School is Not Enough: Learning is a consequence of doing (2021)

The survivorship bias you point to is a big part of it. Reading the biography of Carnegie, just as one example, strikes me as kind of egregious because it quickly becomes obvious he was part of a child labor system and by counterargument succeeded largely because he was one of the lucky poor given access to private education by a wealthy benefactor. You could just as easily turn Carnegie into a counterexample, of what happens when you give a child an education with lots of attention. He also happened to be in the right place and right time, in the railroads just as they were taking off.

The focus on the schools too seems really misguided to me. Most of the problems with society today, in my opinion, are due to all the formal roadblocks placed up by bureaucratic red tape, instantiated by the labyrinths of government or private human resources departments.

There are just so many things that require such and such degree, or such and such experience, not because they're actually necessary, but because various legalistic bureaucracies require them. Some of the examples in the essay could happen today, but most of them probably not. The essay seems to quietly acknowledge this but then turns attention away from it, probably because it undermines its thesis.

In my own career I've heard lots of stories like this from the past, both close to me institutionally and more distally. People just sort of showing up somewhere and chatting and then getting a career because they came there to do the work, were respected on the basis of conversation, and had a path forward. None of that would happen today. There would be rubber stamping required, certificates and degrees in a specific field or subfield, with no attention to whether or not the person has the actual ability and background in the area to do the tasks involved.

Schooling today I think has problems, and I agree with the premise that doing things is important. But I think schools teach to what is out there in the world, and students are doing things in school curricula all the time with no acknowledgment later because you're seen as commensurate with a degree. It's not a problem with schools, it's a problem with having vocational paths with opportunities be open to people who have the skills and abilities, but just don't have quite the right credentials or connections. Maybe it's always been that way, but something about today's society makes the examples provided in the essay seem irrelevant today for all sorts of reasons that have nothing to do with the schools themselves.

That is only because our system is so heavily built around bureaucracy and credentials. Regardless of his skills or intelligence, the HS dropout will face discrimination for not having his pieces of paper so intense that it would be illegal if done against any other group.

You have to really understand why you can break the rules and still succeed. And if you have to use the word “stupid” or “sheep” in your explanation you’re most likely wrong.

The adult equivalent of this to quit your comfortable paying jobs to do a start-up. Fail bad, and realise you are landed way behind people with 9-5 jobs.

Most of the times- "Do this scary thing and win" requires lots of luck going for you. In fact it can be attributed luck alone in nearly all cases.

The problem is people think if they work hard enough that chances will be in their favor. That's rarely, if ever the case.

By and large. Study well, get a job, save, invest, tend to your health and relationships. Just do the well set formula. You can't go wrong here.

That means the coursework and schedules are designed specifically for the lowest common denominator of a student.

This means that if you're anything but, say, the bottom 20% of students, public school isn't an efficient use of time for you. You should be learning more in the same amount of time.

There are a lot of other problems with it too, but that's the most egregious. If education was more efficient, a lot of the other problems with it could be solved as well.

But this doesn't come cheap, and tutoring is also going a bit out of style, regrettably.

Later I invite the counterfactual:

"Imagine if Carnegie and Da Vinci were instead compelled to stay in school for 10 more years. What would have happened?"

and,

"A 13-year-old Steve Jobs once called Bill Hewlett—whose number was simply listed in the phone book–and received a summer job at Hewlett Packard. This would be unsurprising in Carnegie’s time, was certainly surprising for 1968, and is culturally verboten today."

Maybe that's true, maybe it's not.

Either way, at 60, on a daily basis in my life, almost all the skills I use were thing I learned after I turned 25 (and most of them after 30). That includes cooking, woodworking, programming, swimming and host of others.

My stepfather used to say (he probably still would if given the chance) that the point of school (by which he meant what in the US is called K-12) is learning how to learn. I agree with 100% (surprise!) - the reason I have been able to learn things in later life is because I got an excellent opportunity to learn how to learn when I was younger.

> The opportunity with AI is that education can be much more personalized now.

I don't even know what this means. The best education consists of a situation (sometimes created by a teacher) that provides a given individual with the opportunity and motivation to acquire some knowledge about something. I do not see what AI can possibly have to do with creating such situations.

When offering advice on how to learn how to program, I have to heavily recommend that students try their best to avoid the use of AI. Whereas previously the best advice I could give was to "build something", it is now possible to build a piece of software without understanding it at all. I have observed this myself with Rust; I have built a few programs now by repeatedly prompting AI models. I have even been quite engaged in designing the architecture, guiding the programs towards patterns that my intuition as a programmer says will be good for Rust too. The software works, but I can't help but feel I have learned nothing at all. Building something is now insufficient to learn, at least in the domain of programming.

I feel there will be far more compilations we will have to address in order to benefit from AI in education. That said, I am still optimistic that it will be a net positive force.

I hear this all the time, but I've never seen any evidence of it.

The problem with self-directed education is one does not know which direction to go. By following a program, you're following a path of learning what you need to know that you don't know you need to know.

For example, what kind of math would you need to know to do mechanical engineering? Hydraulics? Electronics? Physics? Astrogation? Signal processing? It's all different.

School typically only caters to one type of learning, and it actually wouldn't matter which type since only focusing on one always leaves out the other.

Lastly, if you can only learn one way, and it is a defect, what do you expect them to do? Genetically modify themselves? Chemically correct themselves? They're kids, they need to be catered for, they can't do it for themselves.

No, your claim is even stronger - that anyone who doesn't learn that way has a learning disability?

I think either version is far too strong a statement.

Regardless I think it's trivially true that one learns by doing primarily or possibly exclusively. When I think of all the practice problems or "think through implications" that I have to do before being competent enough to claim i know something... Let alone my first attempt at applying the knowledge. That's all "doing".

Another point is that you can’t really learn a skill unless there are stakes - a real goal you need to accomplish, real customers, real coworkers. Grades aren’t real stakes; at least I didn’t regard them as such.

I’ve seen this over and over through the years as new college grads arrive who know a lot about things but have no idea how to do those things. Unless they went to a school with a good co-op program.

Maybe if you're stuck in a classroom with unmotivated people, or your classmates are much slower than you, or the class is huge and your teacher doesn't give a shit about teaching. But in the absence of a severe case of some incidental problem like that, I've found the opposite to be true.

Besides that, a lot of classes are centered primarily on learning by oneself anyway. Many of my favorite classes in college were simply too fast-paced to allow students to rely on lecture time to pick up the material. Most of the learning was driven by out-of-class study, while lecture time was essentially used (along with office hours) as a chance to ask questions and catch up. In those classes I had the dual pleasures of exploring the material in solitude and testing my understanding with others who likewise were exploring the same wonders (and sometimes struggling with them) for the first time. It was great!

Admittedly, I was generally extremely unhappy in high school, and even in college I often felt frustrated with the arbitrariness of assignments and grades. But for me, as studying with others, especially people who were smart and passionate, was one of the best parts of both. (Generally, college was better due to a greater sense of freedom and (eventually) classes that were much more challenging in a way that felt meaningful.)

Agency is actively suppressed at school; that's one of its core functions.