Education as civilization-building | Hacker News Reader

Education as civilization-building

fchollet.substack.com

69 pointseducated65 comments

Completely agree, and that is also the reason I think education should be in a large part socially/government funded: I benefit from other people around me being educated. I’d expect there must be some research that indicates that for every euro spend on education by the government, society benefits more than that one euro.

Not when conditioning people into one-minded herd-tube.

It should not be funded by taking away from those funding it themselves or educating themselves.

Nothing harms more than state propaganda, except state propaganda funded by corpostate.

Homeschooling should be promoted. Nothing teaches you more than walking 1000 miles.

PS Society & Europe was better when there were marks instead of euro. Especially looking at South of Europe.

Two marks sounds even better than one ;-)

> Education is the process through which the body of knowledge and culture that we have been accumulating for thousands of years passes from our generation to the next one.

In aggregate, yes. But no one person gets the entire body of knowledge that humanity has accumulated for thousands of years. This is impossible for any single person to understand.

Each person can only hope to get a piece, and hopefully some of those useful skills the author derides so that they can contribute a piece of their own back to the whole. Because simply understanding civilization - even if it were possible for one person to do - does not prevent any of the decay the author is concerned about. It must be improved upon and re-transmitted to the next generation in order for it to endure.

Ars longa, vita brevis: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/09/ars-longa-vita-brevis/

I've never been as depressed as I was back in the university when I was looking for open jobs and realized the employers want a completely different set of skills than what I had. It hit me like a hammer when I realized all this time I had spend studying didn't even pay off in the end.

I know how to code (no thanks to our education system), so I ended up getting a job anyway, but I have unemployed friends who are around 30yo with master's decrees and the best they can get is a part-time job as a cashier. They've mostly just given up on life at this point and live on welfare. They're very civilized though.

How's that opioid crisis going on btw?

What exactly is the point you're making? That treating people like replaceable cogs in an economic machine is bad or do you have some other point?

I think the point is that we need to be honest and transparent with ppl. We don't have enough good jobs to accommodate, and there won't be. The so called middle class positions is and will be shrinking and we have to face the fact.

What exactly is a "good" job in your opinion?

What I mean is on macro perceptive, a good job should sustain a 'middle class' life style, let the ppl to afford housing, cars, children etc. And apparently by this standard, the percentage of good jobs are shrinking, and it's a global phenomena. Shrinking middle is not something I come up with. I just totally agree with it. Think about the good old days in America

We have increasing number of ppl getting higher educations, coupled with shrinking good job markets, the competitions to get good jobs is only more fierce by the day. Whatever the reason, the automation, the shifting economy, the depletion of resources, the fact doesn't change. The supply of university graduates just outpase the shrinking 'good middle class' job markets.

In the developed world there are so many industries that pay well screaming for more workers. Go on any job board and you can see this.

The problem is people get some random "lifestyle" degree (like in Classics say) and then say "why can't I get a job with this?". Maybe because the modern economy has very limited demand for archaeologists?

But if you learn virtually any trade, anything to do with IT, many forms of social work/healthcare, many parts of accounting/bookkeeping, then a middle class job is possible.

The problem is then you start getting all these qualifications to why that isn't the "right" job they want. Maybe you need to do physical work, or work outside, or work with computers/software, or work with numbers, or work somewhere dirty, or work outside a global city, or work with sick people, or join the military etc. And then suddenly it isn't a "good job" anymore.

Being a university graduate means so little these days because you can graduate in so many things that should basically be (or are) hobbies. There is no demand from customers, business, government for any of these "qualifications" so all people end up with is an inflated ego and debt.

You are talking about micro. I am talking about macro as I indicated in my first sentence. I am not interested in discussing anecdote. As someone who lives comfortably for now I can't imagine the new graduates are able to get a home, raising children. It's just too expensive. Majority of the ppl would live working poor no matter how much cost they cut.

Think about this simple question. Do you think the percentage of ppl are capable to become home owner are comparable to 50-60 years ago in America? Is the cost of living getting higher or lower?

Depends where they want to buy a home and of what size/quality. As it always has.

I agree the housing market is a bit fucked but that is a problem with the housing market, not the job market. Don't get the two confused.

Land taxes should be implemented to help fix the morally bankrupt way housing is treated in this country.

But my point is the current macro economy, which includes BOTH supply and demand and ALL things considered. For example, the job market(current situation + forecast) relative to the amount the applications(current candidate pool + yearly growth), the cost of living(current situation + forecast), etc. I am not sure what your point is. I never solely talked about the job market. My central question is: is it easier or harder to get a good job to sustain a middle class compare to 50-60 years ago(from a macro economy perspective)? Sure everyone has a chance, is the chance higher or lower?

