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Comment by carapace | Hacker News Reader

This. The Internet obviates most of our current educational system. E.g., textbooks are absurd in a world where every child has a radio-networked pocket supercomputer.

The daycare aspect of schools is broken, obviously, but that's a deep societal problem far beyond the ability of teachers to fix.

The educational aspect of schools is (mostly, but not entirely) redundant to the resources available for free on the Internet.

Perhaps we should separate those aspects from each other? (I dunno. I don't have children so it's not (immediately) my problem.)

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> The educational aspect of schools is (mostly, but not entirely) redundant to the resources available for free on the Internet.

I think this overestimates it. What I've found from internet 'learning', myself and others (and the students I used to teach) is that there's more often the illusion of learning than any actual learning. Let's not equate watching a YouTube video and thinking we understand it to actual learning. I've been victim to that myself when trying to learn pure math, and with kids it'll certainly be worse.

And the same issues will carry over to any online textbook too. Teachers are there to actually assess what the kids really learned, not what they think they learned, or what they can google to get past the next question on their assignment. The internet just fosters the illusion of learning (and let's not even get to critical thinking from it).

I've heard a proverb (I want to say Pacific Islands but I'm not sure of the source), "Knowledge is only rumor until it's in the muscle."

When I say "mostly, but not entirely" redundant what I mean is that the things that schools can offer over and above the information on the Internet are a small subset of what they're doing now, and the industry that supports them is largely a relic (e.g. the textbook industry.)

Schools can still offer in-person mentoring and tutoring, and lab facilities with supervision, but if you take away the daycare aspects of schools I think that's about all that's left (of the educational aspects.) The regimented scheduling, most of the buildings and school bus systems, etc. are the now-unnecessary bits.

People with kids will tell you how well "internet education" went the last 2 years...

This isn't a technology problem. Kids are still kids. Fortnite will still be more fun than doing math, whether that's on a computer or in a classroom.

> People with kids will tell you how well "internet education" went the last 2 years...

As I said, I don't have kids, so I don't have first-hand information, but from what I've heard we got the worst of both. I don't think we can draw too many conclusions from the hot mess of the last two years, not yet anyway. In any event, I hope it's obvious that I'm not advocating for more of that.

What I mean is that the raw material freely available on the Internet is more than enough in terms of information, so it seems to me that long hours of mostly-rote learning from approved textbooks, etc. don't make sense anymore (if they ever did.)

Instead it seems like schools (for education, not daycare) could provide direct, in-person interactions with mentors and tutors that would be an important part of any re-designed educational system, to help kids learn to teach themselves.

> Fortnite will still be more fun than doing math, whether that's on a computer or in a classroom.

Well, to me the whole concept of "battle royale" is a symptom of modern depravity, I'd never let my kids play such a messed up game.

But I reject the idea that playing video games with your friends is more fun than e.g. building a robot IRL with your friends, eh? I mean starting with magnets and wires and, like, an Arduino. You'd have to learn mathematics in the context of electronics, mechanics, software and hardware, sensors, etc. An integrated context where you're immediately applying what you learn to your robot.

Internet education can't work for the primary reason: not everyone is WFH. Most places are asking for more to come in. But many jobs require you to come in. So that right there eliminates it. For the lucky that can WFH, they need to dedicate resources to make sure their kid is paying attention or actually learning. It doesn't scale.

It's not a technology problem.

> What I mean is that the raw material freely available on the Internet is more than enough in terms of information, so it seems to me that long hours of mostly-rote learning from approved textbooks, etc. don't make sense anymore (if they ever did.)

It may seem trivial to say "why bother teaching 2+2 if they can just use a calculator." But they still need to understand the CONCEPT of adding. The point isn't just that the answer is four.

Even in something like history where you're asked to remember a date. How can any discussion of history involve not understanding the chronology of events?

> But I reject the idea that playing video games with your friends is more fun than e.g. building a robot IRL with your friends, eh? I mean starting with magnets and wires and, like, an Arduino. You'd have to learn mathematics in the context of electronics, mechanics, software and hardware, sensors, etc. An integrated context where you're immediately applying what you learn to your robot.

All of these options are available to kids with the power of the internet, as you just argued, and yet they almost all choose video games instead.

> People with kids will tell you how well "internet education" went the last 2 years

We had a bunch of school districts with little to no experience running distance education, with a vested interest in return-to-classroom, all attempt to implement an online curriculum practically overnight. I don't consider it fair to consider that "online learning" or an earnest attempt at a successful home schooling curriculum.

To drive that point home, a family I know in Washington State had two kids in the school district during that disaster. The school district shifted a tone of responsibility onto parents and kids. The parents were fed up and switched to a for-profit homeschool program. Their kids are still home schooled - they never went back to the school district after COVID ended.

The problems aren't technology related. No amount of curriculum change will make a parent be able to WFH forever or provide enough attention for their child because they're too busy putting food on their table and working to the only metric that matters above all else for their outcomes: money.

> To drive that point home, a family I know in Washington State had two kids in the school district during that disaster. The school district shifted a tone of responsibility onto parents and kids. The parents were fed up and switched to a for-profit homeschool program. Their kids are still home schooled - they never went back to the school district after COVID ended.

Yea, we get it, some people can afford homeschooling and have time to do it. That doesn't scale nationwide.

> Yea, we get it, some people can afford homeschooling and have time to do it. That doesn't scale nationwide.

I think you're cutting exactly to the core of it. We conflate child sitting with education and end up with a bad version of both.

Online school went pretty well for my kid. No doubt in my mind that she was learning way more than during in person school. The key was probably that she was next door to me the whole time and I had some time to help her with homework that I didn’t before remote. Honestly my child and I both wish they’d go back to remote.

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