[thowar2]

Education should be on this list.

The root of all these problems stem from a lack of effective education.

1) The current methods are highly ineffective for teaching

By getting more effective at teaching children, and helping them to self educate, we get better informed citizens who can interpret news more accurately and effectively participate in democracy.

2) The current goals for education do not align with current & future needs

Our current system is designed to produce factory workers for the industrial economy, which was adapted to produce knowledge workers for the information economy. But we are moving towards full automation of most of those jobs.

We will need to prepare people to be adaptable in a fast changing automated world: more entrepreneurial type skills are needed.

[saalweachter]

See, I hear techies grumble about education constantly. Our education system is teaching the wrong skills or not challenging students or just an elaborate babysitting racket.

I hear teachers, on the other hand, complain that after decades of trying everything they can, they've realized that they cannot help students unless those students have safe, stable, supportive home lives.

It's easy to say we should introduce children to programming early, even easy to do. It is easy to complain about critical thinking skills and kids these days. It is easy to see that overtesting schools and overreacting to those test scores wastes resources and the time of children and teachers.

It's hard to find a way to ensure one in six children in the US subject to food insecurity always get three good meals a day. It is hard to figure out how to provide stability in a single family, let alone all families. It is hard to say a child shouldn't drop out of school and work whatever job they can when their parents have been unable or unwilling to provide for them.

We have been talking about and trying to fix "education" my entire life; maybe we should try fixing some of the underlying problems first, even if they are hard.

[ethbro]

> they cannot help students unless those students have safe, stable, supportive home lives

As someone from a teaching family, this is absolutely true.

That said, the underlying problems can only be fixed by a combination of economic improvement and education. Education empowers in the future, but economic status empowers educational opportunities in the present.

And when it comes down to it, the government can't afford to replace the future wealth created by an educated citizenry.

[thowar2]

Yes this is a problem that certainly deserves attention.

But the education issues also apply to the other five in six children who do have food security. The education problem is one that affects anyone who does not have access to the best private schools.

When I say fix education, I don't mean teach people programming or whatever skills or knowledge that might give them a marginal leg up. Those things are becoming increasingly less valuable.

I mean teach people how to be well adjusted people, teach them soft skills of empathy and understanding others, teach them why and how to continuously improve themselves, teach them how to identify areas where they can contribute to society without waiting for a teacher or boss to tell them exactly what to do.

Without these abilities, more and more will fall into the poverty trap as the need for worker bees diminishes.

[patmcguire]

You can aim at other models that aren't trying to improve the 18-year batch model. The great stratification that happens at the end of that, where you're either raised to the great meritocracy in the sky or cast into the abyss, would probably still be unconscionable if it were done fairly, and it's not.

So focus on the parts that happen once you're an adult. MOOCs aren't a panacea but you don't have to miss a class because your shift moved. If the objection is they aren't taken seriously by employers, my objection is that's still playing the old prestige and rank game, and there is always going to be someone at the bottom of that anyway. So make them useful to themselves if employers don't want them.

(I believe fixing childhood poverty involves the US Government doing things it's not going to do soon, and that private business isn't going to do it. We must cultivate our garden.)

[tomjen3]

None of those are particular hard. Start by ending snap and using the money to increase the number of meals in schools to three a day. Second those meals must be some protein, some veggies and potatoes, pizza, etc are not food.

[saalweachter]

One of the difficulties in guaranteeing adequate childhood nutrition is that children are only in schools for about 180 days a year, in the US, but need to eat approximately 365 days each year.

[Kluny]

We can start moving toward an education system that works once we agree on some core values.

Someone else said that the goal of education is to produce factory workers. I disagree. I think the goal of education is to allow one teacher to effectively babysit up to 30 children at once. With both parents working, it simply isn't possible for them to give kids the attention they need to keep them healty and sane, let alone educate them on how to be part of society. Schools are supposed to do this instead, but the primary goal is training the children to be manageable at a ratio of 30 to 1.

Before we can do anything else, we have to acknowledge that the first goal is getting the kids out of their parents hair. This is the fundamental truth that everyone knows but refuses to acknowledge when they're debating policy. After that, we can make other decisions that make more sense. The lecture-hall format really only makes sense when the number of students is unmanageable for a single adult. If was only 10 kids per teacher, they would actually have time for more useful activities, applying knowledge, giving guidance to students who are ready to strike out on their own.

