While I agree that doing is a great way to learn some things.
I have to point out the fallacy in the first paragraph. He cites a bunch of people who began working in their teen years who later went on to become famous, presumably because they started "doing" things so early. As a counterpoint, there are many millions of young people throughout history, and even now, who began "doing" at a young age and were nothing more than average, at best.
Dropping out of high school to go be a "doer" is a great way to become a high school dropout, not a prodigy.
These kinds of essays resonate with me but there's always something about them that seems really off and misguided at the same time.
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.
> 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 must be a balance. Without regulation bridges collapse, trains of toxic chemicals derail, and people get poisoned even just by eating and drinking. With too much regulation, innovation is stifled, usually because regulators were captured.
The US seems to have the worst of both, decades of captured regulators and people being harmed by powerful business interests. Meanwhile the public education system gets undermined constantly by a self fulfilling cycle of neglect and deverting funding to private schools.
(Of course in a polarized electorate it's risky to admit both sides have a point, and try to work toward a productive compromise. After all, we can't have our candidate in the wings lose because our opponent incumbent got a 'win'--even if it is most of what we wanted anyway.)
> The US seems to have the worst of both, decades of captured regulators and people being harmed by powerful business interests. Meanwhile the public education system gets undermined constantly by a self fulfilling cycle of neglect and deverting funding to private schools.
> (Of course in a polarized electorate [...]
Although the electorate is polarized, the two major parties do not significantly differ on support for things like regulatory capture, the revolving door between business and government, and the ability to frictionlessly convert back-and-forth between corporate money and political power.
They do differ, as Lina Kahn is proving and others before her. Sadly their efforts are too often sabotaged by Republicans who stand in the way or roll back the work.
it's not the regulations that are at issue, but people demanding irrelevant credentials.
after a few decades working as a programmer, do my highschool or university grades really still matter? yet some companies ask for them (notably canonical, they are also asking how i did in math in highschool. wat!?)
University credentials probably have more to do with proof one has grit, or social signaling. Unless it's for a specialized role that needs a certain degree.
Yup. It’s also because if they don’t list something to filter, they’ll be inundated with candidates they’ll have to spend more time and energy filtering.
It's useful here to split up these people into different categories. Terrance Tao was a prodigy and was allowed to succeed within the school system beyond what others are given access to. Zuckerberg and Gates succeeded and didn't require finishing college - not really dropping out.
Indie Gaming slant on these following examples, and I suspect that this sector is above average for this type of thing, but I suspect if I looked I could find many dropouts in other fields. On the other hand, Carmack dropped out of college, Jonathan Blow dropped out of college. Markus Persson dropped out of high school. Eric Barone never found a job despite graduating from college. All of these people are out-of-this-world fucking good, but were not at the time that they dropped out, which means according to your guide should not have gone on to create what they did.
They shouldn’t have. Not everyone needs fit an example.
Let’s take Markus: before he made Minecraft, he made relatively mediocre games that didn’t get much traction. Minecraft was an exact copy of someone else’s game (Infiniminer) that was posted on the same forum that he went to. He saw potential when its original creator did not (the creator of Infiniminer got angry that people extended his game so he shut it down). Minecraft blew up. The games that Markus made after Minecraft? Relatively mediocre again.
So what can you learn from the example of Markus? Nothing. Nothing at all. Sometimes you just get lucky.
It wasn’t a copy of Infiniminer, despite the name that game wasn’t about infinity or really mining. It was more a team fps with blocks and a bit of digging in a small arena.
While yeah his early games are very weak seeing Infiniminer‘s engines potential as a survival game and creative game rather than a team fps deserves credit.
Carmack is probably the only one who sticks out as he wasn't rich, connected or have early access.
Gates had super-early access to computers via his prep school. By the time he left high-school, he probably had more computer experience than almost all college graduates.
Markus Persson--(By 1994, Persson knew he wanted to become a video game developer, but his teachers advised him to study graphic design, which he did from ages 15 to 18. ... He never finished high school, but was reportedly a good student.) That's hardly a high school dropout. And, IIRC, studying something like graphic design in the system in Sweden is akin to an apprenticeship, no?
The ones Ive seen succeed without going to university seems all to have a chip on their shoulder and is still angry, and what I suspect worry, about it even decades later. They mention it out of the blue and seem angry thinking about it.
Seems kind of sad to me that, that is the price to pay...
I should mention that I such an experience myself with the driving licence. I did not need a driving license, because I live in a city with a great subway, but I was thinking about it. Took some mental energy on the regular. So I took it when I was around 27 years old and haven't driven our thought about it since.
Highly successful people (like waaay outside the normal distribution) needed a reason to get there.
There are far too many off-ramps to ‘comfortable’ along the way, for it to be any other way.
Anger is as good a motivator as any, I guess. What else do you propose?
Greed has a lot of history too.
Love (at least genuine love) much less often, since love for oneself has to be there first - and that is rarely going to coincide with actual high performance.
Especially when we are talking pre-20th century. Child labor was the norm outside of wealthy families. It was more remarkable not to have a job at a young age than it was to have one.
The world is full of “rules” that the best among us break. There is no progress from following exactly the path of people before you, but the world also has little capacity for people who break too many rules.
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.
>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.
This is a two way street. If you can't articulate why something is the way it is without regurgitating a talking point from it's peddlers then you're wrong too.
I wouldn't say it's a fallacy. Something can be necessary without being sufficient. Doing is necessary to learn to do, and certainly to learn to do well, but it's no guarantee of outcome.
You would expect there to be lot more people making their living in many passion fields say sports, gaming, music, art and writing... There is lot of young people there, but in the end those making reasonable living is small fraction...
> Dropping out of high school to go be a "doer" is a great way to become a high school dropout, not a prodigy.
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.
Considering how little most adults seem to remember about what was taught in high school I'm not entirely sure how much value it provides. It sends me up the wall when people can't help their kids with the excuse of "I don't know how to do that" despite having done that same thing in school. Pick up the damn book and refresh your memory then.
>Considering how little most adults seem to remember about what was taught in high school I'm not entirely sure how much value it provides.
maybe it's an elite small percentage who push society forward and improve it, and it's important that they are discovered and learn by learning and not as important what the rest do with their education.
I think society should be organized around the common (wo)man, but the common man wants the best doctor when he needs medical care, and the common woman wants the best aircraft designer to have designed any plane she flies on.
that's not to say that we should not look for better ways to educate people, perhaps we can find more doctors and plane designers, but just because 10% (or whatever) is all we get out of education doesn't make our education system a bust.
I don't remember many of the advanced algebra classes anymore and I wouldn't be able to tell you why precisely the polynomial equations of 5th and higher degree aren't solvable in radicals (has something to do with sequences of normal subgroups, eh...)
But studying advanced maths forced me to learn to think rigorously and take various minuscule details into account, and that skill is valuable.
With one exception, my favorite CS classes, by the test of which ones engaged me and changed my trajectory later in my career, had no programming. One was a sequence of classes about logic and set theory, the other distributed computing. The latter in particular has come up again and again and again as a blind spot for coworkers, many of whom did finish their degree or even a masters.
I got much more vocational coding in than the vast majority of my classmates before I dropped out, and not all of the theoretical stuff has been applicable. But what was has been invaluable.
> It's easy to distinguish the worthless degrees from the valuable ones. Google the starting salaries of each major.
Agreed.
