5 ms·

A lot of philanthropists in the US seem to become interested in education. Is this as true in, say, Sweden? I wonder if it is largely an artifact of the brok

by pg 14y ago

A lot of philanthropists in the US seem to become interested in education. Is this as true in, say, Sweden? I wonder if it is largely an artifact of the brokenness of American schools rather than the universal importance of education. (Not that education isn't important. It's immensely important. But maybe in some places it doesn't seem like a problem.)

oacgnol 14y ago
I don't know if you could say that the impetus is largely because of the brokenness of the American education system. Online education startups like Coursera, Udacity, etc. have a far reaching effect on the rest of the world too. I'm willing to conjecture that a majority of students on Coursera right now are not US citizens, and that the appeal of (quality) college material to the rest of the world is a big factor. There are huge implications for universities to take advantage of this to spread influence.
diego 14y ago
Good education in the US is very expensive, unlike in Sweden. For those of us who believe that quality education for everyone is good for society, it means it's broken. Other people believe that it's better to have excellent education for those who can afford it, and marginal education for the rest. Those people would not say it's broken.
mrtron 14y ago
An Indian billionaire donated ~2 billion to education. I have always thought investment into education is the optimal strategy for increasing the rate of human progress against time.
sterna 14y ago
Philanthropy is much bigger in the US than in the Nordic countries so there is much more money to go around. That being said there has traditionally been a feeling among the rich that they have already given their share to education through the high tax rate. Historically construction has been the most popular type of philanthropic project. But in recent years the scope has been broadened a lot because the welfare state has had to retract some of its branches, and thus education has also risen in popularity.
marvin 14y ago
Pretty sure this view is correct. Philantropy in general isn't very big in Scandinavia (at least from a private level), but at least in Norway most of it ends up being directed at developing countries. I don't think I've ever heard of someone giving money to domestic education outside of religious communities.
fohlin 14y ago
As a data point, 15 percent of Swedish university funds come from private donations [1]. That's supposed to be equal to the US, though I imagine that other types of educational institutions get considerably less in Sweden. [1]: http://www.sulf.se/Universitetslararen/Arkiv/2011/Nummer-1011-11/Donationer-i-Sverige-ar-lika-stora-som-i-USA/ http://www.sulf.se/Universitetslararen/Arkiv/2011/Nummer-101... (sv)
ThomPete 14y ago
Education is a big topic most places also in Scandinavia where it's more or less free. But where there is active entrepreneurship in the US in this field, most of Scandinavia is copycatting others or developing government plans on how to improve education per. the PISA measurement scale. The Scandinavian model is known for it's group oriented focus on learning where the new discussion is whether this is the right approach. Among other things especially the tiger mom revolution from china is a big discussion and Canadas education system is very popular. Finland seems to be the only Scandinavian country that is doing exceptionally well on the PISA scale. My own personal believe is that there are to basic reasons why the quality of education seems to go down is. 1) Still too much focus on "learning by heart". It's obvious that you need to learn read, write and do basic calculation, but beyond that the most important thing to learn is, how to learn. 2) Parents outsources the job of raising their children to the pre-schools, kindergartens and so on. Forget about more money for education. If you can make parents more actively interested in their childrens education it will automatically raise the quality of the education they recieve. More money for education is not going to solve those two fundamental problems.
- zerostar07 14y ago
  Isn't it the case that people in the US invest more time participating in their children's education (going to the extremes of homeschooling), yet their pre-college education fares low in comparison? Also wouldn't it have a huge impact on productivity and education inequality if education became a family matter?
  - jahewson 14y ago
    People in the US spend much more time working than those in almost any other developed country. Too much time. In Scandinavia overwork is socially unacceptable, while living a balanced life is desirable. For example, workers in the US get no statutory holiday, and most employers give 15 days, whereas in Scandinavia it is stautory 35-39 days depending on country. As the vast majority of US children are not homeschooled, it's not relevant to the broader discussion. In anycase homeschooling is typically encountered in a religious setting, or remote locations. Education is already a family matter, children whose parents provide a home environment conducive to learning will learn better, it's an inevitability. The tragedy is that such an environment is usually beyond the means of less wealthy parents, or beyond the abilities of