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> Yet for some reason, edtech hasn't been able to look beyond the current state of things and build something completely new. There isn't an "Uber" or "Bitcoin" of edtech. And I believe the reason why is solely because of posts like this: advice that places too much importance on working with inefficient systems, industry best practices, laws and trying to fix a broken system instead of ignoring all of that unimportant stuff and just focusing on users to build a new one from scratch through software.

The number one obstacle quite frankly is law and accreditation. They force the certain basic foundation that hinders a revolutionary startup from inventing a different modality.

But that's my point. Uber and Airbnb and Bitcoin didn't confine themselves to laws in the beginning. They just built something that worked. Yes, now that they are big they are hitting legal obstacles (like NYC's ruling on Airbnb rentals today, a top HN post). But they are also now known, and so users are aware of the potential innovation that the current state of law is inhibiting. And that increased demand for these kinds of inevitable new products and services will lead to faster change over time.

Uber and Airbnb don't have the government as a customer. You can't both ignore the government and sell it stuff at the same time.

The model I've come up with leapfrogs government entirely and goes straight to users.

Keaton, you make it incredibly clear that you have no understanding about how education works. It's really sad that you criticize YC and our excellent educator community. Your neglect and lack of respect for teachers and traditional schooling is appalling and disturbing.

The saddest part is that a large number of young techies (you are 19) feel like you. Nevertheless, I want to empathize with you, and suggest that you step away from your computer and spend just any small amount of time within our public education system to see the challenges and complexities of serving our students. It is a complex problem and you are grossly understating and trivializing the importance and purpose of existing institutions. The founders of Uber and Bitcoin and Airbnb got nothing on education. Serve even 10 underserved students and drive them to prolonged success, and then come back and talk.

I don't take offense as much as someone running an edtech company, as much as I take for being a part of an outstanding community of people improving education.

You may be right. But if I'm right, I'll help more kids faster. And that's what I care about. And I think I am right, because I see what I'm talking about every day.

With the exception of a few incredible teachers and mentors out there (I myself had several), education today isn't genuinely exciting for most students. Many teachers are truly great people and are valuable to students. But are they a necessity, or a luxury? Either way, in order for educational content to stay current in today's system, teachers need to be taught new information first before they can then teach their students. Physical teacher-to-student teaching is an O(n^k+1) solution that will never be in every city let alone the developing world. If -- and that's a big "if" -- learning could come from a single software-based source of information in a way that was just as good or better than physical teaching today, a world-class education and credit for it could be accessible everywhere. All a student would need is a smartphone, which is relatively nothing compared to the current cost of education. Look at Duolingo as a great example of this for language learning and language-fluency credentialing. And on top of that, is the role of the teacher to in fact teach, or to guide and mentor? Great mentorship is invaluble, but that can also come from anybody great even if they're not in a formal teaching role.

Most learning today, whether technology, science or art, happens through books and YouTube videos and students teaching each other anyways. This peer-to-peer model works. And because through this model, young, radiant students are the primary source of content delivery, this model is also addictively social and exciting. All you have to do is remove the system and let kids do their thing. There's a reason products like Reddit are so popular -- it's an Internet ecosystem for youth all over the world.

Almost everyone who's been largely successful in any field has been self-taught. This isn't a coincidence. Those who truly love what they do enough to commit themselves to becoming world class by definition transcend the limits imposed by conventional educational standards. The problem, then, is not a teaching problem, but an exposure problem and an excitement problem to help kids find their passions and solve problems with friends in person who they love. Could an edtech platform be as viral as a Snapchat, Twitter, Netflix, Twitch Reddit, Buzzfeed? That's what I'm set to find out.

Edit: For context:

Harkness table https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harkness_table

Sugata Mitra: Kids can teach themselves https://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_shows_how_kids_teach_...

The best prep school in the world Phillips Exeter Academy, where I went, ironically is designed around kids teaching themselves. And parents pay $40,000+ per year for it.