> If a person picks a useless major, the decision is on them.
Not just them. Their parents, the school, etc. There are so many "simple" things to know. Too many for them to always be obvious, even when they "obviously" should be.
A mistake that a million young students make is a mistake worth updating the educational system to handle better.
And as an objective practical matter, it is always on society. Society systematically loses masses of individual potential by not providing more guidance when it matters. (And perversely turning education into an easy loan factory, regardless of expected income, the opposite of good guidance.)
I picked my major entirely on my own. My parents didn't advise me about it, nor did the school.
I have been known to advise young people that their intended major was akin to taking a vow of poverty, and they all insisted they were following their dream, and are now working at minimum wage jobs.
I don't have a whole lot of sympathy for students who discover after they graduate that their chosen major has no value. How do they go through 4 years of college never checking such things? Google "starting salary for history majors", for example.
At Caltech, everyone knew that ChE paid the best, and AY degrees were worthless (this was long before google). The AY majors usually did a double major - AY for fun, and the other degree for money.
I would assume that students getting into competitive schools were more informed (whether or not that resulted in a good decision).
> I don't have a whole lot of sympathy
It is a big objective problem, for the students and society. So even without feelings, some kind of incentives need to be better aligned with reality.
Limiting student loan repayment terms, with a limited percentage of student income recoverable to banks, would certainly incentivize banks not to help students get in trouble.
Telling basket weaving majors that they are welcome to do it for love, but to expect to be paying for the degree themselves up front, or with an ongoing job, represents the desired outcome, in simplified terms.
It's a lot easier today with google to be informed than in my day. All the information needed is a couple of searches away.
In any case, and I know this isn't a popular thing to say, but when you're 18 it's time to take responsibility for your choices, and time to stop saying your choices are other peoples' fault.
Society (and parents) still should have some responsibility on educating young people about career prospects of different degrees. Too many in older generations think any degree will land their children a job, and thus encourage them to study whatever they like.
I think school system is hugely failing students if they are not instructed and then capable of spending one or two afternoons on simply googling and looking at career prospects and what different jobs actually might entail. And then at least with minimal criticality thinking is that for them.
I am pretty sure there is no careers you cannot find some information on with rather simple searches.
This belief that "a degree, any degree" is sufficient must have started after I went to University (mid-90s), because when I was a teenager, it was drilled into us that we need to not only go to University, but we need to major in something lucrative. Nobody, from parents to guidance counsellors, was saying "Oh, just go to college and major in anything, it doesn't matter!"
As I mentioned before, there are no jobs for AY majors, even from Caltech. I don't suggest abolishing it. There were many AY majoring students, and they had open eyes about it. There wasn't any whining about it.
We have already dumbed college down so much to make it accessible to so many. The last thing we need to do is dumb it down further so that everybody can go. 17 years of education isn't really any better than 13. The only reason a college degree was ever worth anything was because it was taught at a high level that most people would never be able to pass.
Which ones? I know a few countries with those qualities, some of them filter out the bad students really early on or into another stream of education (typically slower, lower quality), as in before you're 9, not 20.
Cheap studies don't turn students into mindless debauchery-loving zombies, but they also put a pretty hard cap on the professors' salaries. As long as your school is really a not-for-profit organization, salaries will be mediocre.
Elite American universities can attract top scientific talent from overseas with good salaries and very well equipped labs, because they have the money. This, in turn, attracts foreign students.
It's just human nature, and human nature is the same everywhere.
I know a German who spent over 20 years in the German university system, taking advantage of every free program so she wouldn't have to get a job.
For a well known trope, the spawn of first generation wealthy people tend to dissipate that wealth. They didn't work for it, and so they don't value it. It's why people look down on nepotism. Things not earned are not valued.
And I know an American who spent years trying to get through a degree program that he never ended up completing because he was too burned out having to work multiple jobs to live at the same time. Just like I know plenty of Swedes who have and continue to study, developing their knowledge and curiosity for free while being enthusiastically productive members of society. We all have anecdotes.
Many educators have pointed out that cuts in government funding for higher education in the US now mean that the student is the paying customer and, as they say, "the customer is always right". Institutions have financial motivations to overlook students' incompetence, cheating, and other misbehavior as long as they keep paying tuition fees.
My dad (career military) told me that army boots lasted 3 times longer when the GIs bought them out of their uniform allowance (and could keep unspent funds), rather than being issued boots. He always laughed about that.
When I was old enough to do work, he'd have me buy my own shoes :-)
>>Dropping out of high school to go be a "doer" is a great way to become a high school dropout, not a prodigy.
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.
The author hits on a powerful point that is getting missed in this HN discussion. That is: talented and driven students are limited by the US education system.
Some of those young people cultivate skill by getting practice during youth. Doing that while young builds a compounding machine of personal interest + confidence + progress.
I have never seen broad data to support this, so discussions revolve around anecdotes[1]. That's fine by me though because we have countless examples of the legends of their craft who fit that mold: bill gates, zuck, warren buffett, taylor swift, mozart, da vinci... the list is long.
No single system will work for every single student. But that isn't the point. The point is that the best of the best deserve to feed their interests at a young age, which the current US upbringing limits. How many more bill gates and zuck-level creators could the world have if more talented youths could cultivate their talents very early in life?
Well, just look at the design. State education is designed to get ~97% of pupils to some minimum education level.
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.
While I really want to agree with you because I spent 10 years of my education with people who were exactly the bottom 20% which was beyond frustrating, unfortunately the resources are limited, so if you try to create a society where the top 10% has all the opportunities to develop to their full potential, you'll end up leaving behind the other 90%, which will make average voter even less informed about the world around them.
Holding back capable people from reaching their potential is a unique kind of evil to me.
It's not even about giving them more resources, but the taking away that infuriates me. The single most valuable thing a child can have is curiosity, the second most is their time. Anyone who takes away one or the other are fundamentally an enemy to me.
Forcing kids who have great potential to go at the pace of the worst is taking away both of those things at the same time. These kids don't need much babysitting, they are also completely able to learn from anything. They do not need a live instructor, that's for sure.
this assumes that the point of school is to maximize student learning. i think it's better to look at it as free daycare so that adults can work. the whole system makes more sense in that context
With a competent tutor, material and emotional support you don't need to cultivate talents, you simply create complex skills. You typically don't search so much for a hidden talent in a child as leverage their neuroplasticity and accelerated learning to lay a life-long foundation.
But this doesn't come cheap, and tutoring is also going a bit out of style, regrettably.
I’m confused as to how this argues that precocious kids’ situation today is different from the past. Is the idea that the situations of self-made tycoons past—telegraph operator supporting his family by age 16, and so on—were somehow typical of youth in those days?
Isn’t the more apt comparison between “pointless” schoolwork today and the “pointless” menial labor that would characterize more typical adolescences in early industrial times?
For that matter, between interest groups and national contests and wholesome YouTube role models aand makerspaces and even open-source, where kids can ease their way into meaningful contributions—all against a backdrop of world-historical material security—isn’t it an even larger handful of exceptional kids today with the means to break out and “do” than in the past?
Why should we look to the experiences of the exceptional few to understand what works best for kids on average?
> I’m confused as to how this argues that precocious kids’ situation today is different from the past.
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."
> "Imagine if Carnegie and Da Vinci were instead compelled to stay in school for 10 more years. What would have happened?"