those less-well educated. The solution of course, is good public schools (though the home learner will still be top of the class). EDIT: I'm British, we have 28 days holiday and overwork is perfectly acceptable here. Our schools are doing poorly because of a mediocre and highly proscriptive curriculum which has reduced the job to spoon-feeding photocopied worksheets, and puts off anyone intelligent from becoming a teacher (the pay is awful too). This is compounded by a severe over-dependence on standardised testing which has further reduced the job to spoon-feeding only the photocopied worksheet required to pass the next test, and resulted in massive grade inflation for over a decade. Rote learning is the only lending, and there is little to no actual understanding anymore. But people think that the government should fix education, as it is a public endeavour, even if this means admitting that the government don't have a clue and simply using public money to fund private schools (see Charter Schools) which is the latest experiment, and so far seem to be working.
Shivetya 14y ago
Because many feel the system to be broke and with little real chance of fixing it. However if you look through the history of the United States many of the very wealthy contributed to education. Current age issues is that for having existed nearly forty years the Department of Education has presided over an eleven time increase in the number of public school employees while enrollment over the same time increased only a little over eight percent. Yet test score improvements are nearly flat. The joke in the city nearest me is, if you want to know if someone works for the school just look to see if they have relatives in political office. Its as bad as people getting jobs at the airport. Simply put, the system does not work and going through the bureaucracy to fix it isn't panning out. Toss in the fact that in many districts the union is in total control of the local politicians. Look at how much money they pour into politics, in California for example over sixty million dollars is being poured into support of Prop 32. This money is essentially transferred directly from the tax payer to the unions to fund their political agenda because teachers have no choice in how their dues are spent let alone they have no choice in paying them. We allowed a system to be constructed where we pay with tax dollars an interest who then uses those dollars to get even more. Think of how all that money would benefit education instead. Actually we spend too much on education based on the results. Want to fix education? First get the political money out. Forbid unions from spending money on political campaigns directly or indirectly. Second, give schools systems more freedom in assigning teachers. Currently in our area staffing is based on the employee needs and not the student needs. Third, Hold parents accountable for disruptive children. Fourth, run the school year round. Fifth, quit wasting money on schools which are merely monuments to the politicians who have them built (half billion dollar schools? hundred million dollar schools? Really?)
markus2012 14y ago
I'm Canadian. I moved to VA for a couple of years. My children went to school there and we thought it was excellent. We moved to the Boston area for a couple of years. We thought the school system was excellent there too. We found some level of parent involvement is required in both countries to help over the rough spots and fill in the holes of missed knowledge. None of our children have gone to a US high school so I can't speak to that. Up until that point I don't see much of a difference between the two countries and have negligible complaints. That being said, I think computer based learning with the teacher only used to get over tough spots is what I'd prefer. (We can't risk a country-specific online school)
tokenadult 14y ago
Paul, you wrote, A lot of philanthropists in the US seem to become interested in education. . . . I wonder if it is largely an artifact of the brokenness of American schools rather than the universal importance of education. In the countries I know best, philanthropists donate to K-12 education, just as they do in the United States. But in the countries I know best, the school system in general gets better results per dollar, from public or from private investment. You may have noticed one of my posts on HN in which I said that I first came to Hacker News after a Ph.D. mathematician who was in the same homeschooling support group as I was at the time recommended that I read your essay "Why Nerds Are Unpopular" (2003). http://paulgraham.com/nerds.html http://paulgraham.com/nerds.html Later on, another friend recommended that I read "What You'll Wish You'd Known" (2005), http://paulgraham.com/hs.html http://paulgraham.com/hs.html and after that I made a habit of visiting your site to read your new essays. Somewhere in that process I followed the "News" link on your site and discovered Hacker News, and I see I registered my user name here about four years ago. Because I discovered Hacker News through your interest in education issues, I especially comment here in threads about those issues. I was introduced to the formal literature on education reform after an assistant principal at the local junior high school in Wisconsin I had just moved to from Minnesota recommended that I read John Holt's book How