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> And in an ideal environment, there should be an educator overseeing a kid and asking what went wrong if kid decides they wanna play with their phone instead o

by _w1tm 2y ago

> And in an ideal environment, there should be an educator overseeing a kid and asking what went wrong if kid decides they wanna play with their phone instead of working. The reason primary education is mandatory is because the average kid doesn’t want to sit there learning things. Even some parents barely care. We have collectively decided to force these children to sit through school because we want the population to have at least some basic skills. Catering to the outliers would not be efficient, sometimes people need to be coerced to set a minimum standard.

drdaeman 2y ago
I don't argue against compulsory education and minimum standards. I strongly agree that they are an absolute necessity. I was an outlier. Used to study well while it was interesting - just because I had access to the books and I loved reading. But around 9th grade I lost track of some courses, things stopped making sense, everything started to fall apart - and at some point I just optimized away, starting to solve for working around the compulsion rather than necessity to learn. I still learned things I cared about, but subjects where I had a gap in understanding went sideways. The compulsion haven't made me learn anything much, but the means to game the system enough to pass through the hurdles. I worked on some skills like writing tiniest cheat sheets (fine motor skill training haha), basic networking to have someone to copy homework from, composing essays without even opening the source material, confidence tricks, breaking into storage rooms, hacking into computer systems and so on. A valuable social skill set, but probably only for a failing simulacra of a society. (Well, I lived in exactly such a society - one under a post-Soviet curse, so it all fits.) And while those were some fun times, I hate how I had totally lost a lot of opportunities to learn many useful things when I had all the time in the world for it - and way more capable brains than I have in my thirties or forties. I didn't do it because I just didn't knew that I cared about it. I don't blame anyone, of course - things just happened that way. So, I strongly disagree with the "doesn't want" bit. Kids do want to learn things. I wanted to. I believe we all normally do - curiosity and desire to learn is humanity's signature trait. But kids cannot steer themselves, so they need guidance. And compulsion does a poor job as such. But I agree that catering to the outliers is not efficient in present day real-life conditions. Probably not just inefficient, but outright impossible until(if) we ever reach post-scarcity. I even wrote a regret: "[approach] that doesn't work because it requires ideal environment". The compulsion is basically all we realistically have. I just made a note how it's a shame that it's a poor man's solution to a problem that ideally should be solved very differently.

by _w1tm 2y ago

drdaeman 2y ago

I don't argue against compulsory education and minimum standards. I strongly agree that they are an absolute necessity. I was an outlier. Used to study well while it was interesting - just because I had access to the books and I loved reading. But around 9th grade I lost track of some courses, things stopped making sense, everything started to fall apart - and at some point I just optimized away, starting to solve for working around the compulsion rather than necessity to learn. I still learned things I cared about, but subjects where I had a gap in understanding went sideways. The compulsion haven't made me learn anything much, but the means to game the system enough to pass through the hurdles. I worked on some skills like writing tiniest cheat sheets (fine motor skill training haha), basic networking to have someone to copy homework from, composing essays without even opening the source material, confidence tricks, breaking into storage rooms, hacking into computer systems and so on. A valuable social skill set, but probably only for a failing simulacra of a society. (Well, I lived in exactly such a society - one under a post-Soviet curse, so it all fits.) And while those were some fun times, I hate how I had totally lost a lot of opportunities to learn many useful things when I had all the time in the world for it - and way more capable brains than I have in my thirties or forties. I didn't do it because I just didn't knew that I cared about it. I don't blame anyone, of course - things just happened that way. So, I strongly disagree with the "doesn't want" bit. Kids do want to learn things. I wanted to. I believe we all normally do - curiosity and desire to learn is humanity's signature trait. But kids cannot steer themselves, so they need guidance. And compulsion does a poor job as such. But I agree that catering to the outliers is not efficient in present day real-life conditions. Probably not just inefficient, but outright impossible until(if) we ever reach post-scarcity. I even wrote a regret: "[approach] that doesn't work because it requires ideal environment". The compulsion is basically all we realistically have. I just made a note how it's a shame that it's a poor man's solution to a problem that ideally should be solved very differently.