Tripling the number of teachers is going to cost some money, and application-type lessons costs more than lecture-type lessons. Some ways to deal with this - as a society, acknowledge that creating educated, well informed citizens is not a fuzzy, feel-good liberal goal, but a necessary factor for everyone's safety, including the permanently child-free. I think most people agree with that already, but since many people voting are full grown adults who still aren't properly educated, not everyone will come to the same conclusion, and therefore a massive infusion of public money for this idea isn't likely to happen. So I think a successful, disruptive idea will be one that gets around the cost problem of a much lower student-to-teacher ratio. I don't think remote teaching is going to be the answer here.

[DougN7]

I've rewritten my comment three times so far ...

My wife and I are fortunate enough that she can be a stay at home mom. I grew up the same way. Were middle class, though increasingly probably slightly mid to upper these days. We don't need the babysitter, and want our kids to be educated, so that is the focus. We help them with homework, etc. We're lucky.

So from my perspective, having both parents working is the root issue. It's an economic necessity for probably 80+% of the country, which I suppose is really the root issue.

Ultimately it all boils down to resources, time and money, and there is never enough to go around. I don't have an answer for that :(

[tsycho]

It's not just about money. Even if parents can afford to have one of them be stay at home, neither parent might want to be the one staying at home.

Being a stay at higher parent is an incredibly difficult, stressful and under appreciated job so to many well educated couples, it's not appealing at all.

[Kluny]

True that - not to mention tedious, mentally understimulating, and comes with a perceived lack of social status. Even for people who love it and can afford it, there are many downsides.

[jazzyk]

How about having one of the parents work part-time?

True, not all jobs can be offered as part-time, and working part-time limits your career growth if you work for a big corporation, but still, it is a viable option.

[TheGRS]

The nuclear family is not always going to be viable in every scenario though and we really can't control all of the economic factors that go into that effectively. But we can effectively control a lot of what happens in schools. Things like curriculum, money spent, facilities used, after school offerings, etc. Even if the incentive existed to be a stay-at-home parent, there will always be parents who would rather have dual incomes for a variety of reasons.

[eevilspock]

> having both parents working is the root issue... resources, time and money, and there is never enough to go around.

> a massive shift toward automation... in the next five years, 5 million jobs in 15 economies will be lost. (from YC post)

We don't have enough workers. We have too many workers. When will we realize that our current economic system is doing a lousy job of allocating human resources?

We can't get enough teachers, but we have tens of millions of people and hundreds of billions of dollars allocated toward things that add, to be generous, questionable value to the world.

[Kluny]

Yeah, that whole "5 million jobs in 15 economies will be lost"... it's such a weird thing to say, that a job will be lost. Some kinds of jobs have to continue forever. Other types of jobs are tasks that will eventually be complete and the workers will have to move on to the next thing.

There is TONS of work that needs to be done though. Teachers like you said, health care workers, psychologists to help us deal with the inevitable mental problems, mountain bike trail maintainers, pickers of plastic trash out of the ocean, people to design apis for distributing government transparency data, designers of infographics to help the rest of us make sense of that data, and on and on and on. There's so much to do, when you stop thinking of a "job" as something provided for you by the government or a company, and rather as value that you can contribute to the world. Another disruptive business is going to figure out how to make it possible to pay people for contributing that kind of value.

[sprafa]

If you account for all the money that's gone into Products that have no real human value, and add on top the fact that the companies making them avoid taxes like the devil, we begin to see the scale of the tragedy.

[Kluny]

I agree. And some men want to be stay at home dads, and sometimes both parents want to work, and sometimes there's a single parent who's falling apart trying to do everything. I wish we could agree that all those choices are valid, and allow some social safety nets that make it possible.

[3825]

> I agree. And some men want to be stay at home dads, and sometimes both parents want to work, and sometimes there's a single parent who's falling apart trying to do everything. I wish we could agree that all those choices are valid, and allow some social safety nets that make it possible.

I think it goes back to what you said first. We need to agree on some core values.

I don't want any more of my money going to people who mocked the MSNBC host[0] when she said "children belong to the collective". It seems pretty obvious to me. If we are all paying for your children, I better have a say in how we raise OUR children.