Children Fail. (You will find it an interesting read if you have not read it before.) On my own, I then went to the public library and found other books on education reform such as Charles Silberman's Crisis in the Classroom (quite an interesting book forty years later, to see what has changed and what has not in schools in the United States and Britain, the two countries he compared), and very radical books like Ivan Illich's Deschooling Society (1971). I have been studying education reform ever since, and have several shelf-feet of books on the subject that I have actually read, from a wide variety of perspectives, in my home office. During my two three-year stays in Taiwan (1982-1985, and 1998-2001), I was very alert to educational issues there, and I also have a huge collection of Chinese-language textbooks at home. My law degree was motivated by a desire to understand the legal framework surrounding the United States school system, the better to work to improve it. I have testified to committees of the state Legislature in Minnesota on education issues multiple times. I'm currently on the state board of directors of a parent organization here devoted to improving education of gifted children, and my paid work is providing supplemental mathematics courses for able learners from ten counties in Minnesota. So I've tried to walk the walk in the real world before talking the talk about education reform here on HN. I notice you wrote of the brokenness of American schools and I would not go that far. United States schools do not do as badly as they might. But I find that even when I say that United States schools underperform compared to the level of spending devoted to them, http://www.oecd.org/pisa/49685503.pdf http://www.oecd.org/pisa/49685503.pdf that this has evoked a fight club response here on Hacker News, with a persistent claim (poorly evidenced, based on the prior probabilities) that the United States is doing as well as any other country in educating public school pupils, correcting for the demographic groups living in the United States. I don't buy that, on multiple grounds, and I remembered a little while ago that one reason that statement is implausible on its face is that school systems in almost all other parts of the world have to teach young people to be proficient in one or more second languages (including but not limited to English) while learning all their other K-12 subjects, while Americans who have an acquired knowledge of any noncognate language (as I do) are exceedingly rare. More specifically, American schools are underperforming in teaching the most advantaged members of American society, http://educationnext.org/when-the-best-is-mediocre/ http://educationnext.org/when-the-best-is-mediocre/ http://educationnext.org/young-gifted-and-neglected/ http://educationnext.org/young-gifted-and-neglected/ especially in mathematics, http://educationnext.org/teaching-math-to-the-talented/ http://educationnext.org/teaching-math-to-the-talented/ while not doing well by the least advantaged young people in American society either. http://www.oecd.org/pisa/pisaproducts/pisa2009/48165173.pdf http://www.oecd.org/pisa/pisaproducts/pisa2009/48165173.pdf http://www.ams.org/notices/200502/fea-kenschaft.pdf http://www.ams.org/notices/200502/fea-kenschaft.pdf So while I haven't used your word "broken," nor the word "failed" that other Hacker News participants have falsely ascribed to my keyboard, I think it is fair to say that United States schools underperform relative to the huge investment made in them. http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/education/2003-09-16-education-comparison_x.htm http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/education/2003-09-16-edu... "'There are countries which don't get the bang for the bucks, and the U.S. is one of them,' said Barry McGaw, education director for the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which produced the annual review of industrialized nations." http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/08/education-spending-and-those-international-test-scores/ http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/08/education-spend... "As you can see, the United States is exactly on the line of best fit [on a scatterplot of country GDP and country means on reading test scores]. American students scored about as well as you’d expect them to if all you knew about them was their average standard of living." If a philanthropist can encourage further research in and understanding of how the United States and other countries could do even better in results for their already large investments in K-12 schooling, that would be a good contribution to society. And you, Paul, I suppose have much interest in this as the father of a child born since I discovered your writings. The George Lucas Educational Foundation already funds the Edutopia website http://www.edutopia.org/ http://www.edutopia.org/ but I'm not aware of that website receiving much attention from anything but its National Public Radio underwriting messages. Maybe more money will help the site do a better job of nudging reform along, or maybe the foundation needs a new focus. Among the big-money philanthropies, I think the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has gradually stumbled upon some helpful approaches for genuine school improvement, after several false starts.

