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Comment by andsoitis | Hacker News Reader

> if the students had something interesting to write about then they couldn't really get a kenyan to write it for them.

Can you elaborate?

I'll elaborate. There's this strain of anti-intellectualism that blames everything on education being a farce. It never actually clarifies how anything could be better, it just states that it's bad as it is.

An admission essay is hardly education, it's a pro forma hoop to jump through to get into college (especially now that more and more are ignoring test scores). So you have to invent eight hobbies and convince a bunch of bored administrators that playing the cello since you were four has really helped you overcome adversity, but it's also made you disciplined and ready to take on the world.

I'm very pro-education, and anti-college admissions essay.

There’s also a strain of anti intellectualism that assumes every human should be forced through 12ish years of schooling and every human should achieve the same base level of results.

Public education for all is not much different than the American idea of “temporarily embarrassed millionaires”.

Leave education for those that either want or can benefit from it. Come up with more efficient systems for the rest of the masses.

The expectation of universal results has problems, but universal education is one of the most crucial cornerstones of developed society. Culture and innovation blossom from it like flowers in rich fertile soil. There's a reason humans have fought (sometimes literally) for access to an education.

Culture and innovation blossom from human knowledge, not formal state-mandated education systems. Today, as throughout history, most "culture and innovation" (as measured by inventions, companies, researchers, art, philosophy, etc.) spring from men and women who break ties with their "educations" and instead strike out on their own in the search of truth.

We both agree that a literate and highly knowledgeable citizenry is paramount to the success of society, but the current western education model is failing to produce that citizenry. This failure is in part because professional educators remain unaware that universal education did not create developed societies, rather developed societies created universal education.

Information alone is insufficient to instill individuals with the character necessary to create great societies. The citizenry must already be strong-willed and self-determined for education to successfully add serious value to their lives. Those are the people who fight for their education. Many students today instead fight to avoid learning anything, because the system they're trapped inside has become so odious and hampered by redundancy, inefficiency, and a total lack of humanity.

I went to hippie boarding school where I had no science and one math class between the ages of 11 and 18. Most of my time was spent doing other stuff. Now I have a PhD in physics and work as a research scientist. School is a joke and prepares you for nothing. Although I suppose you could say I was prepared for the path I wanted. Perhaps the deeper take away is that educational preparation is much more complex then simply exposing young people to content they will learn more deeply later. Who knows.

Thats naive as hell

Everybody has their reasons about whats wrong about formal education - some are better and some are way too individual, yet lets do not act as if formal edu was something flawless

Although there are specific, genuine concerns mixed into that anti-intellectualism sometimes: e.g. regarding political indoctrination through education.

I used to find such arguments patently ridiculous myself, until a very recent HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35488772.

The political slant in those EXAM QUESTIONS appears completely absurd to me-- its basically on a "full points only if you call the californians hypocrites"-level (and thats not even hyperbole), and if that is what an exam is allowed to look like I don't even want to know how much overt preaching happens in the lectures.

An opinionated professor is fine, possibly entertaining even, and being exposed to conflicting viewpoints is valuable in itself, but THAT went WAY beyound any reasonable bounds.

Yeah that midterm grading system was basically "you get an A if you agree with my political opinions, and you fail if you disagree". He's not even teaching at a tiny liberal arts college in the middle of nowhere, this is at George Mason University, a highly regarded research university.

It's fine if he explains his viewpoints in lecture occasionally, but not if passing a class is dependent on agreeing with the professor on everything. If that were the case, most economists would fail his midterm.

Yeah but he's an economist.

Surely that exam does not represent the typical experience of a US college student? It is insane.

I don't think so (I asked in the comments and from the responses I got can only conclude that this is NOT the norm).

But the fact that the professor himself has no problem sharing this online is concerning itself.

This should, in my opinion, appear immediately and obviously unethical to everyone involved, even if you share the professors political outlook completely...

If anything, LLMs showed that you don’t need ability to reason to perform many jobs, like content writing. College assays are probably another good example.

I can offer a solution though. Don’t create that many for-profit institutions that teach useless degrees. Don’t put students in debt for getting useless degrees that they cheat their way though. Done.

It's not a solution because many people will disagree with the premise.

Just because LLM can generate text doesn't mean generating text is useless. Namely, it helps thinking.

Do you also believe humans have to understand fractions because computers can do them? Genuine question; a lot of people think like that.

EDIT: Also, no one is putting anyone in debt. People are free to choose what they want to do. Don't wanna study, just don't. Easy. No, what's actually happening is that individually are making dumb decisions out of their own free will.

> Just because LLM can generate text doesn't mean generating text is useless. Namely, it helps thinking.

This doesn’t disprove that many degrees are profit-driven. Those are bound to have dumb assignments that even an LLM can complete.

> People are free to choose what they want to do.

I wonder if you ever heard of incentives in society. Incentives can be misaligned.

> Those are bound to have dumb assignments that even an LLM can complete.

Right, lets stop teaching children how to sum.

I wonder if you've ever learned anything complex in your entire life. Probably not. But the rest of us now that training of any kind starts simple and builds from there.

I think most of the University could probably be replaced by short courses and long apprenticeships. At least in stem. This would likely reduce the amount of people who could go to universities.

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