Bill Gates is wrong about education
supermemo.guru
supermemo.guru
Bill Gates wants to help the 99% by improving school life for them. This article argues that instead of slightly raising the average among the 99%, we should instead help the top 1% and given that we now focus our budget on a lot less people, each of them will see bigger improvements.
Among other things, the article says "healthy childhood of few concerns without the relegation to daycare is the root of greatness". Unless they are independently wealthy before having kids, most normal parents will need daycare because they still need to work for money.
My personal opinion is that recent years have clearly shown us that we live in a winner takes all system and that wealth doesn't usually dribble down. Large companies keep billions in profit offshore, where they don't pay taxes (that could help education) and where the money surely won't help the middle class find jobs with livable wages.
You're not alone with that opinion, in fact I thought it was established by now the trickle-down effect in economics is a myth (or at least I read so)?
Parents don't need daycare if they only work half of the time. (Of course, this means owning less.)
Offshore money doesn't matter for the economy. Actually it improves the life of the 99% because the value of their money would decrease if the offshore money would join the onshore money circulation.
That money is labor taken out of economic activity and left rotting away in a vault.
Surplus needs to reinvested in the cycle, otherwise the overall economy will shrink.
What’s being quarreled about in the last generational policy struggle, is who gets to dictate how to spend it. The Jeff Bezos-es, the neoliberal technocrats, or the political establishment. Or something else
Trickle-down economics depends on progressively better paid work and more of it, while the incentives for businesses are to have as few people on payroll for as little compensation as possible.
I think this is the gist of Mazzucato’s views
Many parents are not wealthy enough to have the choice you're implying any more.
First, if they earn half the time, that means part-time work which generally means earning less than half the wages because companies tend to use a full time employee for higher value work.
Second, if they are renters, they don't "own less" by earning less than half. Instead, they might (for example) go from being able to afford the rent on a place to raise a family, to being able to afford the rent on a room in a shared house which is unsuitable.
If they own a place (with a mortgage), they'd go from buying a place which is big enough to not being able to afford to buy a place, because they won't even be granted a mortgage for a family-size home on a single typical income.
> Offshore money doesn't matter for the economy. Actually it improves the life of the 99% because the value of their money would decrease if the offshore money would join the onshore money circulation.
The parent comment is referring to the lost taxes due to trading profits being creatively accounted to hide them in offshore reservoirs. If paid those taxes would improve the life of the 99%.
As for the value of onshore money decreasing if offshore money were to join it, it's not that simple because much of that additional circulation would end up inside the pockets of the 99%.
What do you think will happen if the wealth gap grows further and more and more people become angry and unhappy? Riots and revolution are only a matter of time if the gap keeps growing. Having billions of dollars in an offshore bank will mean nothing if we continue on the same path. Even if you have no empathy for the 99%, at least look at it for self preservation. Our country is still extremely young and recorded history doesn't stretch back very far; chaos and revolution are normal and it would not be hard to pass the point of no return.
There is a reason most tech aristocracy believe that minimum basic income is a good idea.
I am pretty sure plenty of women do rise their children alone on $300 a week because they are working a full-time minimum wage job and rise their children. As a couple, doing it together, why should the same not be possible? Why is it preferable for both parents to work full time instead of actually having time to rise their children?
heard a throwaway comment in a podcast that poor countries have to invest in the top of the distribution because they have limited resources and need to max out highly-educated people so they can develop their tech economy. (I wish I had a real footnote for that claim or understood it better).
If you model the US as a poor nation that's falling behind its peers, or more plausibly, if you modify half of US states this way, there's an argument we should have the same education strategy as india or 1990s china.
This is not so simple. Half a century ago, it'd have been common place for either the Mother or the Grandparents to be looking after the children around the house.
In the name of modernity we've replaced family with the nation-state. Yay progress! I say 'modernity', because some of the policies that have led us here were distinctly marketed with the very same adjective.
I have wondered the same, and often felt this longing for "what could have been" myself. (I'm a college dropout who pursued a rather unconventional startup path.) Even though I've found myself surprisingly well-equipped to tackle most challenges, even when working with researchers, I have a very strong sense of impostor syndrome. I feel that I don't know enough about what I don't know.
