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Comment by derefr | Hacker News Reader

Look at game design. School is the opposite of addictive or fun: it doesn't have a tight feedback loop, you are indefinitely punished for initial mistakes that could otherwise have been experiments, and doing badly has large consequences (repeating/wasting tuition money.) School, ideally, would be a completionist, not competitive, game: every correct question would give you an experience point, and you'd finish (not "pass") when you had (in however much time you like) 100%-ed every question of every assignment of the course.

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> Look at game design.

This is actually the basic idea of an amazingly interesting book I read recently, _Good Video Games and Good Learning_ (http://www.amazon.com/Video-Learning-Literacies-Digital-Epis... and see also http://www.amazon.com/Video-Games-Learning-Literacy-Second/d...)

Wow that really succinctly described the difference. I think a bit of the reason why they do have deadlines is because people can put off not doing the work at all forever unless you got some sort of whip cracker going. I did it with a mathematics correspondence course. My linear algebra prof in the middle of the course basically said that he realized that his main job is to be the whip cracker to get people through this, more than learning per say, since there are other methods of learning math too.

Well, if that's what people need, then we shouldn't be wasting the time of tenured professors and grad students—who have much more interesting and specialized things to do—by making them into whip-crackers. I think the ideal "teacher" for a completionist education system would simply be someone who could juggle the roles of motivational speaker, hard-ass, and Socratic. In other words, although they would have their own particular skillset, they wouldn't need to know the material at all.

Lecturing would be left to professional speakers backed by a writing team and subject-matter experts, filmed remotely and either sold to schools as materials on the free market, or produced for the public by government media arms such as the BBC. If anyone had a question about the material that couldn't be answered by the lecture, the books, the rest of the class, by the "teacher"'s Socratic deduction, etc., the school would have tutors on-call as well (by remote from a tutoring group, or locally as a service of alumni.) There would be no segregated "classes" or "classrooms", but rather an integrated environment more akin to a combination library/study-hall, with gatherings for people working on the same class of problem at the same time, etc.

In fact, there wouldn't really be a need to "graduate" at all, or to "register" for specific semesters. As long as you could get a print-out at any time proving you had 100%-ed the problems relevant to the job you're applying for, that would be all you would need. You would be able to show up one day, leave for years, then come back and resume your studies as if you had never left. In fact, done this way, people would probably stop considering themselves to be "in school", but rather just say that they "go learning" in the same way one would "go hiking" or "go to yoga." A life-long hobby, in other words—just the way an education should be :)

Ah... but if only.

It's interesting for me to hear you describe this as I understand Texas is trying something similar with a program called Avid. My best friend is tutoring, er, facilitating for a smaller district. She tells me it's hard. You have the normal issues of kids not listening (either some classes just go "bad" or sophomore year causes kids to be especially...) but also have to deal with the kids expecting a more normal student-teacher relationship becoming frustrated that they aren't being given answers or being stubborn about how their teacher did it differently. IIRC, the program is for kids who neither parent has a degree so I wonder how much that plays into the difficulties of the program.

The one thing missing from my description is the idea of a role model—kids need those, and schools shouldn't be where they get them. It used to be that kids would first use their parents as role models, and then enter vocational training, where they would have a master as a role model.

Right now, teachers act like role models for kids, but they're an intrinsically bad fit: kids want to see their role models doing the things they want to do, but teachers simply teach. Ideally, role models would be "visiting fellows", perhaps alumni, of a completionist school, psyching kids up about doing some thing or other such that they see school as a step toward doing that thing. Without that, school is meaningless, and it's no wonder kids aren't interested in it.

He was just an instructor (He had a masters I think and had been doing this job for years). I was taking the course at a local community college and found their quality of math education far better than the local university.

A lot of people feel the same way too about PhDs teaching, but universities are so huge they're like governments unto themselves full of traditions and factions and general bickering. I could really see value in the system you propose.

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