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Comment by willis936 | Hacker News Reader

Back in your day education was not sold as a financial transaction to a prosperous life. The honor system is idyllic and requires idyllic circumstances: people who pursue education for no reason other than curiosity or self improvement. If you want the honor system back then you need to offer more stable safety nets. It's not "kids these days", it's the natural result of the systems adults have made.

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> Back in your day education was not sold as a financial transaction to a prosperous life.

Yes it was. This was the pitch for as long as Google has existed. The only relevant change from the early days of Google is that now you also need to go to a T20 school and GPA inflation has gone completely insane.

> Back in your day education was not sold as a financial transaction to a prosperous life.

Assuming the person you're talking to is still alive, this isn't true.

> The honor system is idyllic and requires idyllic circumstances: people who pursue education for no reason other than curiosity or self improvement.

This isn't true either; if your student body consists of only those people, you don't need any system at all. There is no point in even notionally punishing students who don't want anything from you.

I'm still alive, and college wasn't really sold primarily as a financial investment when I attended in the 1970s.

Even in the old times, including at medieval universities, most students weren't simply hobbyist curious gentlemen who studied it for idyllic leasure reasons, but people studied things to then get various jobs, teaching, administrative and clerical or legal work, etc.

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