You make some good points and I appreciate the links. The one thing you're leaving off that public and private schools teach are the lessons learned from face-to-face social interactions with peers, bullies, and authority figures. Public schools largely held be back as a savant where I had to learn most shit on my own. Some teachers were great enough to try to help me on the side. Nonetheless, the basic principles on human behavior I've encountered in various workplaces were the same as I dealt with in public schooling. Other people good at balancing various tradeoffs in the schools did well in the workplaces I've been in. Among the worst were the homeschoolers with one or two exceptions. Especially when they were trying to change things with resisting authority figures before getting slapped in the face with constant expectation to do what you're told. If anything, those of us from public school experience more freedom going into average workplace than we had then.

So, if kids left the normal educational system for your app, how would you replicate that experience gained in soft skills when most of their learning is just watching videos or messaging/talking to people through a phone? Or are you going to push it off to parents hoping they just all change in terms of how they facilitate training in social interaction? Remember that many students being held back by poor education are in the hood, rural areas, homes with apathetic parents, etc. The schools might be the closest thing they get to learning from some decent or just diverse people. Plus, there's the side benefit that they're like a day care allowing parents to go to work or have a mental break at least until summer. ;)

If you look over my application linked in the OC, you'll see our number one design goal is to connect users physically. There's something incredibly powerful about the social experience that school provides like you're describing that no big edtech platform today has made an explicit design goal. In short, we'll have to "design for trust" a lot like Airbnb did (see Joe Gebbia's TED talk). The locations could be anywhere from a local Starbucks to a public library to the nearest college campus. If educational content could be optimized for the smartphone, a lot like Snapchat has optimized the Snapchat story as their primary unit of content on mobile, then any place could become a sort of classroom. So long as you're surrounded by kids like you learning and making things with you that you care about. Meetup.com has accomplished this to some extent for working professionals, but we don't think it's specific enough towards specific projects in the context of youth education.

This is going to be a really hard problem to solve overall from a design perspective. And like you hinted, it will be even harder for us to do this for kids in poor or rural areas in contrast to rich kids in urban areas. But we're going to figure it out somehow. If the timing is right, self-driving cars and improved cheap public transportation will help this tremendously. Our app could then in theory automate the entire process of getting a group of kids connected somewhere safe and public. The value and safety of those kinds of experiences could be built upon even further if you add in a kind of crowdsourced mentorship experience on top of that, like Uber for chaperones in a way. If you're a local software engineer or cinematographer or biophysics researcher, you could give back to your local community by helping out local kids who want to contribute in your field. Now all the sudden everybody can become a teacher, which feels really good. Like Quora answers, but in person.

Your application is very interesting but it looks like you're trying to do too much at once. Especially with the AI part haha. I think a subset of it is achievable by one, focused person for a limited set of students and topics. As another said, the crap people deal with today is mandated by law and policy under a regime that won't buy into what you're proposing. Further, many places require by law that the kids are in what educational system considers a school rather than your app. So, you might want to prove the idea by hitting the market for workforce training and personal improvement then pivot into general education as both will use similar resources.

Another problem with your proposal, a huge one, is that there's nothing in it about countering spread of misinformation. Quick link to give an idea of how easy invalid information spreads and persists across social media:

http://www.iflscience.com/technology/facebook-echo-chambers-...

That or another Facebook study also pointed out that retractions (eg a Snopes article) only slowed misinformation in the 30-40% range IIRC. The bad info spreads more and lasts longer in your model. It has to be detected somehow with official counters on any topics where there's a consensus that they need to know. That means your model, like the others, needs human beings that act as sort of teachers and moderators. This is even true for a high-quality forum of smart people like Hacker News. Alternative is some AI that knows everything about how people speak, these topics, how to explain them... artificial teachers of nearly human intelligence that nobody has built yet. Since you lack that and need humans, your model can't scale for general population at the rate of technology scaling. Instead, it's something like N teachers per M groups where the N to M ratio is however much stuff the teachers can follow and moderate. You then modify this somehow with the fact that specific people or groups vetted by teachers as knowing the material can be rated among the N as their input is trustworthy. Might even compensate volunteers somehow a la StackOverflow or Quora if they contribute a certain amount.