If you can't really tell what micro/macro mean, you should pick up those economy topics first. I am done trying to teach basic econ 101

You are confusing a lot of different things.

The pool of available jobs open to people is very high if they are willing to train and do them. Cost of living has been lower on average than in recent memory (only recently has inflation begun to change this). Housing is the big exception but that is one aspect of the overall macro-economic picture.

As for your econ 101 comment: econ 101 IS MICROECONOMICS, you clown. 102 is macroeconomics. So pretty clear you are talking out your arse so no point trying to teach you the basics. .

My point is that I completely disagree with your article and that schools should focus more on teaching skills that are useful. Better to be a cog than nothing.

It's not my article but thanks for clarifying. In the future you can just say you disagree with the expressed viewpoint without reducing people to drug addicts to make some point about being a cog in an economic machine.

No, I'm going to speak up my mind in the future just as I did now. False promises and it's side effects was part of my point after all - and it was you who brought the cogs to the discussion.

Great, keep up the good work.

Let's teach the latest Javascript framework that will become obsolete by the time the student graduates

There are enough studies that will prepare you for a job, it's just that most young people are more interested in doing something interesting or fulfilling, and make economically unwise decisions.

yes, very true. I had to give up on environmental advocacy because the career path was non-existent.

Money must be like democracy. The worst possible way to organize society with the possible exception of everything else we have tried.

First: in most of the world the first 8 to 12 years are already focused on general knowledge with plenty of history, arts, culture, social studies, etc. Not job training.

Second: "civilization building", "maximally realizing human potential" and so on are occupations that very few individuals can have. Civilizations simply don't have the disposable resources to sustain a significant portion of their population focusing on such things.

Yeah, that's the basic idea of the liberal arts curriculum and the institutions teaching it.

In recent years, there has been a lot of opposition against the idea. "Learn to code!" or anything "STEM" are the two most popular slogans in that regard.

Understanding code is a necessity in a technocratic society because as more and more things are automated understanding code becomes a necessity just like literacy. It's gotten to the point now that most people carry supercomputers in their pockets but instead of utilizing those computers to augment their intelligence for navigating the world people are absorbed in mindless consumption of algorithmic entertainment. This is not a sustainable state of affairs.

Keeping masses entertained has been an important feature of holding power in most past civilisations. It distracts them from taxation and elite corruption.

Which is why I said it's not sustainable. Sustaining democracies requires a citizenry who are more than just puppets controlled by the powerful. An obvious example is Twitter and social media in general. It's downright depressing to see so many people addicted to applications that have turned human interactions into engagement games just so the companies operating those interaction sandboxes can present ads for commercial activities to as many people as possible. The whole setup is outright anti-democratic and it wouldn't have happened if more people understood how computers worked and how they could utilize them to express themselves in less restricted ways.

You have it opaque. Technology is for people not people for technology. We want minimal, simple & easily understandable law. But the more law is created the more middleman control and bloat it. The more technocrats you will have the more inhumane technocracy will become. Nobody needs to understand code. The only entities that needs it are machines. When you use a printer you need to know where to push print button not how printing was implemented.

You can't expect humanity to adjust to technology by force, especially knowing natural limitation of this. Next decade you will side with sterilisation of unfitting "modern civilization".

GDP flows & spreads in economy on all jobs shaping salaries. If humanity do makes technological progress it means GDP do grows and so people with lowest salaries should gain buying power. If they don't it's not their fault, it means something goes wrong with the progress that we all blindly assume is happening. But since 1970 there is no progress on West. There is a centralisation of global wealth scheme going on & we don't get natural replacement of those generations of civilization and progress builders as before. Middle class is literally being eradicated.

Mindless consumption is 99% of what people do in shops. Healthy human species proper diet food is 1% of products in shops. Most of stuff around is toxic & fake.

We don't need augmenting human intelligence. We need to build civilization for everyone & for humans.

Society is a pyramid. Bottom produces top and achievements of top are co-owned by bottom from where they originate.

I agree fully with algoentertainment. But making whole society into mindless efficient machines will be the other extreme to go to.

Coding in itself is not normal natural human activity and the optimum for humans is what they evolved for in nature in their natural environment. Not observing matrix code.

Fixing eyes & natural vision, not augmenting it first. Starting with true human food not replacing it. Making humans drug free before drugging them for specific performance.

