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Comment by resource_waste | Hacker News Reader

Child labor has negative ideas because we think of coal mines with cancer, 0 education, and 18 hour working days. Or something like that.

I looked at the education my kid was getting in K-5, and I genuinely think he would learn more at a company doing manual labor than he would in Music.

But maybe we don't need to do such menial tasks. My kid could play with the HTML on a page for hours until it looks good. I used to pay people on upwork to do this...

I wonder what is a more valuable skill, learning to enjoy music/literature or learning how the world works + html?

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I could fill volumes with descriptions of temples and palaces, paintings, sculptures, tapestry, porcelain, etc., etc., etc.—if I could have time. But I could not do this without neglecting my duty. The science of government it is my duty to study, more than all other sciences: the art of legislation and administration and negotiation, ought to take place, indeed to exclude in a manner all other arts. I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.

-- John Adams

Yeah I'll take Plato over John Adams.

Not really sure why we are going out of our way to corrupt our children with fables and poems.

They can learn that stuff on their own time. Why codify it? Why does a child need to learn about Box Car Children rather than a biography of an actual person who lived such a life?

Anyway, seems normal to get push back for removing entertainment classes in K12. People are more conservative than they let on.

plato is a bit slippery, but as i understand it, he was opposed to his students learning skills that would make them useful to others; he believed that the liberal arts, those befitting a free citizen rather than a slave, were things like music and literature

You do not understand it.

He specifically disdains these entertainments because they pretend to be what is real, obscuring what reality is.

Anyway, so you read something online and repeat it, and you think its going to contradict someone who actually read Plato.

I just don't get it.

i'm not sure you're right, but i'd be interested to find out. i've found a lot of stuff in plato that contradicts what you're saying, although you're partly correct. did you want to refer to any particular passage in support of your point?

Plato put all writing in the same category as poetry and believed that only person to person dialogue could transmit truth. He didn't have a special animosity toward poetry. He would say that a biography was as useless and dead as a novel.

Could just as well argue that the poetry, architecture etc is the foundation of politics. It defines a culture around which these political groupings are formed in the first place. Things aren't so neatly divided.

There's value in just being a child. Not everything is about min/maxing your life.

Then... don't make them sit in schools learning how to enjoy 'entertainment'.

learning to enjoy music and literature is valuable to the person themself. learning html or manual labor can be valuable to the person themself, but more often it's valuable to other people, because it enables the learner to serve them. that is, most html is written in the service of other people rather than for personal enjoyment or as a form of personal expression, and in the case of manual labor i think this is even more true

but why is it good to be valuable to other people? sometimes we justify this in spiritual or altruistic terms, but manual labor and html are, i think, usually done for paying clients. that is, having these skills that are valuable to other people is good not as an end in itself but as a means to the end of getting paid

but why is it good to get paid? because the person who is paid can stay alive. but why is that valuable? different people have different perspectives on this, but a lot of them come down to survival as a means to possible happiness. among other things, this possible happiness often consists of enjoying music and literature

so i think that they're both valuable, in incommensurable ways. enjoying music and literature is the ultimate end, or part of it, and learning html and how the world works is useful as a potential means to that end

i also think, though, that work itself is enjoyable and produces happiness, and making other people happy makes us happy

learning how the world works is sort of intermediate between these two. lawyers, politicians, doctors, engineers, managers, investors, et al., use their knowledge of how the world works to serve others, and many of us enjoy knowledge for its own sake, but the reason why pastry chefs and assembly-line workers need to know how the world works is neither to enjoy the knowledge nor to use it to serve others. it's so they can get paid. so it's sort of the link between serving others and using the resulting value for your own purposes

These are mandatory classes. The kids are not enjoying anything of their free will.

yes, i understand that, and i think that's a really bad feature of the so-called educational system (which is really a form of ritualized child abuse). however, it's completely irrelevant to what i was saying, which is about the relative value of the different skills you were discussing, not about the degree to which the system succeeds at developing them or about the experience of being subjected to it

I wonder what is a more valuable skill, learning to enjoy music/literature or learning how the world works + html?

The former, because that is what makes life worth living. The latter is just for meeting existential needs.

Passive entertainment being 'what makes life worth living' sounds like some Nietzsche Last Man tier stuff.

As someone who has worked in tech my entire career... Music and literature.

> I wonder what is a more valuable skill, learning to enjoy music/literature or learning how the world works + html?

You're missing something huge here - how does the world change if it worked like this?

Immediately, there becomes an incentive for children to do as much productive work as possible. Immediately, you create a world where companies that are able to use child labor are able to make things much, much cheaper, and win out economically. Immediately, you create products and services which are reliant on the labor of children.

It's not about the actual worth of education, it's about what is incentivized and how that impacts society as a whole. If you don't believe me, look at prison labor - the exact same thing happens there.

This actually sounds great. We might enter into a golden age.

Consider that we got to our current age by having a well-educated populace and that developing countries are copying this model to improve their economic prosperity as well. Rolling that back doesn't seem like it will lead to a golden age.

Where was the proposal to roll it back?

The proposal was to eliminate entertainment education and replace it with real world skills.

You know what defines a "golden age"? A flourishing of the arts and sciences. I've never heard anyone associate that term with an abundance of manual labor, or "real world skills" as you put it.

Change the topic after defeat?

Value is subjective.

Music/lit teaches you "how the world works", but you can do both.

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