Hacker News Reader

Comment by SRasch | Hacker News Reader

"The combination of forces that produced the default curriculum was so random"

This seems true and sad. What would be a first principles approach to "What should every kid learn" if we were to start from scratch you think?

View on HN

> "What should every kid learn" if we were to start from scratch you think?

Depends on socio economic class I would imagine. If you belong to middle class in India for example, you would want you kids to buy into 'the cult of achievement' where achievement is defined by how many people you can prove that you are better than. Because this is only one of the few methods available to Indian middle class to ensure that her child is not going to live a life of destitution. You probably won't care if your child is 'thinking critically'.

But I guess it is an interesting question as to what school would mean if you belong to upper class in America where you are free from social morality and hierarchies. I would imagine you want you child to learn how to be passionate about things so they can escape a life of constant boredom.

Is it fair to say that there isn't (or may not be) a such thing as first principles at all, outside of acculturation, if education is so context dependent?

Kids need to learn to read. Society works sooo much better when you can assume every adult can read.

Give man a fish vs. teach to fish..

This was true when print was orders of magnitude cheaper to distribute than audio or video. Of course text still has distinct advantages, particularly for further education (a lot easier to skim and pull the factoid you need out of a textbook than 80 hours of video), but "society" shouldn't be affected nearly as much as it used to be.

...and here I type you an answer. I can't really use video yet.

Larger percentage of humans are literate than ever before. Larger body of knowledge is in written form than ever before. I think we are going to rely more on text in the future, not less. Even with video content, you search, tag and label them with text. That is not going away.

This isn't true yet, but with enough technological progress it could become true. And if it does, it seems likely that the change from literate to post-literate culture will be as significant as the change from pre-literate to literate.

Ted Chiang wrote an excellent story examining this issue (although not going as far as completely post-literate):

http://subterraneanpress.com/magazine/fall_2013/the_truth_of...

Give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish... And he'll vote for the man who gave him a fish.

> What would be a first principles approach to "What should every kid learn" if we were to start from scratch you think?

It's a question humans have been asking for centuries, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emile,_or_On_Education

I can't hope to enumerate all topics they ought to cover, but math (arithmetic), history, science (scientific method), and language (reading, culture, literature) seem to be pretty important cornerstones wouldn't you think? It's hard to imagine living in a modern world where citizens could not read, write, add, subtract, or conduct simple experiments.

If we were to start from scratch? Every kid should learn to be themselves. Let their individual educations naturally sprout forth from that.

My daughter responded to "be yourself" with "how can I be myself if I don't know who I am?". Kids are still becoming themselves, so that advice is not actionable.

I agree with the rest of your comment.

I would say that every kid should be exposed to enough experiences to support their natural human quest to understand themselves. But there are people who don't have much capacity or desire for introspection, so that breaks down quickly.

I don't think every kid needs the same things. Which is why the industrial education system fails for most. There is no perfect curriculum, there is no perfect law, etc.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com