Impossible to predict accurately, since so much of opportunity is luck. Maybe they would have made better connections in school. Maybe they would not have. Maybe they would have made the exact same connections.
It's possible to make a statistical argument that since they got such ridiculously unlikely opportunities, any deviation from the path they took would have been bad for them. But then you're no longer arguing about the value of education, you're just making observations about a pair of lucky people. And that's not compelling at all, when you don't address the entire outcome distribution for people making the exact same choices.
This article heavily relies on the assumption that schools do not allow for other learning modalities than passively consuming information, which is false.
Forcing someone to sit in school all day and then do homework after that renders the fact that they are technically also allowed to learn on their own in their remaining free time pretty much irrelevant.
School is not a place for being creative or productive. It prepares students for tests that they will eventually use to either get a job or go to university. In those places some people will make something people want (be productive) or have the opportunity to do something new (be creative).
This sounds like a dismissal based on a personal anecdote, rather than knowledge of what can be (and increasingly is!) done in a school. Many working in education have encouraged more interactive and project-based learning, such as PLTW[1] in STEM, and others[2] in other areas. Of course, it turns out that designing that while also teaching 6-8 classes a day to a couple hundred students is rather challenging.
I wouldn't disagree that school isn't a place for being productive, if productivity is defined as "making something people want." By that definition all learning is unproductive.
[2] For maths, reference the works of Jo Boaler, Peter Liljedahl, etc.; most standards I have seen in social studies in recent years have inquiry as a key component, and I know several teachers who make use of projects there; there is often agency in choosing projects in art, particularly in upper grades; and so on.
There is a point he's not making that's important here: the ability to learn and absorb knowledge peaks when people are young. What you do around that time matters. If you waste your time, you never get it back later.
The modern education system emerged as part of the industrial revolution. It's purpose was not to produce enlightened individuals but to produce productive/obedient laborers. People needed to know how to read/write and do simple calculations. Maybe a bit of math on the side. And there had to be some kind of system to rescue the really smart boys (mostly at the time) from being wasted on blue collar work and get them on some track to higher education. But mostly universities were for the upper class. You were born into that, not cherry picked from the lower classes. Education was about getting lower class kids up-to a lowish standard so they could be productive. And modern education hasn't really improved that much.
We have an opportunity to rethink education. Like many, I had lots of different teachers in high school and in university. Some really amazing, some not that great. Being a high school teacher is a tough job. It's a very rigid program that is sort of standardized for everyone. Mostly there isn't a lot of wiggle room to go beyond that. Lots of kids have trouble dealing with that and they kind of drop out or fail.
The opportunity with AI is that education can be much more personalized now. Anybody can get access to that. For free even. Education no longer has to be a group thing where everybody does the same things, gets the same tests, and then get the OK stamp of approval to be unleashed on an indifferent job market. Lots of people just coast through high school so they can finally start their lives not realizing that they just burned up their most important quarter of it.
I love Neal Stephenson's the The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer which is about a poor young orphaned girl getting her hands on an AI powered book that starts teaching her and adapts to her context. That's slowly becoming science fact with modern LLMs.
> There is a point he's not making that's important here: the ability to learn and absorb knowledge peaks when people are young.
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.
You no longer have to learn anything, you can just ask.
I feel there are also a lot of urban myths about learning and the human brain out there. You hear it all the time everywhere: I’m too old to learn this language/instrument/skill now.
There are the things you can ask about, and there are things you have to do.
You cannot just ask how to build or cook or paint or weld something. AI cannot help with this (certainly not yet) beyond the sort of information that the internet (and youtube in particular) is already providing.
Don’t throw the babies with the bath water, education as a group thing is good as long as all in the group are at the similar level, it becomes even efficient when students stimulate one another. Also being part of the group students learn more about interacting in groups. Then problem is that these groups are mostly made up of students at different levels, abilities and so on.
> Education no longer has to be a group thing where everybody does the same things
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.
It doesn't have to be self directed but it can still be individualized. One on one teaching is the goto solution for the rich and wealthy. With AI that can be extended to everyone.
Schools don't really adapt to the individual currently. It works for the average student but there are lots of students that don't do well with that. And it doesn't really get the best out of people.
Introducing AI into education will be non trivial. This is difficulty is observable already in my experience.
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.
In reflecting on the history of formal education, it's necessry to separate the Oxbride tradition of grooming future aristocrats and nobles from the rise of compulsory public education at the end of the 19th century, which is a responds to a variety of challenges raised by both industrialization and modern cities.
For a retrospective review of that history, with extensive citations, Ivan Illich's Deschooling Society can get you started on your own research. His book is fundamentally polemical because he was invested in his opinions about the past, the present, and the future, but the bibliography and citations prove useful for this topic even if you don't buy his summary perspective.
There are of course many other primary and secondary treatments contemporary to the time, that you can review without reading through Illich's polemics, some of which are very easy to find in the Harper's Magazine archives.
What you'll find, broadly, os that there was very little said of the idealism we now attribute to enlightment and almost all of the dialog about modern public education, especially compulsory -- by both proponets and critics -- was quite practical, focused on what schooling and education would acheive (or sacrifice) for industry, social cohesion, cultural diversity/uniformity, crime, child welfare, political alignment, and national identity.
IOW, "I've never seen any evidence" is understandable (we each only have so much time to study), but it's not for some lack of that evidence.
I didn't drop out, because I was wildly successful.
Exactly the opposite, in fact.
The process of climbing out of the wreckage is what helped me to become [moderately] successful.
I doubt anyone here, would be impressed by my career path, but I'm happier than I ever thought that I could be, now.
I think the apprenticeship model is really the best way to learn in a practical manner.
But that involves things like staying with employers for more than a year, and also, employers treating their employees in a way that makes them want to stay.
It also works with unions, because they have a whole infrastructure, wrapped around it.
Trivially untrue. Inability to learn except by doing is a defect, which renders you extremely vulnerable to critical errors - you won't be able to learn about these errors since making them (which you find you need to do in order to learn) is fatal.
That doesn't make learning by doing a bad idea, or even necessarily a poor first choice, but if it's the only way for you to learn that's a problem.
I don't think they were suggesting that at all. It is not an on/off feature flag, people learn in different ways. People learn in different measures of many ways, even in the one person.
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.
So your claim is that one can learn how to do something simply by being told, and not doing any practice problems, thought exercises, reviewing solutions, etc?
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".
Saying that a whole style of learning for neurodivergent folks like Temple Grandin is kinda misguided. They don't need to learn by doing by everything, and I'm sure you knew that.
It's even more nuanced than that, there's the type of task, the person's learning style, the makeup of the specific task, the manner of feedback from performing it, whether there's flexibility in performing it quickly or slowly. Only chronic take-havers and bloggers will reduce it to one or two variables.
Based on my several decades of life experience, I would say the point is there’s hardly anything useful that you can learn without doing. And there are many things that you can’t do without leaving the traditional classroom environment. That’s why schools have chem labs, wood shops, kitchens, orchestras…oh wait, do they have those anymore?
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.
- All of us are more naturally talented at some things.
- When you end up working with your natural talents, you have it easier than everyone else.
- Working in your talents often translates to passion, and that’s how you get the so called “agency.”
- To find your talents, you have to try everything once (e.g. wakeboarding, tennis, programming, accounting).
- More well off parents can offer their kids more opportunities to find their talents.
- Schooling and “doing” are orthogonal to finding your talents. Neither learning or doing will tell you your talents, passion, or give you agency, but you should do them both anyway.