Sometimes, I think that if I'd spent more time learning, I would know where to look to learn the next thing. Perhaps this is just imagination.
I'm sure I would feel the same kind of longing had I spent more time in college. A funny predicament.
EDIT: If the page doesn't load at first, reload the page. It should load right away.
I'm sure there's surviorship bias, but the people who dropped out are probably some of the best. There's certainly some value in a CS/CE bachelor's curriculum, and occasionally, something would come up where knowledge from a course was useful; but mostly a 4 year degree in CS/CE is a certificate of sticking to hard things that are computer related. You've probably got some project under your belt that shows you can stick to hard things that are computer related, even if it's not as formalized.
If it really bothers you, work through The Art of Computer Programming by Knuth. If it bothers you a little, but not that much, maybe borrow it from a library and look through the table of contents and read a few sections that look interesting.
On that note: Had I stayed in college, I would've been a senior this year. I recently brought over a college friend to discuss a paid internship at my company with him, and was very underwhelmed with what he had accomplished during his university tenure (this being a quite prestigious institution). From the stories he told of professors assigning grindingly futile projects to his lack of knowledge about relatively widespread concepts like distributed hash tables, it was a rather disappointing conversation.
I still think the institution of the university is hard to replicate elsewhere, but the content (and maybe the people) certainly need an update!
Thank you for the note about Knuth's book. I'll check it out in more depth — I have the PDF version sitting in my downloads folder. My startup is currently being acquired, but once that's settled I'll have time for some holiday reading :).
On the other hand, the gatekeeping that a degree offers does seem to be important. I think this is mainly because degrees serve as a sort of stamina test, of the kind which is hard to replicate elsewhere. Someone who plodded their way through a coding bootcamp is unlikely to have the same grit and determination as someone with a Bachelor's degree.
Perhaps we just need a better way of gatekeeping, and then the universities can once again serve as centres of education and learning. I think it would also help if employment guarantees were offered, so universities would be incentivized to teach their students relevant skills.
Wow, was this written in 1995 or something?
Reads ridiculously out of date and wrong today.
"The web" today is Facebook and Instagram and exploitative mobile games. Not what you want your kids to be exposed to.
Medical malpractice happens all the time, the comparison isn't invalid. The difference is the cost to the user, i.e. building yourself an echo chamber is free whereas even a suspiciously cheap (say) plastic surgeon is not.
This argument works on multiple levels, the internet has crackpots on it but it also has easily indexable alternatives who are only n degrees away from offline authority figures. The issue is more to do with psychology than the internet's intrinsic (sociological) properties.
For general knowledge, Wikipedia is only useful in handful of mostly European languages.
Schools pretty much force you to at least know the basics to get a passing grade. The web only helps if you have self-initiative.
The internet makes massive difference in availability of movies with subtitles you can watch over and over, songs, later easy to read blogs. Discussion forums also provide super simple english to begin to read. Books and articles are too hard in comparison, both in vocabulary and sentence structure.
Duolingo is massive thing.
Yes, teacher is necessary too. But if you actually want your kids to learn other language, the web and games available easily for free now make massive massive difference.
This is such a lie. Can you point me to a sustainable website with useful knowledge?
Almost all knowledge has been artificially fenced off in order to allow the elite to extract rents from it. Patents and copyrights monopolize vital production processes, and put it in the hands of knowledge Capitalists.
"Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world's entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the sciences? You'll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier." [1]
Wendy Liu adds:
"Place Silicon Valley in its proper historical context and you see that, despite its mythology, it’s far from unique. Rather, it fits into a pattern of rapid technological change which has shaped recent centuries. In this case, advances in information technology have unleashed a wave of new capabilities. Just as the internal combustion engine and the growth of the railroads created Rockefeller, and the telecommunications boom created AT&T, this breakthrough enabled a few well-placed corporations to reap the rewards. By capitalising on network effects, early mover advantage, and near-zero marginal costs of production, they have positioned themselves as gateways to information, giving them the power to extract rent from every transaction.
