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Comment by eric4smith | Hacker News Reader

Gonna be big changes if the outbreak continues for a longer time. Here in Vietnam, we're seeing what 2 months of school closures mean.

Children go to work with their parents now. My breakfast Pho place has a little dude who man's the register and is learning how the business works from his family.

Kids play in the park after morning studies at home.

It's not all sun and roses of course, but it's an interesting forced experiment that's happening under our very noses. The big losers are people who see the "school building" as the only way to learn. The winners are going to be those who embrace methods and technologies that help people learn without the rote of the traditional classroom.

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I also live in Vietnam for 4 years now. The forced school closures have really impacted the economy.

All the school teachers are not getting paid and a lot are stiffed on their contracts. There is no viable actual recourse in Vietnm. Many have to leave the country as a result and now won't be back because they leave on bad terms. You see them posting constantly in the expat groups looking for help.

The teachers eat at all the expat places and tourism has been decimated... so all the non-local restaurants are suffering and will go out of business since they already operate on small margins. Viet landlords are more than happy (greedy) to have a place go empty than reduce rents... entire streets have shut down [1] literally over night.

Places like Halong Bay, who depend entirely on tourist revenue have stopped all cruises and those workers, who make tiny salaries, are now out of work.

What I'm trying to say is that the ripple effects are going to be huge in Vietnam... it isn't going to be pretty and it isn't going to magically fix itself over night. Especially as more cases keep cropping up.

[1] https://tuoitrenews.vn/news/business/20200305/stores-close-e...

It’s absurd that the teachers are not getting paid.

It is Vietnam, trust me, there is a lot more absurd things going on there than foreign teachers not getting paid during a crisis.

I missed the fact they’re foreign. Still bad but not as much I guess. They probably have somewhere to go back to, no?

Some of the teachers don't even have enough money to get home.

That is terrible.

It was about time to change!

Hope this will lead to

* more Khan Academy-like content

* free textbooks available to everybody in the world

* software companions to help children advance according to their exact needs and level (instead of being stuck in a 20-person class herd)

* online teachers paid by the hour or monthly subscription available for students

* less emphasis on expensive certifications and more on 'what can you accomplish'

What opportunities or hopeful outcomes do you see?

It would be great if Stanford simply recorded all their lectures in HD and released them on YouTube.

Not everybody is able and sufficient self controlled to self study off Khan or EdX or similar platforms.

Funny, I would say that's probably the most powerful and impactful thing a person could learn. Better then being force-fed every math concept in existence. And how would people learn to self-study without incentive and opertunity?

If they learn it. Possible in a healthy family setting. But impossible if you already grow up in a dysfunctional family. It would make sure to keep kids from "low class" families right there for another generation.

"Healthy family setting" here means that one parent has to be the teacher. Even in middle and higher class, that still requires massive investment in time and effort, way more then when kid goes to school.

And it also requires not just resources, but also parent that could be good teacher. And even among richer people, not every parent would be good teacher, quite a lot would sux at it.

Purely online courses have huge failure rates - even when paid for and run through same university as in person variant. That is simply how humans work currently. The younger the kid, the worst it will be.

Incentive and opportunity is something quite different then "there is no other option".

There's the issue. What we need is complete automation, with fully automated machine-learning based students. This will help vendors attract more users and raise additional capital, and keep people employed.

There's an assumption here that one can easily self-learn to self-study.

It might be true for some proportion of HN readers, but it's not clear that this generalizes. After all, those of us who self-study are often learning programming-related topics for which there is both abundant online documentation and clear, objective feedback on progress. We also tend, as a community, to have reliable access to the necessary technology, large amounts of disposable income (and security of leisure time that comes with it), a high level of prior expertise, and exposure to role models in self-learning. It's easy to take these things for granted, but they all certainly help in developing self-study habits.

As much as I might personally like to see everyone be more self-driven and self-reliant in learning, I share the concern expressed elsewhere in this thread as to what the impact of a sudden shift to remote learning would be on equitable access to education.

This. If the organizations devoted to learning drop out then it is reasonable to expect that a great deal of learning will also drop out. This will be particularly pronounced among students of limited means.

Basically, poor people, and people struggling with disabilities and disadvantages, will get far less education. Overall, society will see drastically less education as a whole. This includes not just technical education in math, physical sciences, automotive tech, etc., but also in civil society areas such as social studies and literature.

Current education systems are very far from ideal. But abandoning them for an extended period of time under the belief that people will see it as in their best interest to learn to be good citizens on their own is potentially catastrophic.

People also seem to forget another factor for poor students in the US: Free school breakfast and lunch. For some low-income kids their school meals may be the only nutritious meals they get during the day. What happens to those kids if we shut down schools for months and take away that source of food?

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