The article throws out the baby with the bathwater. Let's focus on the consumer market for US grades 7-12 and vocational education, especially computing. For f

The article throws out the baby with the bathwater. Let's focus on the consumer market for US grades 7-12 and vocational education, especially computing. For fine arts such as singing, piano, violin, other instruments in a symphony orchestra, guitar, dance, painting, sculpture, photography, etc. it appears that overwhelmingly the way children make progress is (A) their family has some expertise and encourages their children and (B) the education is available in the home, in the church (e.g., for choir), or from private tutors, e.g., a local piano or violin teacher. E.g., for violin, consider Ms. Caroline Goulding as at http://www.carolinegoulding.com/ Or consider Ms. Alina Ibragimova playing the Bach 'Chaconne' as at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tezau3hlRxs She's good; the last part of the first D-minor section is world class work. Tough to believe that she learned how to do that in a standard school! For the consumer market for grades 7-12, before a consumer will devote much time or energy to education, they need to know that there will be a 'payoff' from official education 'certification' which mostly means better grades in grades 9-12 or higher scores on tests of the College Entrance Examination Board (CEEB), e.g., as at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/College_Board Of course good scores on CEEB tests are useful for getting into college and getting college scholarships. So, really such consumer education has to aim at existing graded courses in grades 9-12 and/or subjects tested by the CEEB. Now we face a hard lesson: Doing well on these aims is "not a spectator sport", more work than just watching TV, and a lot of hard work. For such learning, the first source is the student's usual school. For more, the student may want some tutoring. A few students want to do better than what is available in the school. For tutoring, here's an approach: Find what are the more popular textbooks and develop some videos tied closely to those main books. Then a student who needs tutoring, or just to get ready for a test on Monday, could use the videos for just the place they are in their textbook. For going beyond what is available in the school, a student could use some guidance and then the learning materials. For going beyond, we are really aiming just at some CEEB tests, in particular, the tests of the College Level Examination Program (CLEP) as at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/College_Level_Examination_Program For the course content, just get some of the best available textbooks and then maybe have some corresponding supplementary videos. Some on-line tests so that a student could 'check their progress' would be helpful. E.g., maybe a student wants to do well in calculus. So, get a book on calculus aimed at the CLEP test in calculus. For still more, that is, for an ambitious student in grades 9-12, just aim at the subject matter tests of the GRE. For vocational, the audience of Hacker News the unique, world class cream of such education. Why? Because in the US, nearly all education in practical computing is from self teaching from books, on-line fora, practicing at a computer, on-line documentation, e.g., the Microsoft MSDN Web pages, etc. Improving such vocational education? Not easy because it would involve at least writing better books than the best ones already available from O'Reilly, Microsoft Press, and many other publishers and better Web sites, fora, etc. For one company in education to improve on all those sources is hopelessly difficult. So, where do I see a significant startup opportunity in education for grades 9-12 and vocational education? I don't. Really, that's good news: The CEEB seems to have the needed means of 'certification', their tests. Otherwise, get some good learning materials, commonly just textbooks although maybe PDFs downloaded from the Internet. The bottleneck is the work -- no spectator sport and no royal road. Instead hard work. E.g., look at the left hand finger tips of Ms. Ibragimova; they are bent backwards. So were those of Jascha Heifetz. Why? Thousands of hours of intense practice. Hard work. I did some such things: (1) I'm no good at violin, have too little talent and never practiced nearly enough, but I did make it through the D-major section of 'Chaconne' and parts of the rest mostly via being self-taught. (2) I never took freshman calculus. The college where I did my freshman year was not so good and pushed everyone into a 'college algebra' class a bit beneath what I'd already done in high school (in the same city as the college but the best high school in the city -- Dad carefully selected where he bought his house). So, I showed up for the tests only and otherwise got a good calculus book and dug in. For my sophomore year, I went to a much better college and one that happened to have a quite good math department and just started on their sophomore calculus from Johnson and Kiokemeister, then also used at Harvard. It's a good calculus book. Did fine: Made As in that calculus, got Honors in Math, and 800 on the math subject matter test of the GRE. (3) I continued with a lot of largely independent study much like I'd used for freshman calculus, and that background was crucial for my Ph.D. in Engineering -- really some applied math. (4) My career has been in applied math and computing. I've taught computing in two well-known universities, but I never really took a course in it and, instead, was essentially self-taught, as is nearly standard on HN. One little victory: One Christmas at the farm of my wife's family, I was upstairs practicing violin. A bright daughter, about 9, of one of my wife's sisters came up and watched. So I put my violin bow in her right hand, showing her how to position her fingers to hold it (the more natural Russian way Heifetz used and not the less natural German way!), put the violin under her left chin, and let her make sounds. Her mother had been trying without success for years to get that girl interested in music, but the next day her father asked me "Now, how much is a violin going to cost me?". She was a bright girl: She was at a large, very competitive high school, the pride of the community, and in her senior year her parents were surprised to discover that she was by a wide margin the head of her class. She got Valedictorian. In college the retraced the steps of my wife and got PBK. She got her LLB at Harvard and started at Cravath, Swaine & Moore. Bright girl. So, net, really, just do the darned work, and no great educational startup opportunity. For a reader who got this far and heard of the Bach 'Chaconne' here for the first time, here's what it is: At one point, Bach wrote six pieces for unaccompanied violin (he did the same for cello). Three of the pieces he called called 'Sonatas' and the other three, 'Partitas'. These pieces are secular, unlike his other ecclesiastical music. While Bach was mostly a keyboard player, especially for organ, his violin and cello pieces show amazing knowledge of violin and cello, even if heavily he tried to have them play chords more appropriate for keyboards. The crown jewel of the unaccompanied pieces is the last part of the Partita #2 called the 'Chaconne' which was a old dance form. A lot of the music is trying to play on 3-4 strings at once. Those efforts can view as chords sometimes and just more than one melodic line at other times. Bach was good at doing such things. The piece is in three sections, D-minor, D-major, and D-minor again and is a 'theme and variations'. The variations have great variety, slow to fast, calm to agitated, low pitches to high. The D-major section starts off calm. Soon it is playing some nice arpeggios with some triplets. The triplets get to be more and more intense, say, 'insistent'. The end of the section is essentially the climax of the piece and is the most difficult section to play. Depending on how it is played and heard, the last bars can sound like chords or several melodic lines, each heard before. How to play the last few notes is up to the violinist, but Heifetz makes a big climax there and then quickly moves to the start of the last D-minor section which can view as some 'cathartic' relief from the intensity of the climax at the end of the D-major section. Due to the use of the chords and the relatively non-melodic main theme, for a listener the piece takes some effort to follow well enough to 'like'. What it all 'means' is for the listener to decide. But it does appear that something intense and determined is going on underneath there somewhere. Playing it is great fun -- parts of it are a great way to scream out to the heavens the spirit of humanity or some such. There is an old joke: At times the piece is played on guitar. So, at a concert a guitarist in the audience sat waiting for the concert to begin. With nothing else to do, he mentioned to the person next to him "The Bach 'Chaconne' sure is difficult to play." The next person was composer Castelnuovo-Tedesco, known to be a man of few words, who said nothing until the concert was over at which time he turned to the guitarist and said, "The Bach 'Chaconne' is the greatest piece of music ever written." It's my favorite. Again, the bottleneck in education is the need for the students to do hard work. Given that, there's lots of great music, good violins and pianos, textbooks, CEEB tests, colleges, universities, guidance, YouTube videos, etc. With the hard work, we can soar to the heavens. Without the hard work, we're stuck in the mud.