Not sure if I agree with this. Obviously if you have a natural talent for something, it’s easier to be good at it. Most people though can be very good, great even, at something they simply decide to practice. Most people don’t “actively” practice though, even if they are “doing” something. Purposeful practice is very different from doing.
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.)
> 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.
For me it was the noise. Also, being in a UK 'comprehensive' (state school) meant mixing with people from families with varying work ethics and it pained me trying to understand why other kids motivations, even other adults' motivations, were often very different to mine and what I had been brought up with at home.
I think my extraversion is probably a factor. Personality differences almost certainly mean that different environments will better suit different people!
Fwiw, I went to a state school as well (in the US). But by the time I was at the university, I already had a two-year degree, and all of my general education requirements were already fulfilled. So my first few years in college had the benefits of very small class sizes and a genuinely diverse student body (i.e., students of all ages from high school students doing dual-enrollment to retirees pursuing 'continuing education', students who were parents, students who were military veterans, students who had had already had careers in trades, students who were working full time, etc.), plus they were (mostly! some of the science and math classes were genuinely demanding, being taught either by passionate teachers or for supplemental income by university instructors who didn't want to bore themselves create extra work by dumbing down their curricula) easy enough that I had a ton of free time.
And then the last few years of it were comprised entirely of upper-division electives, except for a couple of major-specific requirements that the university refused to transfer from the community college. It was still a lot of classes, since I ended up doing a double degree (and part of an accelerated masters program that I ditched come graduation time), but basically all of those classes were (a) in my specialties of interest and (b) my choice. Those class sizes were mostly pretty small too, though some of my computer science classes were still huge (100+ students).
I've myself had work habits that were/are largely mysterious to me. But at any rate, by the time I got (back) to the university, my classes were all advanced enough that the vast majority of students in them were committed to their subjects (or else they were experienced enough to know they should drop the uninteresting class in the first week and take something better for them instead).
Not sure about you, but in class I was forced to study an enormous amount of stuff I didn't care about, so I needed to memorize and pass the test, that's it.
Wasted time.
Yeah the class composition probably matters, I wish a universe where what you described make sense.
I'm not sure the title captures the essence of a school, at least for STEM subject. For instance, why is doing maths in schools not "doing"? We solved the same math problems that the real mathematicians had to solve hundreds of years ago, no? The way we tested the Avogadro constant was not that different from a real chemist did a hundred years ago, no? We didn't do the modern ones mostly because the students had not the advanced prereq yet. I think it's more accurate to categorize what we do in school as controlled doing. Yes, we abstract every object as a point mass or a rigid body when learning Newton Mechanics, but that's only because the real-world is too complex for a high-schooler to handle. Yes, we implemented only a single-threaded SkipList using standard C library when taking the first course on algorithms, but that's only because most of the students wouldn't have enough knowledge to go beyond that.
"For a simple example, a better home craft than lemonade might be a pastry, taken seriously. Not sugar cookies or muffins, but the kind of thing that is plain for a 13-year-old to understand, harder for him to make, and very difficult to master. If a child committed to a batch a day, documenting progress, perhaps in time he would have something worth selling."
1. is lemonade a home craft?
2. who is forcing their children to bake sourdough croissants?
3. is craft baker really the career path of the future?
There's a fundamental reason why doing, and learning from doing, is necessary to learn (to do), and can't be replaced with book learning.
Maybe stated like this it sounds obvious, but it runs counter to people expecting LLMs to learn to do things for themselves by "book learning" (pre-training), unless regurgitating artifacts from the training set is all you need.
The issue is that intelligence and action are prediction (with motor cortex output predictions driving muscles and becoming action - a useful insight/framing from Jeff Hawkins)... In order to act well, you need to learn to predict/react well, but these predictions need to be based on your OWN state per the sensory inputs you are receiving. Learning to predict what someone else would do (being book smart) doesn't help when you're the actor, where the predictions need to be based on your own internal state.
School is not enough, learning by doing is not enough... The sweet spot lies as always in the middle. Certain things can only be learnt by doing, some things are learnt x100 faster if you learn the theory first.
The most valuable thing is learning when to apply each type of learning, and the best way to learn that is with different kind of mentors. I guess the well known people that he lists as examples had a lot of those. For me that is the differentiator.
I think the title doesn't go far enough, as it removes the "sufficient" part but leaves alone the "necessary" part.
School is neither necessary nor sufficient for achievement. Certainly education, in some form, must be required. E.g. learning to read and perform basic math, but "school" as it's known today is not the only way, nor likely even a good way, to learn those skills.
Does this mean I shouldn't worry about my 11 year old son and his fixation on video games right now? It looks like you either figure out when you are 12 or 13 or you don't. That's the moment parents should be watching carefully.
It's so hard. My passion for videogames funnelled my passion for programming, which eventually became stronger, but there is no doubt I played too much videogames at that age (damn mmorpgs)
While I agree that doing is a great way to learn some things.
I have to point out the fallacy in the first paragraph. He cites a bunch of people who began working in their teen years who later went on to become famous, presumably because they started "doing" things so early. As a counterpoint, there are many millions of young people throughout history, and even now, who began "doing" at a young age and were nothing more than average, at best.
Dropping out of high school to go be a "doer" is a great way to become a high school dropout, not a prodigy.
These kinds of essays resonate with me but there's always something about them that seems really off and misguided at the same time.
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.
> 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 must be a balance. Without regulation bridges collapse, trains of toxic chemicals derail, and people get poisoned even just by eating and drinking. With too much regulation, innovation is stifled, usually because regulators were captured.
The US seems to have the worst of both, decades of captured regulators and people being harmed by powerful business interests. Meanwhile the public education system gets undermined constantly by a self fulfilling cycle of neglect and deverting funding to private schools.
(Of course in a polarized electorate it's risky to admit both sides have a point, and try to work toward a productive compromise. After all, we can't have our candidate in the wings lose because our opponent incumbent got a 'win'--even if it is most of what we wanted anyway.)
> The US seems to have the worst of both, decades of captured regulators and people being harmed by powerful business interests. Meanwhile the public education system gets undermined constantly by a self fulfilling cycle of neglect and deverting funding to private schools.
> (Of course in a polarized electorate [...]
Although the electorate is polarized, the two major parties do not significantly differ on support for things like regulatory capture, the revolving door between business and government, and the ability to frictionlessly convert back-and-forth between corporate money and political power.
They do differ, as Lina Kahn is proving and others before her. Sadly their efforts are too often sabotaged by Republicans who stand in the way or roll back the work.
it's not the regulations that are at issue, but people demanding irrelevant credentials.
after a few decades working as a programmer, do my highschool or university grades really still matter? yet some companies ask for them (notably canonical, they are also asking how i did in math in highschool. wat!?)
It can be both.
University credentials probably have more to do with proof one has grit, or social signaling. Unless it's for a specialized role that needs a certain degree.
Yup. It’s also because if they don’t list something to filter, they’ll be inundated with candidates they’ll have to spend more time and energy filtering.
The people I’ve seen drop out of something and succeed are like out-of-this-world fucking good. I think if you have to ask, you shouldn’t.
It's useful here to split up these people into different categories. Terrance Tao was a prodigy and was allowed to succeed within the school system beyond what others are given access to. Zuckerberg and Gates succeeded and didn't require finishing college - not really dropping out.