Undergirding this state of affairs is a set of intellectual property rights explicitly designed to favour corporations. This system — the flip side of globalisation — is propagated by various trade agreements and global institutions at the behest of the nation states who benefit from it the most. It’s no accident that Silicon Valley is a uniquely American phenomenon; not only does it owe its success to the United States’ exceptionally high defence spending — the source of its research funding and foundational technological breakthroughs — that very military might is itself what implicitly secures the intellectual property regime.
Seen in that light, tech’s recent development begins to look rather different. Far from launching a new era of global prosperity, it has facilitated the further concentration of wealth and power. By virtue of their position as digital middlemen, Silicon Valley companies are able to extract vast amounts of capital from all over the world. The most salient example is Apple: recently crowned the world’s most valuable company, Apple rakes in enormous quarterly profits even as the Chinese workers who actually assemble its products are driven to suicide.
Whereas we were once led to believe that the network society would produce an egalitarian world, we increasingly see tech as a machine for the commodification of information itself. Something that has the potential to be abundant is made artificially scarce, because capital finds it profitable to enclose the digital commons and dictate its terms of access. Facebook wants a monopoly over your social network so it can show you ads; Google is the internet’s directory; Netflix, Spotify, YouTube, and Apple Music are your tollbooths for cultural production; Amazon is the gateway for your retail needs. These corporations serve social functions integral to modern life, [...] yet, not only are they not publicly owned, they are immune to any sort of democratic control." [2]
[1] Aaron Swartz, https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamj...
Can you stare a Global South kid in the face and tell them they have not been disinherited by the Global North + South Elite? That they (or their family) are poor because of 'bad choices'?
The most important qualification for a child anywhere in the world today is knowing English
I'm definitely where I am now because of the internet and Wikipedia.
At the same time, I agree with you about how the internet and technology have changed and continue to change. I agree that too much knowledge is still vaulted away, that a few companies have established large monopoly positions in tech, that they are destroying the egalitarian dream of the early internet.
edit: I don't know if I would have chosen differently, if all were available in my youth.
edit2: I think do know. I probably spent much more time on video games than on Encarta.
In my case I'm not particularly intelligent (My IQ is probably about 110ish) but my ego drives to learn ever more difficult looking things, that and the having the attention span of a child (I've recently noticed I can barely read aloud without stumbling). Having the internet available to do that on my own terms is why I know anything at all today, I really don't do well being sat in a classroom.
I still do the usual gaming and the like, but I really don't buy that you can force people to learn if their hearts not in it (maybe my parents were too laissez-faire, who knows - if all goes to plan I'll be the first in the family to have a degree worth the paper it's written on).
My best friend had that kind of very-structured upbringing and I could just feel that I could run rings around him because I'd got to the same place (We ended up at the same University) the long way round - even though we're basically made of the same stock mentally.
That's my ode to the internet, anyway.
I do recognize, however, that I'm the exception and not the rule in this regard.
The internet now is very different than the internet I grew up on, and it isn't the future I hoped for (where I imagined everyone would learn as I did, directly benefiting from having access to much of humanity's knowledge).
I lament what the internet has turned into - the overwhelming success of centralized platforms, surveillance capitalism, viral misinformation, etc. I worry about how much worse this all may get once deep-fakes become commonplace...
P.S. I also played video games - but overall I spent more time reading and learning/building things than playing games.
The kind of knowledge that facilitates economic development is of that sort, it's institutional and tacit. In How Asia works Joe Studwell makes an interesting observation. When South Korea and Taiwan had already taken off economically, significant parts of the population still could not read. The expansion of education lagged, not preceded economic growth.
Beaming markup text around the world is not all that it's made out to be for real world development.
I fear that people in america have equated the web with profit , not because it's true, but because all they care about is profit
They suppose that in an industrialised country, everyone is educated properly. One look at America will tell you otherwise.
On the other hand, the author seems to want the world to produce more people like Bill Gates:
> He looks at education from a societal point of view, while I look at the brain of an individual. He wants to move the masses to high achievement, while I want to produce more little Bill Gateses.
