Comment by pols45 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pols45 | Hacker News Reader

To realize how hard educating anyone is, pick 10 kids or adults and come up with a system of learning that enables all of them to flourish. Not just some of them.

What youtube educators don't get is every time a student suffers a setback some one has to take responsibility and sit there with them till they get over the obstacle. Views and Likes don't provide that signal of how many are lost or stuck.

Books and Libraries have existed long before Edu systems or Youtubers emerged, but kids and adults can easily get lost in that jungle if they don't have a feedback loop for guidance and support system when they stumble. Design of that system can be co-opted by Commercial and Political interests. Power corrupts all systems. But then there is always a counter reaction to pull the system back. Boundaries and balance emerge. It's a long slow process.

People maybe frustrated about how long it takes for trees to grow, but whether they are interested in designing a botanical garden or a healthy forest a good sign they will fail is when frustration starts turning into resentment.

The only way to prevent that happening is to stay humble at how complex it all is. Go into the garden. Get your hands dirty. Get one plant to flourish.

> Books and Libraries have existed long before Edu systems or Youtubers emerged

From my position, I am very concerned that people no longer have access to books and libraries.

Go walk into your local university library and try to get access to a journal article. Good luck.

This is as opposed to when I was a child--I could walk into the local library, pull an actual paper periodical off the shelf and run copies off on the photcopiers--all without so much as an ID. I could get access to the microfiche and take copies as well. If I wanted, I could get a library card to any of the local libraries for free.

If I look at the current situation, I'm extremely worried that a young me of today would have no path to where old me of today sits right now.

The you of today has access to much more, via the internet and now AI.

The problem is sorting the wheat from the chaff, politically biased material, and a framework for methodically learning given the ocean of available information.

I hope we solve it.

> The you of today has access to much more, via the internet and now AI.

Adult me does. But if I were a poor child today, would I really have access to much more? I'm not convinced.

As a better recent example, I was trying to figure out how jeweler's used to historically do threads on screws for watches. I had to run down a copy of "Practical Benchwork for Horologists" and eventually had to buy it, sight unseen since the libraries I had access to couldn't cough it up.

For people in the future, apparently there has been a paperback reprint of it. Answering my question about threads: the book devotes a bunch of pages to showing how to build a power feed for your jeweler's lathe.

There is a library in every town. There are bookstores in every town. My library has a mobile app. I currently have 5 booked checked out. Bookshop online has cheap books of every kind. Every school in America has a library. Most homes contain dozens if not hundreds of books.

I’m convinced most people are not so good at transmitting what they know and they don’t get into the depths of what they are explaining. And use jargon/make assumptions that throw students off so they end up getting lost and inevitably quit.

The harsh reality is - we don’t need a zillion teachers. What we need is a high quality production team, including great teachers, who can produce high quality content that all can consume. A teachers role should shift from direct transmission to helping understanding the content.

"high quality content that all can consume" <- this, there, doesn't exist and cannot be made at least for kids under double digit ages. (even at 20yo i don't think you can make content that would reach 30% of the kids).

this is the "naive approach" and the exact problem of the current "mass education" system but simply made worse.

there is a lot of research about education and learning out there and I think we should listen to those people. The real problem though is that quality education would cost a lot of money, and not many would (want to) pay...

At the risk of sounding kind of like a fanboy, you should check out Math Academy. That thing is very good, is based on actual research, they have a book explaining their approach - https://www.justinmath.com/files/the-math-academy-way.pdf

And it is conceived for kids and they routinely seem to take smart kids and enable them to learn advanced math.

I think you are correct that individual instruction is still necessary and just passive consumption of content is not the way. But there are solution that make the system much much more efficient.

Kids know jack shit about how to learn or help others learn, and so do most adults, and no-one should expect the contrary. Having everyone flourish under a common education regime was never a goal for any education system (at least until NCLB Act).

Pedagogy is a science in itself and it got corrupted for political reasons.

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