Indie Gaming slant on these following examples, and I suspect that this sector is above average for this type of thing, but I suspect if I looked I could find many dropouts in other fields. On the other hand, Carmack dropped out of college, Jonathan Blow dropped out of college. Markus Persson dropped out of high school. Eric Barone never found a job despite graduating from college. All of these people are out-of-this-world fucking good, but were not at the time that they dropped out, which means according to your guide should not have gone on to create what they did.
They shouldn’t have. Not everyone needs fit an example.
Let’s take Markus: before he made Minecraft, he made relatively mediocre games that didn’t get much traction. Minecraft was an exact copy of someone else’s game (Infiniminer) that was posted on the same forum that he went to. He saw potential when its original creator did not (the creator of Infiniminer got angry that people extended his game so he shut it down). Minecraft blew up. The games that Markus made after Minecraft? Relatively mediocre again.
So what can you learn from the example of Markus? Nothing. Nothing at all. Sometimes you just get lucky.
sometimes you do just get lucky. but you can only get lucky if you're actually doing stuff (not just learning about it)
If I do X I will get lucky != Lucky people can do X and win.
Simply put the act of doing something doesn't make you lucky. However if you are lucky already, you can do most things and win.
It wasn’t a copy of Infiniminer, despite the name that game wasn’t about infinity or really mining. It was more a team fps with blocks and a bit of digging in a small arena.
While yeah his early games are very weak seeing Infiniminer‘s engines potential as a survival game and creative game rather than a team fps deserves credit.
Carmack is probably the only one who sticks out as he wasn't rich, connected or have early access.
Gates had super-early access to computers via his prep school. By the time he left high-school, he probably had more computer experience than almost all college graduates.
Jonathan Blow spent almost 5 years at Berkeley and hooked up with the Tcl guys (Adam Sah sticks out). That's practially a graduate degree. see: http://number-none.com/blow/papers/rush_tcl94.pdf
Markus Persson--(By 1994, Persson knew he wanted to become a video game developer, but his teachers advised him to study graphic design, which he did from ages 15 to 18. ... He never finished high school, but was reportedly a good student.) That's hardly a high school dropout. And, IIRC, studying something like graphic design in the system in Sweden is akin to an apprenticeship, no?
>The people I’ve seen drop out of something and succeed are like out-of-this-world fucking good.
And frequently from connected and/or rich families. That can be very useful in success, it turns out.
The ones Ive seen succeed without going to university seems all to have a chip on their shoulder and is still angry, and what I suspect worry, about it even decades later. They mention it out of the blue and seem angry thinking about it.
Seems kind of sad to me that, that is the price to pay...
I should mention that I such an experience myself with the driving licence. I did not need a driving license, because I live in a city with a great subway, but I was thinking about it. Took some mental energy on the regular. So I took it when I was around 27 years old and haven't driven our thought about it since.
Anyone else with similar experience?
Highly successful people (like waaay outside the normal distribution) needed a reason to get there.
There are far too many off-ramps to ‘comfortable’ along the way, for it to be any other way.
Anger is as good a motivator as any, I guess. What else do you propose?
Greed has a lot of history too.
Love (at least genuine love) much less often, since love for oneself has to be there first - and that is rarely going to coincide with actual high performance.
Especially when we are talking pre-20th century. Child labor was the norm outside of wealthy families. It was more remarkable not to have a job at a young age than it was to have one.
The world is full of “rules” that the best among us break. There is no progress from following exactly the path of people before you, but the world also has little capacity for people who break too many rules.
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.
>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.
This is a two way street. If you can't articulate why something is the way it is without regurgitating a talking point from it's peddlers then you're wrong too.
I wouldn't say it's a fallacy. Something can be necessary without being sufficient. Doing is necessary to learn to do, and certainly to learn to do well, but it's no guarantee of outcome.
I should have stated explicitly that the fallacy was selection bias. I agree with what you wrote though.
You would expect there to be lot more people making their living in many passion fields say sports, gaming, music, art and writing... There is lot of young people there, but in the end those making reasonable living is small fraction...
> Dropping out of high school to go be a "doer" is a great way to become a high school dropout, not a prodigy.
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.
Could it be that education actually has value sometimes?
Considering how little most adults seem to remember about what was taught in high school I'm not entirely sure how much value it provides. It sends me up the wall when people can't help their kids with the excuse of "I don't know how to do that" despite having done that same thing in school. Pick up the damn book and refresh your memory then.
>Considering how little most adults seem to remember about what was taught in high school I'm not entirely sure how much value it provides.
maybe it's an elite small percentage who push society forward and improve it, and it's important that they are discovered and learn by learning and not as important what the rest do with their education.
I think society should be organized around the common (wo)man, but the common man wants the best doctor when he needs medical care, and the common woman wants the best aircraft designer to have designed any plane she flies on.
that's not to say that we should not look for better ways to educate people, perhaps we can find more doctors and plane designers, but just because 10% (or whatever) is all we get out of education doesn't make our education system a bust.
You barely remember anything from your toddler years, but they were some of the most impactful in your education.
Having had to get back into electricity recently, sure I didn’t remember a thing, but it came back much faster than the first time.
I remember what I learned. I know how to walk, talk, and use a toilet.
I don't remember many of the advanced algebra classes anymore and I wouldn't be able to tell you why precisely the polynomial equations of 5th and higher degree aren't solvable in radicals (has something to do with sequences of normal subgroups, eh...)
But studying advanced maths forced me to learn to think rigorously and take various minuscule details into account, and that skill is valuable.
With one exception, my favorite CS classes, by the test of which ones engaged me and changed my trajectory later in my career, had no programming. One was a sequence of classes about logic and set theory, the other distributed computing. The latter in particular has come up again and again and again as a blind spot for coworkers, many of whom did finish their degree or even a masters.
I got much more vocational coding in than the vast majority of my classmates before I dropped out, and not all of the theoretical stuff has been applicable. But what was has been invaluable.
No.
That is because regular, and failing(even fatal failure) often is just how nearly everyones life works.
You win by first learning where you are going to die, and not going there.
Most college dropouts fail. You are better off finishing school.
And staying in school through college is a great way to be in debt for the rest of your life and regret having a useless degree.
It's easy to distinguish the worthless degrees from the valuable ones. Google the starting salaries of each major.
If a person picks a useless major, the decision is on them.
> It's easy to distinguish the worthless degrees from the valuable ones. Google the starting salaries of each major.
Agreed.
> If a person picks a useless major, the decision is on them.
Not just them. Their parents, the school, etc. There are so many "simple" things to know. Too many for them to always be obvious, even when they "obviously" should be.
A mistake that a million young students make is a mistake worth updating the educational system to handle better.
And as an objective practical matter, it is always on society. Society systematically loses masses of individual potential by not providing more guidance when it matters. (And perversely turning education into an easy loan factory, regardless of expected income, the opposite of good guidance.)
I picked my major entirely on my own. My parents didn't advise me about it, nor did the school.
I have been known to advise young people that their intended major was akin to taking a vow of poverty, and they all insisted they were following their dream, and are now working at minimum wage jobs.
I don't have a whole lot of sympathy for students who discover after they graduate that their chosen major has no value. How do they go through 4 years of college never checking such things? Google "starting salary for history majors", for example.
At Caltech, everyone knew that ChE paid the best, and AY degrees were worthless (this was long before google). The AY majors usually did a double major - AY for fun, and the other degree for money.