by pg 14y ago

oacgnol 14y ago

I don't know if you could say that the impetus is largely because of the brokenness of the American education system. Online education startups like Coursera, Udacity, etc. have a far reaching effect on the rest of the world too. I'm willing to conjecture that a majority of students on Coursera right now are not US citizens, and that the appeal of (quality) college material to the rest of the world is a big factor. There are huge implications for universities to take advantage of this to spread influence.

diego 14y ago

Good education in the US is very expensive, unlike in Sweden. For those of us who believe that quality education for everyone is good for society, it means it's broken. Other people believe that it's better to have excellent education for those who can afford it, and marginal education for the rest. Those people would not say it's broken.

mrtron 14y ago

An Indian billionaire donated ~2 billion to education. I have always thought investment into education is the optimal strategy for increasing the rate of human progress against time.

sterna 14y ago

Philanthropy is much bigger in the US than in the Nordic countries so there is much more money to go around. That being said there has traditionally been a feeling among the rich that they have already given their share to education through the high tax rate. Historically construction has been the most popular type of philanthropic project. But in recent years the scope has been broadened a lot because the welfare state has had to retract some of its branches, and thus education has also risen in popularity.

marvin 14y ago

Pretty sure this view is correct. Philantropy in general isn't very big in Scandinavia (at least from a private level), but at least in Norway most of it ends up being directed at developing countries. I don't think I've ever heard of someone giving money to domestic education outside of religious communities.

fohlin 14y ago

As a data point, 15 percent of Swedish university funds come from private donations [1]. That's supposed to be equal to the US, though I imagine that other types of educational institutions get considerably less in Sweden. [1]: http://www.sulf.se/Universitetslararen/Arkiv/2011/Nummer-1011-11/Donationer-i-Sverige-ar-lika-stora-som-i-USA/ http://www.sulf.se/Universitetslararen/Arkiv/2011/Nummer-101... (sv)

ThomPete 14y ago

Education is a big topic most places also in Scandinavia where it's more or less free. But where there is active entrepreneurship in the US in this field, most of Scandinavia is copycatting others or developing government plans on how to improve education per. the PISA measurement scale. The Scandinavian model is known for it's group oriented focus on learning where the new discussion is whether this is the right approach. Among other things especially the tiger mom revolution from china is a big discussion and Canadas education system is very popular. Finland seems to be the only Scandinavian country that is doing exceptionally well on the PISA scale. My own personal believe is that there are to basic reasons why the quality of education seems to go down is. 1) Still too much focus on "learning by heart". It's obvious that you need to learn read, write and do basic calculation, but beyond that the most important thing to learn is, how to learn. 2) Parents outsources the job of raising their children to the pre-schools, kindergartens and so on. Forget about more money for education. If you can make parents more actively interested in their childrens education it will automatically raise the quality of the education they recieve. More money for education is not going to solve those two fundamental problems.

zerostar07 14y ago
Isn't it the case that people in the US invest more time participating in their children's education (going to the extremes of homeschooling), yet their pre-college education fares low in comparison? Also wouldn't it have a huge impact on productivity and education inequality if education became a family matter?
- jahewson 14y ago
  People in the US spend much more time working than those in almost any other developed country. Too much time. In Scandinavia overwork is socially unacceptable, while living a balanced life is desirable. For example, workers in the US get no statutory holiday, and most employers give 15 days, whereas in Scandinavia it is stautory 35-39 days depending on country. As the vast majority of US children are not homeschooled, it's not relevant to the broader discussion. In anycase homeschooling is typically encountered in a religious setting, or remote locations. Education is already a family matter, children whose parents provide a home environment conducive to learning will learn better, it's an inevitability. The tragedy is that such an environment is usually beyond the means of less wealthy parents, or beyond the abilities of those less-well educated. The solution of course, is good public schools (though the home learner will still be top of the class). EDIT: I'm British, we have 28 days holiday and overwork is perfectly acceptable here. Our schools are doing poorly because of a mediocre and highly proscriptive curriculum which has reduced the job to spoon-feeding photocopied worksheets, and puts off anyone intelligent from becoming a teacher (the pay is awful too). This is compounded by a severe over-dependence on standardised testing which has further reduced the job to spoon-feeding only the photocopied worksheet required to pass the next test, and resulted in massive grade inflation for over a decade. Rote learning is the only lending, and there is little to no actual understanding anymore. But people think that the government should fix education, as it is a public endeavour, even if this means admitting that the government don't have a clue and simply using public money to fund private schools (see Charter Schools) which is the latest experiment, and so far seem to be working.

