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Comment by jimbob45 | Hacker News Reader

Nope. Human contact is the future of education. Rent-seeking scumbags trying to shove technology into education where it isn’t needed can find another industry to ruin.

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Technology is a good replacement for existing technology. Replacing a worksheet with digital problems can work well. Replacing a textbook with a virtual lecture can work well for many students. Replacing an instructor with digital problems doesn’t work.

In my experience there is a lot of crappy and hard to use tech in education that if improved would make things much easier.

In highschool we used this system (https://www.managebac.com/) which I found to be incredibly useful and easy to use and everything was logically placed in the same application. Then when I went to uni we had about 10 cobbled together applications that were all crappy and confusing and my results definitely suffered when I failed to find important information and notices.

The two things that fall apart for me about using games to teach children in the future is 1) learning is not just remembering facts, it's also interacting with others; and 2) not everyone learns the same way, some are not going to be self-motivated to learn via a game, nor can a game adjust itself to the particular needs of all individuals.

I think people who are self-motivated think that because they learned on their own, everyone should be able to as well and all everyone needs is the tools to self-learn. I don't think that's true.

Automation is something teachers could really use. There is a morass of manual labor intensive tasks which are currently required for lesson prep, for instance.

There's not much money in it though. Overworked teachers don't have a lot of cash to throw around.

Why is education untouchable and sacred? If robots can do it just as well I'm all for it. I don't understand what the higher purpose of keeping humans for teaching is.

My view is that technology can deliver education of equal quality to each child, and this baseline should constantly improve over time. A small fraction of children has access to high quality educators, and they might end up being highly motivated, encouraged and empowered. What about the rest?

Pay teachers more. If you are a smart person and could have a great career in industry, why would you ever go teach unless you come from a financial background that can support you (aka wealthy parents) or are extremely altruistic. If you pay teachers competitive wages that are in line with their contributions to society, you'd see better teachers overall.

This is a very valid point.Not so long time ago, teachers used to be extremely highly valued in any society because they were the ones teaching and shaping the future generations.Now teaching is mainly left to those who weren't able to do anything better.

The problem, though, is that the number of teachers we require makes that prohibitively expensive. We need to do both things. We need to increase the leverage of individual teachers, so that they can teach more students. To do that, we require technology. Then we can start paying teachers more.

Just fire most of the administrative workers. Everyone's a spendthrift until you want to spend money on teachers instead of administrators and multi-million dollar buildings and stadiums.

I would love to do that, and it would certainly help, but I don't think it's anywhere near sufficient to pay teachers as much as your average software engineer, for instance.

From the article:

> 1. The things you learn by yourself stick; the things that are “taught” to you do not stick.

Yes, but no. That you teach others sticks, and that's where human contact comes in, and it's something sorely lacking in the institutional education system.

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