Comment by pgbovine | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pgbovine | Hacker News Reader

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let me attempt to clarify with a thought experiment. suppose instead the article was something like "All-star politician X claims that fund-raising, public speaking, polling your audience, and framing your ideas to persuade others should be the marks of success in school, not grades."

How would the HN crowd react to that? probably not nearly as favorably as to Woz saying that hacker-like projects should be the marks of success in school. But one could argue that those skills (persuasion, fund-raising, crowd psychology) are important for success in life as well.

The point I'm trying to make is that this project-centric view of success is very biased towards hackers, and it's an oversimplification to believe that most of the population would also find this appealing.

I think you're not seeing the distinction between which skills are important, and how to teach and measure those skills.

I certainly think that trying to teach, practice, and test fund-raising, public speaking, etc. each as separate skills would not be a good way to train effective leaders or politicians. But if you teach a bit about each of the skills and then have someone apply all of them to a specific project/campaign/endeavor, they'll learn more and actually accomplish something along the way. (BTW, Evidence of this is very easy to find, because effective leadership always requires you to be exercising multiple skills simultaneously.)

You wouldn't teach someone to play violin by spending a month on reading music, a month on bowing, and a month on fingering, and then expect them to be able to easily transition on their own to actual performing.

Similarly, it isn't a good idea to structure a curriculum to have separate classes on data structures, assembly language, object oriented programming, networking, GUIs, etc., and then expect somebody having taken all those classes to be able to build a useful application. (Nor can you simply wait until a "senior project" to start tying things together.)

There's really very little about that insight that's hacker-specific.

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