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Comment by songzme | Hacker News Reader

> ...but the value add for the students is probably more than they made otherwise with no upfront cost.

I really don't want to set a precedence of charging students for something I don't think they should be paying for. I'd rather have them keep their money so they can help improve the world in their own way.

> The alternative of you no longer providing the service is worse.

Worse for who? Society? I don't believe it is my job to fix societal problems. I can help in a way that makes it fun and interesting for me and if any of the graduates want to continue providing the service and charge 5-20% of the students pay, they are free to launch their own service. Everything is open source.

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> I really don't want to set a precedence of charging students for something I don't think they should be paying for.

What do you think students shouldn't be paying for? Education?

Some people pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for learning materials and a certificate of completion. Up front. With no guarantee of future income. And no refund if you don't finish.

Offering learning materials that only cost money if you profit from them seems like a much better alternative.

I don't think students should pay for education, correct. I would enjoy life more if education was free and I'm free to pursue whatever I wanted to learn.

It would be even cooler if I was paid to learn so teachers get to experiment with all different ways to teach and they are fully vested into my growth.

Everything has costs. Nothing is free. Public education funding has to come from somewhere so that educators can eat and classrooms can be built and maintained.

Financial transactions are not inherently bad. They are one half of value transfer. In your case, a win-win situation.

> Everything has costs. Nothing is free. Public education funding has to come from somewhere so that educators can eat and classrooms can be built and maintained.

If you believe that, then it will be true for you. Alot of things are free. If you plant a potato you can end up with a whole field of potatoes that you can eat forever, for free. And all the potatoes you don't eat decomposes back into the soil and makes the soil healthier.

Nature is fundamentally free and abundant and I can't figure out why our society isn't. Everyone around me seems to conclude that nothing is free though so maybe there's something I see that others don't, or there's something everyone else sees that I don't.

Time has value, and economies of scale make it more efficient. I worked at a CSA for a while and the amount of time it would take an individual to have the diversity of foods we provide would have taken them far longer. I have nothing against gardening on its own, but the marginal value add of doing something else yourself doesn’t always exceed the value of your time and the opportunity cost of not doing something else.

You could always live an AnPrim lifestyle and that’s fine (one of Kaczynski’s main points was that specialization in the abstract is incompatible with people), but there are more obvious reasons why more people don’t do that.

Give them the chance to participate and give back to their society as well!

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