Far as full experience regardless of bandwidth, do look up the concept of progressive enhancement as illustrated with this project:

https://gdstechnology.blog.gov.uk/2016/09/19/why-we-use-prog...

That thing even works on Lynx. Now, you want images, video, interactivity. The images can be compressed quite a bit while still being clear. Same with video. More compression for lower bandwidth links. Animated GIF's done well can illustrate in a few images what otherwise takes a video. Still popular on many sites. Use straight-up text where you can as my old text & RTF files were way smaller than Word or Web files. :) Support for distributed, file sharing within group if on Wifi. Alternatively, on SDcards where they could just buy one, have one person who affords Internet pull the data, and pass the shared card(s) along to group members.

I like how you mix it being a paid service with tax deductions and donations. I predict you'll probably put most or all of the services on the same infrastructure. What you can do is use the money that comes in for business or professional courses to cover creation of general ed material. The cash flow is split to cover each. The people making general ed material should have a track record of writing books or doing online courses that actually worked. They'll adapt it to your model. They'll have to change it for increased effectiveness as user feedback comes in like any other marketing. The cash flow also expands the distribution network so people with low income or poverty can access the material without overloading organization. A number of them might become contributors or paying users later.

So, those are some ideas I got as I read your application.

>>> Nonetheless, the basic principles on human behavior I've encountered in various workplaces were the same as I dealt with in public schooling. Other people good at balancing various tradeoffs in the schools did well in the workplaces I've been in. Among the worst were the homeschoolers with one or two exceptions. Especially when they were trying to change things with resisting authority figures before getting slapped in the face with constant expectation to do what you're told. If anything, those of us from public school experience more freedom going into average workplace than we had then.

I get what you're saying here, but if the chief virtue of the educational system is that it beats people into submission ready to face life in authoritarian (or micromanagement-disguised-as-teamwork) workplaces, I'm not entirely convinced that it's something worth protecting.

I'd be more interested in thinking about what a workplace should be like to get the best out of people who haven't been taught the kind of deference that seems to be expected.

"I get what you're saying here, but if the chief virtue of the educational system is that it beats people into submission ready to face life in authoritarian (or micromanagement-disguised-as-teamwork) workplaces, I'm not entirely convinced that it's something worth protecting."

I'm against the public school system. So, we agree with each other. Yet, I'm for putting them in situations where some aspect of what they have to do is dictated so they learn respond to that properly. Some of them will allow a clever response to succeed while others will not. Just like in real world.

They need to expect and be ready for this as the authoritarianism is dominant in workplace and government.

But the mean in education isn't all that great, is it? There's issues that stem from assumptions about education that were correct in the 14th century but have since become a bit dated. You can improve a system built on the wrong premises, but you can't fix it.

It's a system that works through sheer force of will, and squanders the efforts of educators and students alike. The ambition of education technology shouldn't be to rehabilitate 10 underserved students, no matter how noble of a goal that is. It should be to make sure they aren't ever underserved. The current system can't do that period.

By the time you have fixed the issues that prevent it from doing that, you've ripped out and replaced 90% of it. The way class progression works. Automating lecture components. The testing components. How responsibility over students is handed from teacher to teacher. Assuring best practices are used, both by students and teachers. The curricula and how they feed into each other. Tracking student progress. Negotiation of homework quantity between teachers. Enabling broad collaboration between teachers in matters of teaching materials. Quality assurance.

The rage is not against the fact that there is an education system. It's that it could be so much better. It's against the waste of youth. A class of 30 with only half of it engaged wastes 180 childyears over their K-12s. That's 2 long lifetimes, in the years when their minds are the most malleable.

I've been incredibly inspired by YC and only mean for my criticism to be constructive. But by naming their edtech initiative "Imagine K12", they've already lost.

