressed with it. Duolingo still needs work but it's improving. I think (hope?) tools like this will eventually take over - they're certainly better than the dire excuse for an education I received.

hotnfresh 3y ago
My expectation is that SV will siphon off quite a bit of money, but have little effect on outcomes. I expect it will be part of how some school districts try to deal with staffing shortages without significantly increasing wages—I think we’ll see several different tech-enabled attempts at fixes—but that all will basically fail. I do expect a few model schools will succeed with them, and be used to sell the rest, but it’ll be the usual story of unusually-competent leadership and above-average staff making something work well that does not work when those elements are absent, which is the usual case with school reform success stories. But, a bunch of systems and a bunch of training seminars and manuals will be sold to a lot of school districts. Folks are gonna make money off this.
- rcarr 3y ago
  But isn't the hope that if we get these apps right, then the competence of the leadership and the staff doesn't matter so much anymore, just the drive of the individual student?
  - hotnfresh 3y ago
    We have tools that do awesome for driven individual students. We’ve had them since before computers. The problem is we expect to have a fair amount of success educating students who are not driven, which is a large majority of students. Almost anything works with driven students.
    - rcarr 3y ago
      > We have tools that do awesome for driven individual students. We’ve had them since before computers. If you're referring to books then I disagree. I think the computer opens up a whole new way of teaching that is far more interesting. Maths concepts are far easier to understand with good graphics and animations for example. Stuff like Duolingo is far more engaging than than a Spanish textbook (even if does need work on how it teaches grammar). Even stuff like electronics and computers, you would have been limited by your budget for parts, whereas now you can launch up virtual labs or learn networking in the cloud. And now these things are available to everyone now, across the globe. If you're a kid in a small town of a few thousands residents, you may not even be guaranteed to have a library, let alone a library that has multiple books on a topic you want to read. Nowadays, you've got all the information you want at your fingertips. Personally, I think the key to making driven students is to let them study more of what they want to study, within reason. When a kid starts showing a passion for something, let them go down the rabbit hole and let them drop other studies to compensate if necessary. If I remember rightly, the American system of schooling is already a lot better at doing this than the UK system of schooling.