Comment by jamescostian | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jamescostian | Hacker News Reader

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As a student, I agree with many of the words you said but for different reasons. I've had a middle school teacher who told us about her own sex life during class. I've had a high school teacher who droned on and on about her divorce (to the point that everyone learned so little, almost no one passed the AP exams she was supposed to prepare us for) and put down religions - again, during class. College isn't a whole lot better, and elementary probably had similar stories that I can't remember.

We (students) all hated those teachers who wasted our time with things that wouldn't help us get further in the job pipeline. I'd like a little more gamification, because I'm in college and still dealing with too many profs who teach less and less about what people need to do their jobs and more and more stuff no one asked for.

There doesn't have to be an immediate connection between what a teacher says and the subject they are supposed to teach. Many fantastic teachers have inspired me and made me who I am by giving little pieces of unrelated advice. But the advice of a teacher is really, well, just the advice of some teacher. They aren't gods. Plenty of them give really bad advice. I just care about students learning to learn and developing critical thinking. Students can read literature for opinions on things unrelated to school subjects, and ponder on their own. They can watch movies, listen to songs, google things, or even talk to other students. But I don't think teachers should go even further out of class discussions than they already do.

Having been a student with good and bad teachers, I can see your point.

However, many of the things that you are being taught (at least I hope this is still the case) that don't appear to be needed for the "job" are actually important because they are needed for the understanding of the background for why and how the "job". The failure of teachers that we faced as students was that the reasons for learning something were often not explained and only became obvious when learning about other subjects in later years. Having the relevance of the knowledge explained to us would have made it easier for us to learn.

One of my favourite examples was the subject of Karnaugh maps (or K-maps) which is used in logic circuit minimisation for small circuits. We learned all about and didn't use it again for the rest of my engineering undergraduate days.

However, a number of years working with a colleague on trying to solve a particularly pernicious software problem, I asked him why he hadn't used the concept of "don't cares" in short-circuiting the logic mess that was required to solve the software dilemma we were facing. He had never heard of the concept as he had never been taught about K-maps in his undergraduate programming course.

One he understood the concept and it didn't take him long, he was able to write 5 lines that solved the problem, instead of the hundred's that he had already had written (with many more to follow) to test for the problem throughout the program.

I have been surprised at how often over the years, where theoretical knowledge or other knowledge has come to the rescue in finding a solution for specific real-world problems, even though it has (on the surface) no relevance to the job at hand.

I have worked with some very smart people over the years (much smarter than me) who have been stuck for a solution because they didn't have that "irrelevant" piece of knowledge from their undergraduate days, but I did and so a problem was solved.

The one piece of advice I will give you is to learn as widely as you can so that you basic knowledge base will be broad enough for you to keep adding to as the years go by.

Likewise, as an EE I studied differential equations, La Place transforms, z-transforms, s-transforms, the fourier transform, and the dft transform. I'm a digital logic designer and have never had to directly do any of that stuff, but understanding the duality of time domain and frequency domain has been invaluable to me over the years.

Theoretical knowledge is absolutely extremely useful, but the way we teach it is pretty much a non-starter.

We need to humanize our education systems. The concept that we all sit around in school for 20+ years and then go out and find something to do with all of that knowledge is based more on maintaining rigid financial/power structures than it is based on effective information discovery and utilization, and there's no reason that a useful piece of information recovered partially-intact from the caverns of memory here or there should continue to justify such a lumbering, monolithic system.

There are no guarantees that the system will provide even what you've enjoyed; as you said, a peer with similar education had either not been taught or had not remembered the needed concept.

Humans need it "on-demand". We learn and master a trade experimentally, most naturally in the context of an apprenticeship. We can't compartmentalize book learning and practical employment, putting years-long gaps between them, and expect the eviction algorithm in peoples' brains to have not pruned much of the relevant information. We need it cemented with immediate, meaningful, recurring experience, and we need systems that will make it easy for us to remember and reference as necessary.

The existing educational apparatus is none of this. It is just a cash cow for the banks and universities, enslaving most of its "graduates" to decades of debt servicing. That, IMO, is the primary reason it continues to be enforced, because there is very little that is rational about it.

It's also childcare for working parents. I know it's not supposed to be but it's a side effect that's widely taken for granted.

I believe you're correct about young people being turned into debt slaves. The rich and rich-aspirational in the UK are encouraging/implementing this here as quickly as they are able.

I definitely agree that learning things that seem irrelevant to your job pipeline can be good, just like your K-maps example. But I also think there are plenty of seemingly irrelevant things that end up not helping you at all, ever.

That's why I don't think teachers ought to be in charge of teaching those extra things like K-maps, but rather, students should be asked to study things on their own (both inside and outside their comfort zone), in hopes that students will "learn to learn" and be able to teach themselves.

You're right, this method would not have given you K-maps in school, but it also would have wasted less of your time in school, and empowered you to learn about things on your own (such as don't cares in K-maps, or even just the general idea that you can assign whatever value you like to outputs you never expect to see).

Like you said, most people know who's done them a service and who hasn't. If only that was what they were selling!

Just pretend to care while they're rattling on about their kids and their sex lives, meticulously regurgitate their opinions--verbatim--on the test, and watch the circle of life remain unbroken as one generation of over-credentialed under-performers passes the torch to the next.

I mean, hell, it's only four years of your life. Who's going to miss that?

AMEN

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