Shivetya 14y ago

Because many feel the system to be broke and with little real chance of fixing it. However if you look through the history of the United States many of the very wealthy contributed to education. Current age issues is that for having existed nearly forty years the Department of Education has presided over an eleven time increase in the number of public school employees while enrollment over the same time increased only a little over eight percent. Yet test score improvements are nearly flat. The joke in the city nearest me is, if you want to know if someone works for the school just look to see if they have relatives in political office. Its as bad as people getting jobs at the airport. Simply put, the system does not work and going through the bureaucracy to fix it isn't panning out. Toss in the fact that in many districts the union is in total control of the local politicians. Look at how much money they pour into politics, in California for example over sixty million dollars is being poured into support of Prop 32. This money is essentially transferred directly from the tax payer to the unions to fund their political agenda because teachers have no choice in how their dues are spent let alone they have no choice in paying them. We allowed a system to be constructed where we pay with tax dollars an interest who then uses those dollars to get even more. Think of how all that money would benefit education instead. Actually we spend too much on education based on the results. Want to fix education? First get the political money out. Forbid unions from spending money on political campaigns directly or indirectly. Second, give schools systems more freedom in assigning teachers. Currently in our area staffing is based on the employee needs and not the student needs. Third, Hold parents accountable for disruptive children. Fourth, run the school year round. Fifth, quit wasting money on schools which are merely monuments to the politicians who have them built (half billion dollar schools? hundred million dollar schools? Really?)

markus2012 14y ago

I'm Canadian. I moved to VA for a couple of years. My children went to school there and we thought it was excellent. We moved to the Boston area for a couple of years. We thought the school system was excellent there too. We found some level of parent involvement is required in both countries to help over the rough spots and fill in the holes of missed knowledge. None of our children have gone to a US high school so I can't speak to that. Up until that point I don't see much of a difference between the two countries and have negligible complaints. That being said, I think computer based learning with the teacher only used to get over tough spots is what I'd prefer. (We can't risk a country-specific online school)

