Instead Of Field Trips To The Zoo, A Long Island Middle School Visits Startups | Hacker News Reader

Instead Of Field Trips To The Zoo, A Long Island Middle School Visits Startups

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22 pointsturoczy12 comments

Having been a student of the guy behind 140 Varick st and re-vitalization of Silicon Alley, I am glad that we start teaching the new generation what it means to be an entrepreneur.

Most kids today are going to college for a paper degree that will get them in the corporate world and provide layers and layers of management cushion one on top of another. Although boring, political and unfulfilling these jobs are not really demanding.

Most people who go through the start-up experience (successful or not) and wear many hats come out of it with invaluable experience and make better owners/employees/consultants :)

Seeing this made my day.

Why not do both?

You do realise that the "instead of trips to the zoo" is just a headline writer's sleight-of-something here, right? There's nothing in the article about zoo trips being cancelled.

Still, he doesn't seem to think very highly of zoo trips.

Time/Money and standardized tests to cram students for? (the unfortunate reality of most schools these days)

What you're forgetting is at that age one simple thing can create a spark in a kid.

My uncle gave me a crystal radio at 10 (in the shape of Alan Shephard's space capsule) and that led me to becoming an amateur radio operator. Later a science teacher further stoked my interest in tech.

Sometimes it really is the simple things in life that set a kid on a journey.

That is just great. Just what is needed to increase the chances the generation growing up now will be entrepreneurs. I will try to set us up as a host for something similar this fall here in Sweden. I am inspired by all actions to increase entrepreneurship and especially to children and teenagers.

I wish programs like this were in place when I was a child. Imagine going to Google when it was still a few guys in a small office. It would be a life changing event.

But would you have known the significance at the time? Google at 10 employees consisted of a handful of scraggly guys* typing on a computer all day, and a couple other scraggly guys talking on the phone all day to get deals done (hosting contracts, funding, etc). There's nothing that looks interesting or unique about an early-stage startup--it's just people in an office. Compare that to a zoo that has plenty of room for kids to run and scream and see things they've never seen before.

I'm not saying it's useless to take kids to startup offices -- it socializes the value of entrepreneurship -- but it's not quite the same experience as seeing the size of an african elephant for the first time, or looking a gorllia in the eye.

* I use "guys" in a gender-neutral sense here; I don't know what the gender ratio was at Google at 10 employees.

but it's not quite the same experience as seeing the size of an african elephant for the first time, or looking a gorllia in the eye.

In fairness, most parents have probably taken their kids to the zoo dozens of times before they even get to school age. I know I will, when I have kids, because... hey, zoos are awesome!

Look ma, a JAVA developer!

The average case isn't google, though, it's... well, some company which winds up going under or if really lucky maybe getting acquired and either way vanishes off the radar.

And heck, even if you had, would it be that life-changing? It'd be a moderately interesting cocktail party anecdote at best. And I say that as someone who is interested in this kind of stuff. For everyone else it'd probably be a fairly boring cocktail party anecdote.

Visiting a couple of guys in a small office really isn't that intrinsically exciting.

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