I care as much about solving education as they do. I think the basis of my argument is factually correct. Just look at the data.

Why not treat education like any other disruptable industry?

Thinking about similar things, wanna chat?

Sounds good. Shoot me an email at keaton@bloomv1.org. Other social media info is in my HN profile page.

I quickly skimmed your site. I think the assignment on counting a room full of cash was brilliant. That should instantly get students attention in general and to how they might count their future stash. I'm interested in hearing how well that assignment did in both learning and creative solutions from students.

Most educational systems are rooted in child-care, not in actually educating students. And the ones that do have the resources to properly educate students are often so entrenched in politics and status that they become better conduits for indoctrination instead of empowering students to better make decisions themselves. Like any old organization problems, it is going to be incredibly difficult for them to shed that history.

I think new education systems that are based on software will eventually replace most teacher-based education systems. Not only do teachers not scale, most of them don't understand the subjects they are teaching at a deep enough level to teach these subjects effectively.

I am convinced that software tutors that are based on AI research which was primarily done in the 1970s and 1980s will form the core of these new software education systems. For the past few years I have been working on an AI tutor for solving elementary algebra equations that can already teach parts of this subject better than a human can. If you are interested in discussing how AI tutors like this can be used to help realize the vision you have for Bloom, contact me using the email address that is in my profile.

Are you aware of any other edtech companies that have built solutions similar to what you're proposing? That's a good place to start.

BTW, these YC guidelines are built on actual experiences from 100+ companies. I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss their hard-earned wisdom.

Nope, which is why I applied.

And I agree in the sense that I believe in YC more than anybody. But I disagree in the sense that no edtech solution to date is dramatically changing the world as much as a Facebook or Uber, so something must not be working. And I'm calling out Coursera, Udacity, Udemy, EdX, Khan Academy, Codecademy, Vidcode, Jumpcut, MakeSchool, AltSchool, HackClub, codings bootcamps and regular school itself. Honestly, the best solutions right now are in fact YouTube, Reddit and Hacker News.

YC won't do your homework for you. There's great resources out there tho - start by spending a few hours on EdSurge. I literally started the company to inform folks like you entering the space to learn what's going on, who's doing what, and how ed is different from other industries being impacted by tech. It's the best resource out there.

The main takeaway I have after seeing so many enter this space in the past 7+ years is that the incurious never get very far. Be curious and seek to understand the paths of others before you, and you may find your place in it all.

With all due respect, it's a total fallacy that edtech has to be different from other industries. There's no physical force in the universe forcing education to be any certain way. So if one way is provably better, we should just build it, and deal with the obstacles when they come up later. Kids, both privileged and not, have been dropping out for years because they're tired of things. I'm building this for them.

To quote Balaji Srinivasan of 21 & A16z:

"Don't argue about regulation. Build Uber. Don't argue about monetary policy. Build Bitcoin. Don't argue about it. Build the alternative."

Re:industries, you don't think that the fact that education is about humans, rather than say.. power grids, or financial instruments, or mines, or laundry detergents.. makes it at least somewhat different from other industries? Or that those being served (children) are often not in a position to be the sole determinants of what's best for them, and thus your buyers may not be your users (and all that entails)?

Re:physical forces, there's actually several that have defined why education is a certain way today, and that will shape it in the future. Probably the most powerful is that it's first and foremost about human relationships - foundations of values, trust, physical presence, belonging, etc. And the second most powerful is that poverty is a physical context that shapes outcomes in the most profound of ways. I only bring these up because a) they're taken for granted by many tech entrepreneurs who did not have to worry about them in their own lives, and b) they're the reality tech entrepreneurs grapple with when they focus on the core of education problems, rather than the periphery where most wind up.

You sound pretty dead set in thinking you've got this though, so I wish you the best of luck.

Great point! The wellbeing of millions of students, and the complex web of relationships a school creates in a community, deserves a well regulated industry.