tokenadult 14y ago

Paul, you wrote, A lot of philanthropists in the US seem to become interested in education. . . . I wonder if it is largely an artifact of the brokenness of American schools rather than the universal importance of education. In the countries I know best, philanthropists donate to K-12 education, just as they do in the United States. But in the countries I know best, the school system in general gets better results per dollar, from public or from private investment. You may have noticed one of my posts on HN in which I said that I first came to Hacker News after a Ph.D. mathematician who was in the same homeschooling support group as I was at the time recommended that I read your essay "Why Nerds Are Unpopular" (2003). http://paulgraham.com/nerds.html http://paulgraham.com/nerds.html Later on, another friend recommended that I read "What You'll Wish You'd Known" (2005), http://paulgraham.com/hs.html http://paulgraham.com/hs.html and after that I made a habit of visiting your site to read your new essays. Somewhere in that process I followed the "News" link on your site and discovered Hacker News, and I see I registered my user name here about four years ago. Because I discovered Hacker News through your interest in education issues, I especially comment here in threads about those issues. I was introduced to the formal literature on education reform after an assistant principal at the local junior high school in Wisconsin I had just moved to from Minnesota recommended that I read John Holt's book How Children Fail. (You will find it an interesting read if you have not read it before.) On my own, I then went to the public library and found other books on education reform such as Charles Silberman's Crisis in the Classroom (quite an interesting book forty years later, to see what has changed and what has not in schools in the United States and Britain, the two countries he compared), and very radical books like Ivan Illich's Deschooling Society (1971). I have been studying education reform ever since, and have several shelf-feet of books on the subject that I have actually read, from a wide variety of perspectives, in my home office. During my two three-year stays in Taiwan (1982-1985, and 1998-2001), I was very alert to educational issues there, and I also have a huge collection of Chinese-language textbooks at home. My law degree was motivated by a desire to understand the legal framework surrounding the United States school system, the better to work to improve it. I have testified to committees of the state Legislature in Minnesota on education issues multiple times. I'm currently on the state board of directors of a parent organization here devoted to improving education of gifted children, and my paid work is providing supplemental mathematics courses for able learners from ten counties in Minnesota. So I've tried to walk the walk in the real world before talking the talk about education reform here on HN. I notice you wrote of the brokenness of American schools and I would not go that far. United States schools do not do as badly as they might. But I find that even when I say that United States schools underperform compared to the level of spending devoted to them, http://www.oecd.org/pisa/49685503.pdf http://www.oecd.org/pisa/49685503.pdf that this has evoked a fight club response here on Hacker News, with a persistent claim (poorly evidenced, based on the prior probabilities) that the United States is doing as well as any other country in educating public school pupils, correcting for the demographic groups living in the United States. I don't buy that, on multiple grounds, and I remembered a little while ago that one reason that statement is implausible on its face is that school systems in almost all other parts of the world have to teach young people to be proficient in one or more second languages (including but not limited to English) while learning all their other K-12 subjects, while Americans who have an acquired knowledge of any noncognate language (as I do) are exceedingly rare. More specifically, American schools are underperforming in teaching the most advantaged members of American society, http://educationnext.org/when-the-best-is-mediocre/ http://educationnext.org/when-the-best-is-mediocre/ http://educationnext.org/young-gifted-and-neglected/ http://educationnext.org/young-gifted-and-neglected/ especially in mathematics, http://educationnext.org/teaching-math-to-the-talented/ http://educationnext.org/teaching-math-to-the-talented/ while not doing well by the least advantaged young people in American society either. http://www.oecd.org/pisa/pisaproducts/pisa2009/48165173.pdf http://www.oecd.org/pisa/pisaproducts/pisa2009/48165173.pdf http://www.ams.org/notices/200502/fea-kenschaft.pdf http://www.ams.org/notices/200502/fea-kenschaft.pdf So while I haven't used your word "broken," nor the word "failed" that other Hacker News participants have falsely ascribed to my keyboard, I think it is fair to say that United States schools underperform relative to the huge investment made in them. http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/education/2003-09-16-education-comparison_x.htm http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/education/2003-09-16-edu... "'There are countries which don't get the bang for the bucks, and the U.S. is one of them,' said Barry McGaw, education director for the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which produced the annual review of industrialized nations." http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/08/education-spending-and-those-international-test-scores/ http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/08/education-spend... "As you can see, the United States is exactly on the line of best fit [on a scatterplot of country GDP and country means on reading test scores]. American students scored about as well as you’d expect them to if all you knew about them was their average standard of living." If a philanthropist can encourage further research in and understanding of how the United States and other countries could do even better in results for their already large investments in K-12 schooling, that would be a good contribution to society. And you, Paul, I suppose have much interest in this as the father of a child born since I discovered your writings. The George Lucas Educational Foundation already funds the Edutopia website http://www.edutopia.org/ http://www.edutopia.org/ but I'm not aware of that website receiving much attention from anything but its National Public Radio underwriting messages. Maybe more money will help the site do a better job of nudging reform along, or maybe the foundation needs a new focus. Among the big-money philanthropies, I think the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has gradually stumbled upon some helpful approaches for genuine school improvement, after several false starts.