I would assume that students getting into competitive schools were more informed (whether or not that resulted in a good decision).
> I don't have a whole lot of sympathy
It is a big objective problem, for the students and society. So even without feelings, some kind of incentives need to be better aligned with reality.
Limiting student loan repayment terms, with a limited percentage of student income recoverable to banks, would certainly incentivize banks not to help students get in trouble.
Telling basket weaving majors that they are welcome to do it for love, but to expect to be paying for the degree themselves up front, or with an ongoing job, represents the desired outcome, in simplified terms.
It's a lot easier today with google to be informed than in my day. All the information needed is a couple of searches away.
In any case, and I know this isn't a popular thing to say, but when you're 18 it's time to take responsibility for your choices, and time to stop saying your choices are other peoples' fault.
Society (and parents) still should have some responsibility on educating young people about career prospects of different degrees. Too many in older generations think any degree will land their children a job, and thus encourage them to study whatever they like.
I think school system is hugely failing students if they are not instructed and then capable of spending one or two afternoons on simply googling and looking at career prospects and what different jobs actually might entail. And then at least with minimal criticality thinking is that for them.
I am pretty sure there is no careers you cannot find some information on with rather simple searches.
This belief that "a degree, any degree" is sufficient must have started after I went to University (mid-90s), because when I was a teenager, it was drilled into us that we need to not only go to University, but we need to major in something lucrative. Nobody, from parents to guidance counsellors, was saying "Oh, just go to college and major in anything, it doesn't matter!"
The younger generation that grew up with Google never think to google "starting salary for [my] major"? They need to be coached to do it?
Try it. Gott im Himmel!
So which undergrad majors do you propose Caltech abolishes? I can think of a couple with awful starting salaries.
As I mentioned before, there are no jobs for AY majors, even from Caltech. I don't suggest abolishing it. There were many AY majoring students, and they had open eyes about it. There wasn't any whining about it.
I think putting chemistry and biology in that box might be a little much too
So true.. we need to make college ultra low cost, accessible to all, AND useful
We have already dumbed college down so much to make it accessible to so many. The last thing we need to do is dumb it down further so that everybody can go. 17 years of education isn't really any better than 13. The only reason a college degree was ever worth anything was because it was taught at a high level that most people would never be able to pass.
Ultra low cost means colleges will get filled with students who are more interested in partying than learning.
When it costs one money, one is going to be motivated to get the value out of it. I.e. people do not value things they get for free.
There's large parts of the world where college and university have zero tuition fees and still doesn't turn into ceaseless roman orgies.
Which ones? I know a few countries with those qualities, some of them filter out the bad students really early on or into another stream of education (typically slower, lower quality), as in before you're 9, not 20.
One then wonders why so many foreign students come to American universities and pay high tuitions when there are better free ones at home.
Cheap studies don't turn students into mindless debauchery-loving zombies, but they also put a pretty hard cap on the professors' salaries. As long as your school is really a not-for-profit organization, salaries will be mediocre.
Elite American universities can attract top scientific talent from overseas with good salaries and very well equipped labs, because they have the money. This, in turn, attracts foreign students.
Are students less motivated or disciplined in the US than other parts of the developed world where higher education is free/compensated?
It's just human nature, and human nature is the same everywhere.
I know a German who spent over 20 years in the German university system, taking advantage of every free program so she wouldn't have to get a job.
For a well known trope, the spawn of first generation wealthy people tend to dissipate that wealth. They didn't work for it, and so they don't value it. It's why people look down on nepotism. Things not earned are not valued.
And I know an American who spent years trying to get through a degree program that he never ended up completing because he was too burned out having to work multiple jobs to live at the same time. Just like I know plenty of Swedes who have and continue to study, developing their knowledge and curiosity for free while being enthusiastically productive members of society. We all have anecdotes.
Many educators have pointed out that cuts in government funding for higher education in the US now mean that the student is the paying customer and, as they say, "the customer is always right". Institutions have financial motivations to overlook students' incompetence, cheating, and other misbehavior as long as they keep paying tuition fees.
I bet those students with free rides (and free loans) would do better in college if they were required to hold down a job to pay for some of that.
I know I became more diligent with my studies when I started writing tuition checks out of my earnings.
When my parents couldn't help with college payments, I did worse because of stress and divided attention
Helping you implies you were also contributing to the payments.
Money is not the only way to weed out underachieving students, or to motivate the good ones.
It’s not a theoretic point either, plenty of universities do it right now.
I never said it was the only way.
But it is effective.
My dad (career military) told me that army boots lasted 3 times longer when the GIs bought them out of their uniform allowance (and could keep unspent funds), rather than being issued boots. He always laughed about that.
When I was old enough to do work, he'd have me buy my own shoes :-)
>>Dropping out of high school to go be a "doer" is a great way to become a high school dropout, not a prodigy.
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.
The author hits on a powerful point that is getting missed in this HN discussion. That is: talented and driven students are limited by the US education system.
Some of those young people cultivate skill by getting practice during youth. Doing that while young builds a compounding machine of personal interest + confidence + progress.
I have never seen broad data to support this, so discussions revolve around anecdotes[1]. That's fine by me though because we have countless examples of the legends of their craft who fit that mold: bill gates, zuck, warren buffett, taylor swift, mozart, da vinci... the list is long.
No single system will work for every single student. But that isn't the point. The point is that the best of the best deserve to feed their interests at a young age, which the current US upbringing limits. How many more bill gates and zuck-level creators could the world have if more talented youths could cultivate their talents very early in life?
[1] Although not broad data, the thinking behind these works build on a similar point: Thiel Fellowship [https://thielfellowship.org/]; PG's essay How to Do Great Work [https://paulgraham.com/greatwork.html]
Well, just look at the design. State education is designed to get ~97% of pupils to some minimum education level.
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.
While I really want to agree with you because I spent 10 years of my education with people who were exactly the bottom 20% which was beyond frustrating, unfortunately the resources are limited, so if you try to create a society where the top 10% has all the opportunities to develop to their full potential, you'll end up leaving behind the other 90%, which will make average voter even less informed about the world around them.
Hard to imagine what less informed would be compared to the current ignorance.
Holding back capable people from reaching their potential is a unique kind of evil to me.
It's not even about giving them more resources, but the taking away that infuriates me. The single most valuable thing a child can have is curiosity, the second most is their time. Anyone who takes away one or the other are fundamentally an enemy to me.
Forcing kids who have great potential to go at the pace of the worst is taking away both of those things at the same time. These kids don't need much babysitting, they are also completely able to learn from anything. They do not need a live instructor, that's for sure.
this assumes that the point of school is to maximize student learning. i think it's better to look at it as free daycare so that adults can work. the whole system makes more sense in that context
With a competent tutor, material and emotional support you don't need to cultivate talents, you simply create complex skills. You typically don't search so much for a hidden talent in a child as leverage their neuroplasticity and accelerated learning to lay a life-long foundation.
But this doesn't come cheap, and tutoring is also going a bit out of style, regrettably.
Well I wouldn’t mind a few less Zucks and a few more e.g. Doudna.
I’m confused as to how this argues that precocious kids’ situation today is different from the past. Is the idea that the situations of self-made tycoons past—telegraph operator supporting his family by age 16, and so on—were somehow typical of youth in those days?
Isn’t the more apt comparison between “pointless” schoolwork today and the “pointless” menial labor that would characterize more typical adolescences in early industrial times?