> Unlike myself, Bill Gates does not focus on having more Bill Gateses. He focuses on helping the poor, in boosting qualifications of the middle class, and adds "you can't run a society on top 5%". He is right, however, that top 5% can forge a path in education that would inspire all the rest. They cannot be run through a compulsory system set on pushing through the remaining 95%.
I see where the author is coming from here, but I question whether "the education system" is at fault for the lack of excess Bill Gateses in the world. (I would attribute it more to things like genetics, money and luck).
My own view at the moment leans towards "a rising tide lifts all boats". No, the education system doesn't work for everyone, and it's certainly not just the top 5% that it doesn't work for. (Sir Ken Robinson has had some interesting things to say about this - I highly recommend his books and TED talks.)
The education system in every country (and state in many cases) is different, and every individual's experience of their education is different.
> My approach is probably more suited to well-developed nations where the industrial approach makes people sick of schooling.
This is a really interesting observation - let's just talk about ways the education systems can be improved in Income-Level 4 countries then (https://www.gapminder.org/topics/four-income-levels/), and leave Bill Gates out of it completely.
Talent and ability is well distributed, but having access to resources to make the most of that ability tends to be concentrated in the richer urbanized areas.
20% of the US population is rural, those kids are lucky if they have access to broadband, or teachers that can teach well, or access to cultural opportunities (museums, concerts, even libraries). In my metro, the poor side of town has problems getting broadband internet and computers for every child that needs one.
Our time would be better spent making sure everybody has a better opportunity rather than just focusing on those who were lucky enough to live on the right side of town.
"'Waiting for Superman' is a new documentary film that is being lauded as a path-breaking exposé of the problems with public schools in this country, and as a vehicle to pretend that some hard-working, school “reform” experts, have the solutions.
[...]
But the movie is remarkable for the “facts” it doesn’t show: how public money has been handed over to corporations and banks, resulting in public schools closing, students being jammed into overcrowded classrooms, with no equipment, books, or sometimes, not even toilet paper. It doesn’t show how so-called top leaders in education summits are primarily CEOs and charter school operators, as well as Wall Street “Investment” bankers and representatives from foundations pushing the agendas of billionaires like Bill Gates and Eli Broad." [1]
Rick Ayers on DemocracyNow:
"In a way, it reminds me of the Horatio Alger stories in the nineteenth century, when there was great union agitation for raising up the working class, and these Horatio Alger stories would be these wonderful individual stories of individuals who worked hard and did what they were told and became successful, so we do not need a union movement, we just need individuals to succeed under capitalism. And these stories about individuals making it out of the ghetto and the very moving examples of the scholarship student who gets out are put forward precisely to avoid any talk about real problems of poverty, real problems of access, real problems all the students are facing in a place like Harlem."
[1] https://the-spark.net/np879404.html
[2] https://www.democracynow.org/2010/10/1/waiting_for_superman_...
The trend seems to be reversing the previous decade though: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2015/12/why-are-highly-educat...
> Educators spend many years studying pedagogy, and what is and is not developmentally appropriate.
take a look at 50 bad habits learned at school [1]. plenty of mistakes left and right.
Education counteracts evolution [2] is likely also relevant. Curriculums I went through growing up in the US never seemed particularly sane or focused on what is developmentally appropriate. Much of it was overly stressful which I'm sure you know isn't so great for brain development.
[1] https://supermemo.guru/wiki/50_bad_habits_learned_at_school
[2] https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Education_counteracts_evolution
Part of it is early formation. Smarter people can find elementary schoolwork trivial. So they don't get any kind of work habits early on. I was one of these, like you, and still have a hard time buckling down to a task.
There must be more reasons, but that one seems fundamental.
My boys are smart - their mother is the product of a school teacher and a research physicist, so they got it with both barrels. They could have turned out smart-and-lazy. But we put them to hard tasks as soon as they could talk. Music, farm chores, Scout projects. Gave them jobs that were so big they couldn't see the end, so they just had to plug away cheerfully day by day.
Worked. One is an industrial Engineer for new products, invents new ways to aggregate steel in his spare time. Another went to Conservatory in Cello (he liked it better than piano and had to choose). The third spent last month up North, climbing 6 mountains. All three Eagle Scouts in a challenging program. All happy well-adjusted men.