What people do is shaped by their (re)education, parenting, quality of their sources of information, choices surrounding them, their understanding of what a civilized human behaviour & ethics standard is, what their subjective self-assessment & habits let them become.

Big part of it is infosphere around them which they never consciously chosen to be exposed to. Human don't even have a free will so how can he be fully responsible for "own" choices?

A physical ratcage in overcrowded concrete labirynth seems far from humane thing.

Digital escapism is like wrapping shit up in shiny paper of a magic pill to avoid facing true colours of modern reality & degredation of civilization.

We made enough progress to start reverting millennia long unnatural changes & mistakes, reinventing our optimal human state with technology & push the technology evolution in direction serving human true self.

Processing this basic truth gives a profound insights.

While we do enjoy roman and egyptian art, it’s usually the quality of their engineering that makes us look in wonder.

You shouldn't overgeneralize your own perspectives to the broader population

I would disagree this is just a perspective with no objective element to it.

The thing about art is that assessing it is an inherently culturally-bound and personal taste bound endeavour.

Which is the better piece of art:

1. The Mona Lisa

2. The Great Wave off Kanagawa

This will inherently be subjective as there will be so many biases that come into how we assess these things.

However, which is the better piece of engineering:

1. The first plane built by the Wright Brothers

2. A modern 737

By any reasonable analysis it is the 737. It is objectively more complex and indicates a far greater achievement both in its own creation as well as the civilisation that was sophisticated enough to build it.

Engineering has an objective standard you can compare things across, art doesn't. This isn't to say art has no value, life would be so much poorer without it. And they can certainly intersect in something like an iPhone which is both beautiful and amazing engineering.

However, there is an objective point where we have to ask: does this grant the civilisation that built it a greater control over its environment and its capacity to solve problems and this objective standard is what makes a lot of engineering so impressive.

Ideally it should be both.

Everyone doing liberal arts means nobody has the skills to run the modern technologies that power our society. Nobody wants to pay for a vague qualification

Teach arts as part of a rounded education sure, but also teach STEM so we can actually get things done and people can get paid for doing something that organisations actually want done.

Over-optimisation towards one or the other leads to either arts qualified young adults who can't do much for work, or highly literal engineering types who only see value as utility.

The S and M from STEM are liberal arts. It's simply a term to distinguish fields like physics, anthropology, etc from "vocational training"-type programs like med schools [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_arts_education#Modern_...

…and math is among the “liberal arts”.

Earlier today my child was bemoaning the lack of practical skills in education. No education about filling out taxes, dealing with bank accounts, courts, etc. has been given at school.

I'll rectify those deficits soon.

I love the idea of education as something people do because they love to learn and to think and I think it’s important that it exists. At the same time, we can’t expect everyone to want to do that.

Why do some kids want to learn and others don't? Why do some kids have infinite curiosity about the world and want to figure out how it works? Perhaps we should focus on figuring out how to encourage this curiosity in humans.

A newborn seems to be incredibly curious about the world. With age, this curiosity seems to fade, for some more so than others. If we can prevent curiosity from fading, people would be excited about learning.

Ah yes, let's force a government mandated culture on people. Can't imagine anything going wrong with that.

None of what the OP said indicated anything of the sort.

> maximally realizing human potential

It's not though, it's about maximally inserting the human into the machine. That's why the machine is funding the education.

This is rather a simplistic view with the wrong conclusion of what the education means to our society and culture. The scientific progress has always been carried out by a small percent of population, and not a mass process. Its only recent when the education was made available to the masses.

I also suspect the author mistakes the term education for kwoledge. And yes, some knowledge is lost, but that is due the technological progress. It's always been that way.

It helps to first discuss what the purpose of the education system is before trying to reform it.

In my view, the purpose should be: - enable each individual to function independently in society.

For poor individuals, a technical education that helps land you a good job is absolutely great and is an enabling factor for many things to come.

For individuals from richer families with a wide array of opportunities (e.g., middle class in the west), no doubt a traditional liberal arts education is fantastic.

This confuses me. Wouldn't it be more important to enable people to work together in society?

A different education system if you're poor or rich ? From a french point of view, that's horrible. A sure good way for keeping a class system.

French education is rigidly divided into liberal-arts/prep school ("baccalaureat") and vocational-only ("CFA/CAP") at the secondary level. If anything, the typical U.S. high school is a lot more flexible and "unified", though de-facto quality is of course extremely variable.

Of course the french system is flawed, but at least its founding principle is to give everyone the same chance. Starting your life with a different education depending on your wealth is shocking.