For that matter, between interest groups and national contests and wholesome YouTube role models aand makerspaces and even open-source, where kids can ease their way into meaningful contributions—all against a backdrop of world-historical material security—isn’t it an even larger handful of exceptional kids today with the means to break out and “do” than in the past?
Why should we look to the experiences of the exceptional few to understand what works best for kids on average?
> I’m confused as to how this argues that precocious kids’ situation today is different from the past.
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."
> This would be unsurprising in Carnegie’s time, was certainly surprising for 1968, and is culturally verboten today.
A telephone was only accessible to businesses and the wealthy during Carnegie’s time, so no surprised there.
A better analogy would be a postal letter.
> "Imagine if Carnegie and Da Vinci were instead compelled to stay in school for 10 more years. What would have happened?"
Impossible to predict accurately, since so much of opportunity is luck. Maybe they would have made better connections in school. Maybe they would not have. Maybe they would have made the exact same connections.
It's possible to make a statistical argument that since they got such ridiculously unlikely opportunities, any deviation from the path they took would have been bad for them. But then you're no longer arguing about the value of education, you're just making observations about a pair of lucky people. And that's not compelling at all, when you don't address the entire outcome distribution for people making the exact same choices.
It's not that school causes success. It's that school is a decent way to learn. It's not the best, by any means, but it beats not learning at all.
If you drop out of school, do it because you've found a better way to learn.
If you stop learning, whether in our out of school, that is the path to failure.
This article heavily relies on the assumption that schools do not allow for other learning modalities than passively consuming information, which is false.
Why it is false?
Not everyone has access to preparatory STEM schools
Forcing someone to sit in school all day and then do homework after that renders the fact that they are technically also allowed to learn on their own in their remaining free time pretty much irrelevant.
School is not a place for being creative or productive. It prepares students for tests that they will eventually use to either get a job or go to university. In those places some people will make something people want (be productive) or have the opportunity to do something new (be creative).
This sounds like a dismissal based on a personal anecdote, rather than knowledge of what can be (and increasingly is!) done in a school. Many working in education have encouraged more interactive and project-based learning, such as PLTW[1] in STEM, and others[2] in other areas. Of course, it turns out that designing that while also teaching 6-8 classes a day to a couple hundred students is rather challenging.
I wouldn't disagree that school isn't a place for being productive, if productivity is defined as "making something people want." By that definition all learning is unproductive.
[1] https://www.pltw.org/
[2] For maths, reference the works of Jo Boaler, Peter Liljedahl, etc.; most standards I have seen in social studies in recent years have inquiry as a key component, and I know several teachers who make use of projects there; there is often agency in choosing projects in art, particularly in upper grades; and so on.
There is a point he's not making that's important here: the ability to learn and absorb knowledge peaks when people are young. What you do around that time matters. If you waste your time, you never get it back later.
The modern education system emerged as part of the industrial revolution. It's purpose was not to produce enlightened individuals but to produce productive/obedient laborers. People needed to know how to read/write and do simple calculations. Maybe a bit of math on the side. And there had to be some kind of system to rescue the really smart boys (mostly at the time) from being wasted on blue collar work and get them on some track to higher education. But mostly universities were for the upper class. You were born into that, not cherry picked from the lower classes. Education was about getting lower class kids up-to a lowish standard so they could be productive. And modern education hasn't really improved that much.
We have an opportunity to rethink education. Like many, I had lots of different teachers in high school and in university. Some really amazing, some not that great. Being a high school teacher is a tough job. It's a very rigid program that is sort of standardized for everyone. Mostly there isn't a lot of wiggle room to go beyond that. Lots of kids have trouble dealing with that and they kind of drop out or fail.
The opportunity with AI is that education can be much more personalized now. Anybody can get access to that. For free even. Education no longer has to be a group thing where everybody does the same things, gets the same tests, and then get the OK stamp of approval to be unleashed on an indifferent job market. Lots of people just coast through high school so they can finally start their lives not realizing that they just burned up their most important quarter of it.
I love Neal Stephenson's the The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer which is about a poor young orphaned girl getting her hands on an AI powered book that starts teaching her and adapts to her context. That's slowly becoming science fact with modern LLMs.
> There is a point he's not making that's important here: the ability to learn and absorb knowledge peaks when people are young.
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.
I think AI actually mostly leads to the opposite.
You no longer have to learn anything, you can just ask.
I feel there are also a lot of urban myths about learning and the human brain out there. You hear it all the time everywhere: I’m too old to learn this language/instrument/skill now.
There are the things you can ask about, and there are things you have to do.
You cannot just ask how to build or cook or paint or weld something. AI cannot help with this (certainly not yet) beyond the sort of information that the internet (and youtube in particular) is already providing.
Don’t throw the babies with the bath water, education as a group thing is good as long as all in the group are at the similar level, it becomes even efficient when students stimulate one another. Also being part of the group students learn more about interacting in groups. Then problem is that these groups are mostly made up of students at different levels, abilities and so on.
> Education no longer has to be a group thing where everybody does the same things
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.
It doesn't have to be self directed but it can still be individualized. One on one teaching is the goto solution for the rich and wealthy. With AI that can be extended to everyone.
Schools don't really adapt to the individual currently. It works for the average student but there are lots of students that don't do well with that. And it doesn't really get the best out of people.
Introducing AI into education will be non trivial. This is difficulty is observable already in my experience.
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.
> It's purpose was not to produce enlightened individuals but to produce productive/obedient laborers.
I hear this all the time, but I've never seen any evidence of it.
In reflecting on the history of formal education, it's necessry to separate the Oxbride tradition of grooming future aristocrats and nobles from the rise of compulsory public education at the end of the 19th century, which is a responds to a variety of challenges raised by both industrialization and modern cities.
For a retrospective review of that history, with extensive citations, Ivan Illich's Deschooling Society can get you started on your own research. His book is fundamentally polemical because he was invested in his opinions about the past, the present, and the future, but the bibliography and citations prove useful for this topic even if you don't buy his summary perspective.
There are of course many other primary and secondary treatments contemporary to the time, that you can review without reading through Illich's polemics, some of which are very easy to find in the Harper's Magazine archives.
What you'll find, broadly, os that there was very little said of the idealism we now attribute to enlightment and almost all of the dialog about modern public education, especially compulsory -- by both proponets and critics -- was quite practical, focused on what schooling and education would acheive (or sacrifice) for industry, social cohesion, cultural diversity/uniformity, crime, child welfare, political alignment, and national identity.
IOW, "I've never seen any evidence" is understandable (we each only have so much time to study), but it's not for some lack of that evidence.
High school dropout, here.
I didn't drop out, because I was wildly successful.
Exactly the opposite, in fact.
The process of climbing out of the wreckage is what helped me to become [moderately] successful.
I doubt anyone here, would be impressed by my career path, but I'm happier than I ever thought that I could be, now.
I think the apprenticeship model is really the best way to learn in a practical manner.
But that involves things like staying with employers for more than a year, and also, employers treating their employees in a way that makes them want to stay.
It also works with unions, because they have a whole infrastructure, wrapped around it.
Trivially untrue. Inability to learn except by doing is a defect, which renders you extremely vulnerable to critical errors - you won't be able to learn about these errors since making them (which you find you need to do in order to learn) is fatal.
