Techies care about education, but not enough
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For instance, to be taken seriously as an "educator" I'd need to get a Masters or PhD in education. This (1) would cost a lot of money, and (2) not raise my income (though it might get me a better benefits package), would (3) qualify me for a job I don't want to do, and (4) [most importantly] steal time from hacking on things that might have an impact on education.
Another half of it is that, from a systemantic viewpoint (what does the system do vs. what does the system say that it does?) the real thing that "the public" wants from education is a way to pass (i) values and (ii) social status onto their children. Overall, the purpose of the system is to sort people out in social status by something that corresponds somewhat to ability [broadly defined] but as much to the social status of the parents... and to do so in a way that people perceive that "I failed" rather than "I was failed." As Habermas says, this creates a feeling that the 'system' is legitimate which can somewhat compensate for the irrational and erroneous decisions that are made by governments and corporations.
(Questions of legitimacy don't come up so much when governments & corporations are successful at managing the economy, since people are busy working and spending...)
The other major stakeholders are all self-interested, and they've got pretty good rackets going. You can't entirely blame, say, textbook publishers or teacher's unions for all the problems of education, but they'll fight to the death any change that threatens them.
Personally I'm very interested in diffusing knowledge to people who want it -- be that free or for a fee. Some people may differ, but I'm not at all interested in selling products to governments... Because it's not about fun marketing and technology, it's about lobbying (that is, bribing politicians.)
do it well and do it long enough then YOU will become the authority.
i've had caffeine.
My web sites appeal to students, teachers, and others all over the world -- and they earn me a check every month.
But per Jacobolus's comment, I don't really blame other techies for not getting involved. Most of education's problems are structural not technological. My hope is that by providing really good social learning tools -- much better than anything else out there and at a much lower cost -- that by making it much easier to move to better teaching practices, the structural problems will work themselves out easier.
But honestly, I don't give myself a huge chance of succeeding. Others far more gifted than I have failed over and over. But I figure you can only be young and idealistic once.
Edit: And to clarify what I mean by "succeeding", I mean by that succeeding at "fixing" education. As for succeeding as a company, based on feedback I've gotten so far, I think success is achievable.
Everyone cares about education. Everyone has a strong opinion about the way things should be, because everyone went through school and approaches the topic through their personal experiences. Unfortunately, most of that everyone is clueless (including most techies), and lots of their ideas are contradictory. That is why education policy (like all controversial/important policy) is fundamentally hard. There are no obvious solutions that everyone can agree about – if there were, we’d use them. Instead, it’s a constant hard fight to organize, educate, reach out, debate, and for teachers, just get on doing their jobs the best they can in their own classrooms.
Talk on this discussion board and elsewhere “the industry” being complacent and motivated to keep things “bad” is absurd. “The industry” is millions of individual teachers, parents, students, and administrators, all striving to do their best in their own little local niches. Unfortunately the big structural challenges are often difficult or even insurmountable, and kids end up suffering for it. This isn’t the fault of teacher’s unions (as Obama recently has been saying, parroting a longtime right-wing anti-tax talking point), and it isn’t the fault of “government”, and it isn’t the fault of any singly identifiable actor or institution. It’s just hard.
The post has the right overall idea though: put up or shut up. Do the work, whether that’s becoming a teacher or just helping out in a local classroom from time to time, or whether it’s developing new curricula, organizing people on the ground, etc. Just complaining without action is just nearly useless.
If you're interested in improving your business skills in a concrete hacker kind of way, here are 99 books that I believe are the best to start with: http://personalmba.com/best-business-books/. Reading + personal experimentation goes a very long way.
I'm currently writing summaries of these books as well: http://personalmba.com/category/book-summaries/
My own book, which is a summary of the most important/powerful concepts in business (if you know about Charlie Munger's work on "elementary worldly wisdom," you'll be interested), comes out December 30th: http://personalmba.com/book/
All it takes to get a great education is interest + great resources to learn from. Plus, if you're DIY-inclined, you can save a ton of time and money teaching yourself.
Education is just like every other good cause in that it needs leadership to be improved. If someone with a background in education put together a concrete plan and came here and posted an "Ask HN" plea for help I could almost guarantee they'd get that help.
But as any good programmer knows you can only create a solution if the people needing the solution give you enough info to give them what they need. Meaning the ball isn't in our court right now.
No one is whining. I'm just calling it like it is.
First you aren't "Calling it like it is". You're passing judgement on the community based on what you perceive to be inaction. What I'm saying is we can't really act until someone who knows the other side comes to us and asks for help.
Second this isn't about entrepreneurship. The reality of the situation is that schools are poor and the kids who need help the most are generally the poorest. So if you really care about reforming education you really can't go into it as a for-profit venture. Because you have to make whatever you accomplish available as far and wide as possible to get any traction.
