Comment by ludston | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ludston | Hacker News Reader

This article isn't really about AI. It's about how this blogger doesn't value high-school education beyond it serving as a day-care. Talking about AI is for dressing this up as a controversial hot-take for click-bait.

The root of the flaw in this thinking is a common assumption that school is designed to create drones for the workforce rather than to round out human beings. Giving youth an opportunity to be a part of a shared understanding and a shared culture that is rooted in the history of the previous generations.

This kind of essay is on par with a general theme of discrediting and devaluing teachers and school in English speaking countries that is reinforced by Hollywood and out of touch billionaires. It's not doing us any favours because kids pick up on this disdain and make if part of their own identities.

I'm even more convinced by this when I look at other things this person has asked GPT to write for them. Their core focus is on convincing people not to value traditional education so that they can sell their own competing product.

I'm not convinced staying in classrooms from ages 16-22 is actually conducive to a well rounded citizenry. USA must have the highest proportion of 4 year graduates in the world and look where it's got us. It's just more time to grow into your cliques and push off the real world while "preparing for the real world"

Source: John Taylor Gatto, Jonathan Kozol, Ken Robinson to some extent.

When I was in university I went on a trip to Shanghai and met a woman my age who started her career at 14, she was global head of marketing while I was still trying to pass calculus...

> USA must have the highest proportion of 4 year graduates in the world and look where it's got us

It doesn't.

> look where it's got us

Richest nation on earth. To be fair that's as much tied to population size, resources, colonial-style capitalist exploitation as it is to American Exceptionalism and a good education system. And the US is suffering from a worsening wealth redistribution problem. But that's only going to be solved with more and better education not less.

Well that and decades of being the only industrialized nation not carpet bombed in a world war we have been riding on that and being issuer the global reserve currency for decades.

more than just carpet bombing -- the nukes, the genocides, the Communist purges before (USSR) and after (Red China)

all advanced countries basically got slaughtered to varying degrees and the US saw no real systemic damage and comparatively light levels of dead.

it's like if all of NATO and the Asian Tigers collapsed today except for China -- already a dominant player they jump to superpower status

> And the US is suffering from a worsening wealth redistribution problem. But that's only going to be solved with more and better education not less.

I'd love to hear how. I'm a firm believer in education, but saying we can fix the wealth gap by just educating our kids even more is like saying we can stop deforestation if only we had even sharper axes.

The wealthiest are the luckiest, but also the best at exploiting resources like an educated work force. I can't think of a single invention of our modern day that has lessened the wealth gap. (The last one that did was probably the guillotine, and even that was a small blip on the graph.) The latest invention AI, is only accelerating the widening of the gap, just like other inventions before it. Point being, just being smarter seems to only accelerate the gap, not fix it. Unless you know of some hidden inflection point coming up.

I do think having a good understanding of our political systems, etc is obviously important. And I suppose that would fall under the umbrella of education. But if we just pumped out more doctors, each doctor just gets a smaller slice of the doctor pie. Elon isn't magically going to get less money.

Thanks for the correction, I was late night scrolling and didn't want to look it up, but looks like we're behind UAE, Ireland, Switzerland, Singapore, Belgium.

I do want to push back that higher level of education attained equates to universally better outcomes, because there's opportunity cost to being in school into your twenties, not becoming a taxpayer, getting deep into debt only to become underemployed. Again, people I've met who entered work at a young age are plenty intelligent and more skilled in their field than peers who went to grad school. I don't know that schools increase your intelligence, just your credentials.

> a general theme of discrediting and devaluing teachers and school in English speaking countries that is reinforced by Hollywood and out of touch billionaires

It's the dumbest thing for a culture to do to itself. I'm often so incredulous I want to believe it was actually done by soviet-bloc propaganda to undermine the west.

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