That doesn't make learning by doing a bad idea, or even necessarily a poor first choice, but if it's the only way for you to learn that's a problem.
I don't think they were suggesting that at all. It is not an on/off feature flag, people learn in different ways. People learn in different measures of many ways, even in the one person.
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.
So your claim is that one can learn how to do something simply by being told, and not doing any practice problems, thought exercises, reviewing solutions, etc?
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".
Saying that a whole style of learning for neurodivergent folks like Temple Grandin is kinda misguided. They don't need to learn by doing by everything, and I'm sure you knew that.
It's even more nuanced than that, there's the type of task, the person's learning style, the makeup of the specific task, the manner of feedback from performing it, whether there's flexibility in performing it quickly or slowly. Only chronic take-havers and bloggers will reduce it to one or two variables.
Based on my several decades of life experience, I would say the point is there’s hardly anything useful that you can learn without doing. And there are many things that you can’t do without leaving the traditional classroom environment. That’s why schools have chem labs, wood shops, kitchens, orchestras…oh wait, do they have those anymore?
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.
I present a different analysis:
- All of us are more naturally talented at some things.
- When you end up working with your natural talents, you have it easier than everyone else.
- Working in your talents often translates to passion, and that’s how you get the so called “agency.”
- To find your talents, you have to try everything once (e.g. wakeboarding, tennis, programming, accounting).
- More well off parents can offer their kids more opportunities to find their talents.
- Schooling and “doing” are orthogonal to finding your talents. Neither learning or doing will tell you your talents, passion, or give you agency, but you should do them both anyway.
Not sure if I agree with this. Obviously if you have a natural talent for something, it’s easier to be good at it. Most people though can be very good, great even, at something they simply decide to practice. Most people don’t “actively” practice though, even if they are “doing” something. Purposeful practice is very different from doing.
I’m not saying talent is enough.
I’m just speaking from my experience. I put a lot of practice into things that I am also talented at and life is good. shrug
I put practice into other things like cooking and music too but I’m not going to become a chef or play music for anything but fun.
School was the most hated period of life. It's so much more fun to learn by oneself, by reading and watching coupled with doing.
I think we've yet to stumble upon a form that combines these three actions into one medium. Perhaps AI-guided doing (in simulation) will be the way.
> It's so much more fun to learn by oneself
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.)
> 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.
For me it was the noise. Also, being in a UK 'comprehensive' (state school) meant mixing with people from families with varying work ethics and it pained me trying to understand why other kids motivations, even other adults' motivations, were often very different to mine and what I had been brought up with at home.
I think my extraversion is probably a factor. Personality differences almost certainly mean that different environments will better suit different people!
Fwiw, I went to a state school as well (in the US). But by the time I was at the university, I already had a two-year degree, and all of my general education requirements were already fulfilled. So my first few years in college had the benefits of very small class sizes and a genuinely diverse student body (i.e., students of all ages from high school students doing dual-enrollment to retirees pursuing 'continuing education', students who were parents, students who were military veterans, students who had had already had careers in trades, students who were working full time, etc.), plus they were (mostly! some of the science and math classes were genuinely demanding, being taught either by passionate teachers or for supplemental income by university instructors who didn't want to bore themselves create extra work by dumbing down their curricula) easy enough that I had a ton of free time.
And then the last few years of it were comprised entirely of upper-division electives, except for a couple of major-specific requirements that the university refused to transfer from the community college. It was still a lot of classes, since I ended up doing a double degree (and part of an accelerated masters program that I ditched come graduation time), but basically all of those classes were (a) in my specialties of interest and (b) my choice. Those class sizes were mostly pretty small too, though some of my computer science classes were still huge (100+ students).
I've myself had work habits that were/are largely mysterious to me. But at any rate, by the time I got (back) to the university, my classes were all advanced enough that the vast majority of students in them were committed to their subjects (or else they were experienced enough to know they should drop the uninteresting class in the first week and take something better for them instead).
Not sure about you, but in class I was forced to study an enormous amount of stuff I didn't care about, so I needed to memorize and pass the test, that's it.
Wasted time.
Yeah the class composition probably matters, I wish a universe where what you described make sense.
I'm not sure the title captures the essence of a school, at least for STEM subject. For instance, why is doing maths in schools not "doing"? We solved the same math problems that the real mathematicians had to solve hundreds of years ago, no? The way we tested the Avogadro constant was not that different from a real chemist did a hundred years ago, no? We didn't do the modern ones mostly because the students had not the advanced prereq yet. I think it's more accurate to categorize what we do in school as controlled doing. Yes, we abstract every object as a point mass or a rigid body when learning Newton Mechanics, but that's only because the real-world is too complex for a high-schooler to handle. Yes, we implemented only a single-threaded SkipList using standard C library when taking the first course on algorithms, but that's only because most of the students wouldn't have enough knowledge to go beyond that.
"For a simple example, a better home craft than lemonade might be a pastry, taken seriously. Not sugar cookies or muffins, but the kind of thing that is plain for a 13-year-old to understand, harder for him to make, and very difficult to master. If a child committed to a batch a day, documenting progress, perhaps in time he would have something worth selling."
1. is lemonade a home craft? 2. who is forcing their children to bake sourdough croissants? 3. is craft baker really the career path of the future?
There's a fundamental reason why doing, and learning from doing, is necessary to learn (to do), and can't be replaced with book learning.
Maybe stated like this it sounds obvious, but it runs counter to people expecting LLMs to learn to do things for themselves by "book learning" (pre-training), unless regurgitating artifacts from the training set is all you need.
The issue is that intelligence and action are prediction (with motor cortex output predictions driving muscles and becoming action - a useful insight/framing from Jeff Hawkins)... In order to act well, you need to learn to predict/react well, but these predictions need to be based on your OWN state per the sensory inputs you are receiving. Learning to predict what someone else would do (being book smart) doesn't help when you're the actor, where the predictions need to be based on your own internal state.
Free to learn, a book by Peter Gray about unschooling, really opened my eyes and finally help with decision about homeschooling.
It shood be basic literature for all institutional teachers.
School is not enough, learning by doing is not enough... The sweet spot lies as always in the middle. Certain things can only be learnt by doing, some things are learnt x100 faster if you learn the theory first.
The most valuable thing is learning when to apply each type of learning, and the best way to learn that is with different kind of mentors. I guess the well known people that he lists as examples had a lot of those. For me that is the differentiator.
I think the title doesn't go far enough, as it removes the "sufficient" part but leaves alone the "necessary" part.
School is neither necessary nor sufficient for achievement. Certainly education, in some form, must be required. E.g. learning to read and perform basic math, but "school" as it's known today is not the only way, nor likely even a good way, to learn those skills.
An earlier version of this article was discussed at the time:
The most precious resource is agency - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27695181 - July 2021 (325 comments)
Does this mean I shouldn't worry about my 11 year old son and his fixation on video games right now? It looks like you either figure out when you are 12 or 13 or you don't. That's the moment parents should be watching carefully.
It's so hard. My passion for videogames funnelled my passion for programming, which eventually became stronger, but there is no doubt I played too much videogames at that age (damn mmorpgs)
Agency is also possibly an innate ability not necessarily cultivated at school or by focusing on some useful early pursuit.
>not necessarily cultivated at school
Agency is actively suppressed at school; that's one of its core functions.
Those that can’t do, teach.
And those that can't teach?
Become scrum masters
They teach gym
A lot of them teach
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