That insider mentality is the logic that kept teachers in NYC rubber rooms. People from the outside must break in! (And without someone coming and kissing your ring first!)
The reason you have to have a for-profit venture is sustainability. Lack of funding creates 2 situations - necessity on grants or necessity on free labor. Both extremely difficult to make sustainable.
So what are for-profit ventures that have had huge impacts on education? Blackboard( I don't like to admit that but its true). Chegg too. Both companies said, "Here's a problem. Here's a solution." The market responds, and everyone wins. Businesses can/do make the education system better.
Everything in the education supply chain needs to be interchangeable or else it is hard to optimize anything.
Imagine trying to start up a hacker school for kids. You have to provide educations for areas outside of your "teach people how to hack robots and computers" expertise like history, language art, etc.
Why not let delegate the job to a School of Grammars or a walt-mart style basic mathematic school? Oh right, you can't! You have to go through the legislative process to get it approved. Then you have to battle the local teacher union with all the pink-collar teachers who don't understand the value of hacking and thinks that all kids should become "creative" people not mechanical engineers. Imagine politicians dumbing down the hacking education plan just so they can have easy and inexpensive way to test students.
Sure you can get crappier school in a free market system, but it also mean you can get really good schools and educational systems.
Parents, probably does have more of an interest in making their kids goes to charter school.
But it still is up to the political process. I mean, parents who vote with their money still have a disadvantage to political voters who can make the state provide schools with somebody else's money.
It is an imperfect process but nonetheless better than nothing.
The catholic church's offerings manage just fine, as do Montessori schools. Just two examples off the top of my head.
It's getting recognition from industry that you are able to educate people just as well as the old model. As it stands industry is happy to benefit from the large outlay of students and students are happy to pay it out stand out when it comes to getting employed.
Education, especially at the elementary level, is a solved problem. The big thing in homeschooling right now is "classical education," and it works quite well.
What also works well is just about any method where the student is involved with a caring teacher that measures progress toward a set of goals and adapts the curriculum to best fit the student.
Everything "innovative" already exists. There are wonderful online math games and numerous projects where you can get books online for free. Everything you need to educate someone through high-school is available for free.
It's not about techies not contributing, it's about the pace of the industry you are in. Learning which is vocational in nature is the market you seek.
My guess is most students today still agree.
- The high schools in US will get their funding as long as the students are barely good enough to pass standardized tests, which are jokes compared to the standardized tests in Asia/Europe.
- Colleges in US still enjoy the following advantages: global brands that they've cultivated for 100+ years, as well as the popular culture that extol fun/socializing over hard courses/hard work. (How often do you see smart people getting made fun of in American movies/tv...quite sad really).
- The current demand is dampened by the fact that there's also no real good way to compare college education quality now (I am sure many people have experienced professors that are world renowned for their research/knowledge, but are horrible lecturers/teachers)
Until people in US care about better education, there is no market
The whole education system is an investment in the future of our country - we wouldn't have a strong military or industry without it. So a pipeline was set up to funnel children from infancy to industry, because there's no other force that gets a kid to the point where she's employable. Your final step in this chute is jumping into the right college chute, which will land you in a job somewhere, for mysterious reasons. It wasn't always this way - my parents both had to consciously decide to attend college - it just wasn't a given. When you went to college, you had a clear end-goal in mind. "I want to go because it will let me do X."
What we need is not "demand", but a goal. If people actually attended school as if they were contributing to some greater good, the quality of our education might not increase, but the attitude of our students would be more focused on the end-goal.
It also doesn't matter if other countries made A to the fourth power, Google is still started in America.
What we need is kids that can think outside of the box, not get 3000 points on science tests.
Beside, markets doesn't exists when government basically provide education for "free". Kinda hard to have a market when the government basically take money from you. If you don't take your kids to public schools, you get less benefit if any. In basically every first world countries, education is provided for you. There's no markets in other countries too.
Sometimes you need to know where the box is first ..
What you're doing is comparing risk-taking to fundamentals. I would argue...why can't we have both? Isn't a better-educated population always better for the society?
"There's no markets in other countries too."
Except there is. In Belgium, government funds education -- at many different kinds of schools -- but if a school can't attract students, it goes out of business.
What kind of educated population you wanted? What is the fundamental?
You may want some basic mathematics and grammar, and maybe some courses in logics.
Science? That's a maybe to me.
You want to make an educated person in politics and governance too? Good luck with that. Government teaching civic education is like a criminal in jail teaching kids what's the law of the land is.
Beside, doesn't government plan the educational system? You gotcha do this and that or else we pull your educational money away.
Insulting other scholars isn’t really necessary here, yah?