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Comment by ejlangev | Hacker News Reader

> “In my book, there’s no reason why children in elementary schools can’t be launching their own businesses,” Rebekah Neumann said in an interview.

That's really one of the saddest things I've read from the tech community in a long while. Truly beyond parody. The reason is that they're fucking children and part of being a kid is being sheltered from some of the realities of the world. Training kids to focus on business from an early age which, since there are limited hours in the day, must come at the expense of something else is just sad. Let them develop in peace at least a little bit before being ravaged by capitalism.

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It's well-dressed, well-spoken, well-connected cultishness. They're Branch Davidians. If you've gotten that far into a belief system, you'll do anything to promulgate it, even at the expense of children.

> In her own family, she said, “there are no lines” between work and life or home and office.

This line also stuck out. Seems horribly dystopian to me and yet is presented without comment. Sad that these people are considered "thought leaders" and that viewpoint is presented with anything but scorn.

>This line also stuck out. Seems horribly dystopian to me and yet is presented without comment.

The comment is her next sentence:

>“My kids are in the office. I’m doing what I _love_, he’s doing what he _loves_, they are observing that, and they are doing what they _love_.”

The author is talking about the passion for a life hobby being one and the same as work. Instead of being dystopian, it's actually the utopia many people are striving for.

She's not talking about having a terrible job where you peel potatos and then go home and peel more potatos to bring back to work the next day.

She's also not talking about working 100 hours a week and having no life.

It speaks to a poor understand of kids, schools, and reality. I think we often underestimate kids and their intellectual capacity, but this is just ridiculous. I started outlining how bad this would be for kids, but the list was getting so long that I had to stop. Let's just rely on common sense here.

I never felt I was "ravaged by capitalism," but I was never forced as a kid to compete in cutthroat markets where I was pretty likely to fail against adults who had fully-developed brains and more experience in every relevant field.

Yes, let's get kids more hands-on experience. But the feeling of failing as a kid is brutal. Don't set them up to fail. More importantly, let's teach them critical thinking skills so they can adapt. Focus less on facts and more on solving problems and finding their own solutions. This is possible without forcing them into a high-stress environment where many adults (with far more experience in markets and as consumers) fail.

While I totally agree that it's weird and unsettling to push kids in this direction, I remember having a blast setting up a little candy business in elementary school--my friend and I bought Starbursts, Reese's, Skittles, etc. in bulk at the grocery store with allowance money then doled it out at a markup. This was totally our idea and not something our parents had any involvement in.

I think that as long as the desire is coming from the kids and not elsewhere, it can be a fun and healthy thing, but it's definitely a fine line.

>That's really one of the saddest things I've read from the tech community in a long while. Truly beyond parody.

I think I get what WeWork is trying to teach kids. As a comparison, there's a program in Florida called "Junior Achievement"[1] which teaches entrepreneurial skills to kids K-12. That JA charity is over 40 years old so WeWork's idea is not new. I assume other states have similar kids' entrepreneurial programs under different names.

I went through JA myself. It was a 6-week after-school program. The way it worked was that volunteers (accountants, managers, executives, etc) from local corporations would come in and lead a session to help kids set up businesses. In my group, we created a thermometer company and sold them to neighbors. At the end, the volunteers helped us put together the profit-and-loss financial results. I think I was 11 or 12 at the time.

Another interesting thing is that the JA volunteers not only donated their time after school, but they also had to "recruit" the kids for the program by coming in for 10 minutes during the normal class hours and make a little pitch for kids like me to sign up for the program. It sounded interesting so I got the permission slip for my mom to sign.

The JA experience was fun and I don't think it deprived me of any childhood. I don't know enough about WeWork to know if it's better or worse. Whatever curriculum WeWork is attempting, they still have to sell the parents on letting their kids do it. Parents have to be convinced that it enriches their childrens' lives. It certainly seems from all the responses here that none of the HN parents would enroll their kids.

[1] https://jasouthflorida.org/

Agree it sounds a bit yucky, but as a counterpoint:

I've heard so many kids talk about how they want to become youtube stars. They believe that if they only had the time and support, they'd be making thousands of dollars every day by talking into a camera.

So kids may already be considering launching businesses: in spaces with high competition, oversupply and poor business plans. I suppose this is nothing new: in my generation everyone was going to be a professional musician or video game designer.

I feel like teaching kids the importance of designing for a market, seeing what you can sell and getting real customer requirements could be valuable, but probably more worthwhile for kids over 10 or so.

I think that's a valid point but certainly not for kindergartners. Learning about business is potentially useful but needs to be balanced against the fact that most people don't want to be entrepreneurs and that you need to not learn something else in order to learn that.

It sounds like they are trying to make a kindergarten, just like any other, and they are using this 'start-up' spin to attract parents to sign-up.

It's not a terrible marketing idea, in that 'all news is good news, even bad news' kinda way. But in a, I dunno, human way, it's horrific. Like, preschoolers can't possibly do business, in any way at all. Thinking that they can, heck, insinuating they can, is like thinking a lemonade stand on the corner is a good tax base: froot-loops crazy.

Some of my fondest memories of childhood include selling audio mp3 cds and individual warhead candies.

I think there is something to be said about working towards a goal. Think about developing a game or eveb a lemonade stand. You have to know marketing, supply chains, management, finance just to name a few. The reason school isn’t interesting to many is that it is just isolated knowledge and facts. Solve for X type problems. It would be more engaging if you actually had a goal that required a cross disciplinary set of skills.

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