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Comment by zurfer | Hacker News Reader

Zooming out you see that books, pen and paper are all technology. Like even school and language is technology.

Given that AI exist maybe we can roll back some of the school/university and just let people do the work and learn while doing?

Yes not for a 7yo but with 18 you could just work and learn what is required or what you find exciting.

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Self-directed studying doesn't scale. To produce thousands of new graduates per year you need industrial-scale methods - schools and colleges.

It does scale even better than anything else. Majority of students are just not very good at it. And proving that they have learned sufficiently is hard. Thus schools and universities.

I sense a certain contradiction? If majority of students are just not very good at self-studying methods, then they don't scale well.

Mediocre student that sits through lectures, does the homework and submits assignment on due dates will get a good level of mastery in the subject. The very same student would be totally lost relying only on self-studying - he would not even know what he doesn't know.

It is in sense contradiction. Schools and universities are greatly limited by facilities and teachers. Self studying is not. Thus with modern technology or even with just mass printin you could theoretically educate as many students as you want. In that sense I do say it scales much better.

I fully admit that for efficient time spend and production of sufficiently educated students it is not effective method.

Which is why the real answer to this is actually an older paradigm: apprenticeship.

Companies should be doing their own training for their jobs, and university can be freed up to actually be about intellectual pursuit rather than economic pursuit.

It was companies themselves who created this issue anyways, by demanding degrees for every damn job, regardless of whether a degree could prepare you in the first place, and slashing entry level jobs to almost nothing. Then they started using degrees as a proxy for work experience (and I mean that in the literal sense; "bachelor or 4 years of experience" is common to see in job reqs, despite no bachelor degree actually being equivalent to 4 years of full-time job experience), which just further pushed incoming students to expect that to be the purpose of their time at University.

That's a cost, though. And in today's world, companies rather burn millions on AI than train their own labour.

Yes, but that's not something universities can solve.

Universities predate capitalism (despite the author's absurd assertion that they were founded to serve the interests of businesses), and will exist after it, if any humans survive it.

> Companies should be doing their own training for their jobs, and university can be freed up to actually be about intellectual pursuit rather than economic pursuit.

This would be great of course, but the reason that 'what actually happens' is so different than 'what should happen' are the usual economic incentives. How can we change the financial calculations to separate formal education from job training in a way that drives the ship in the better direction.

One way could be to regulate degree requirements to only jobs that really require them like engineering, nursing, etc. Another might be allow student loan bankruptcy if certain criteria are met such such as x number of years below y income.

We (meaning the US) won't ever fix this ourselves, because we systematically refuse to hold businesses to any kind of standards.

Make it illegal to discriminate based on degree status in hiring (it's not like anyone is hiring an SWE without doing technical interviews anyways, so if you prove out their skills why does the paper matter?), and you remove both the backdoor socioeconomic discrimination route (which is itself a backdoor route to discriminate against protected attributes), and solve the degree 'inflation' incentive.

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