Giving everyone the same chances is a principle pretty much everyone reasonable agrees with.

What I'm saying is that if you are poor, your best bet is to choose to pursue whatever education brings you the best possible job.

Is it? In practice that's what your education system leads to. It always did.

Not as a matter of politics or culture, but of necessity. People who have wealth to fall back on can take more risks. Get completely "worthless" degrees for example. Those without wealth have to aim for more certain outcomes, or put themselves in danger.

Hence the college debt crisis. If many of the same people went to vocational schools, they could have been dept free and better off. This problem is apparent even in more generous public funded school systems.

My country guarantees free tuition and housing stipend to all college aged for their bachelors and masters. But I have too many acquaintances that are now working in positions they are very much overqualified for.

Literature major working as a low level clerk for example.

> But I have too many acquaintances that are now working in positions they are very much overqualified for.

> Literature major working as a low level clerk for example.

What exactly is a literature major qualified to do though? I don't say this to be mean it is just there is this strange perception out there that the very act of getting a degree in something "qualifies" you for some job that will be high-paying etc.

I think of a counter-example where if someone got a degree in scuba-diving would they be "over-qualified" to be a clerk? Well it depends what we mean by "qualified" right? I only think someone is overqualified for their job if their skill set is:

1. In high demand

2. They are unable to practice it

For example, a doctor working unwillingly as a taxi driver is over-qualified because there is huge demand for doctors but for whatever reason this person can't get a job. Or a developer working as a street cleaner etc.

Having a qualification that you don't use isn't enough to be determined "over-qualified". It is only if there is demand for your skills but you can't use them for whatever reason that it makes sense.

What do you mean by “function independently?”

Why do you immediately separate eduction by wealth?

I suspect you mean that the purpose of eduction is to ensure that an individual can be gainfully employed and not be a burden on the state. One of your aims would be heading off any poor students pursuing a less lucrative degree (liberal arts).

This seems like a rather sad view of education.

I mean to function without being babysat, not (only) from an economic perspective.

I'm not suggesting in any way a class-based education system, which are awful. I'm simply stating that if you are poor, your best bet is to pursue whatever education lands you the best possible job.

I think the real value goes beyond a single individual: without proper education a society cannot succeed. Even from a purely economic perspective: you need smart and educated people to start and run companies, you need more smart and educated people for companies to succeed.

You forgot to mention: take care of the children during the day so both parents can work the kinds of jobs which you can't do with children running around.

Which is a bit sad, pre-industrial revolution children could work and help with chores, both for sustenance farmers and for tradesmen. They were a net positive from a rather early age, and I'm pretty sure this had a (positive) impact on their psychological development as well.

Thank you mister obvious.

Is this written by an AI? I was waiting for the article and it never arrived.

You are very smart, thank you for your very important and pertinent contribution.

Low quality articles that people only read the title of is how web forums die.

This is an extremely low quality article that I hope was written by an AI model so no human brains were harmed during it's production.

Yes, thank you. Only a smart person like you could notice that. Once again, I can't thank you enough. Please keep up your efforts of informing people about what you think is useless drivel so that brains won't be harmed in the future.

The brains harmed were the ones who created this, not the ones consuming it. Happy to see that AI models are so close to reading comprehension though.

Yes, computers these days can perform very sophisticated statistical calculation to simulate the appearance of intelligence. Very similar to some people that comment on HN. I'm not as smart as you so I often have a hard time telling the difference. Thanks again for your very informed viewpoint. I have learned a lot from these engagements.

I'm happy to have helped you take the first step on a journey of a billion miles.

The image at the end looked generated and had me worried, but I think the central thesis is in the paragraph starting with "Crucially, education is civilization-building" and I don't think an AI could quite write something that well. Not yet, anyways.

This is a 300 word post. It's barely a tweet. The idea it could have a preliminary thesis, let alone a central one, stretches credulity.

Educations function is already civilization building. The uncivilized are people who live outside of the system of state control. Civilization is the process of indoctrinating education to bring additional assets under the control of the state. However, job training does increase the long term value of state assets and a transition began in the 20th century and continues today. Some such as the author resist this trend because they prefer the traditional education system without understanding it’s historical social function.

Civilization and State are not synonymous. A civilization has many more components than just its governing body. If you don’t think so then answer this: why is it so hard for conquering nations to hold onto and integrate the lands and peoples they have conquered?

You are correct in a strict technical sense. However in most media, and in this article in particular, state and civilization are used interchangeably. The author is not discussing education as a parent might teach their child but rather as to how a state institution indoctrinates its students.

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