Clearly, a lot of people do not see it that way. Why should we have tax deductions for people to have children? Why should we have tax breaks for people to put money away for their children to go to college? I for one support an end to these tax breaks. Lets send a clear message: If your children are your own and do not belong to the society, then you can raise them by yourself. If you can't afford to do so, we'll simply put you in a debtor's prison.

[0] https://youtu.be/sjczwQOnMqg

[literallycancer]

>"children belong to the collective"

I grew up in post-communist Europe. In the past, we had state propaganda that told children to turn in their parents[1], among other wonderful products of that line of thinking. So I'd be very careful with ideas like this one. (I still support mandatory vaccinations and/or sane defaults.)

>Lets send a clear message: If your children are your own and do not belong to the society, then you can raise them by yourself. If you can't afford to do so, we'll simply put you in a debtor's prison.

This would undo a lot of progress that has been made on the human rights front in the past century.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavlik_Morozov

[matt4077]

I think the sentiment is better expressed by the greeks: "It takes a village to raise a child".

One possible model may be to enlarge the "nuclear family" to groups of friends. Get five couples who enjoy each other's company together, and everyone can work 80% (4 days) while two people are home each weekday for childcare/housework etc.

Many other models are possible and it would be best to make it as easy as possible to experiment. Relevant factors may be:

- a universal right to flexible work schedules, at least for larger companies (10+) where changes balance out

- Mixed-zoning housing allowing the creative use of space. Which also helps with:

- Neighbourhoods designed for street life, where you can actually meet neighbours and build these (real) social networks, and where children can explore. When I was 6 or so, I became friends with two families in my neighbourhood. One owned a bookshop which became my personal library. The other was a graphics designer and a racing car driver where I learnt computers and mechanics (and got to drive in a Formula 1 car). I was often invited for dinner at these families, or just hung out when they had guests, and I learned more from listening to adults debating the topics of the day than anywhere else.

[eanzenberg]

It's fine, let's send these people off to Venezuela to live happily ever after.

[conanbatt]

Babysitting a single child is economically very inefficient. Its something teenage girls can do while they watch tv. A full grown adult with skills is worth considerably more to society working than babysitting.

Its not an economic necessity that both parents work, the incentive to do it is extremely large and probably pure conservatism had been keeping it at bay, if at all.

[linkregister]

This perspective ignores the drastic difference in the quality between one caretaker and another. Among middle-class parents, the cost of an engaged preschool provider or nanny with a good teacher:child ratio that can match the quality of care of an invested parent meets or exceeds the median salary.

Especially for parents with multiple children, it is economically rational to have a parent at home to provide that customized 1-on-1 care with the child. The benefit is improved learning and opportunity for experiences (daily trips to museums, sports activities, classes) at the expense of less structured socialization with a peer group and a loss in net household profit.

Though the tax break afforded for day care should not be disregarded, there are plenty of situations where it makes sense to have a parent stay at home with children.

Most parents choose to have children so they can spend time with them. Maximizing this at the expense of some net household profit can be rational, given certain living situations. One could argue it is a luxury, and they would likely be right. Having children at all in advanced industrial societies is, in the individual case, usually a luxury.

[lieut_data]

Society underestimates the long-term economic value of a child raised by a full-time, invested parent. Parenting and babysitting are apples and oranges.

[conanbatt]

No it doesn't. Otherwise, every single teacher, caretaker, would quit their jobs as soon as they had a child and would get the same economical benefit.

If it were a productive investment it would be common because those that do it would easily outclass the rest.

[milesrout]

They don't do that because they can't afford to do that. That's sad and unfortunate.

[onion2k]

Being a parent is not babysitting.

[conanbatt]

Its mostly babysitting. You can divide the effort to raise a child as nursing, teaching and babysitting. The parent is most invested into doing it, but he cannot get very good as a nurse or a teacher (if its not his profession) and babysitting is very low value. You definitely cannot spend 8 hours a day teaching a baby things, and most of the things you teach are quite low skilled (exercise, playing, reading, etc).

If the parent can earn a lot more income by delegating responsibilities he will do it, or rather, most will do it.

[fpig]

This is a fallacy inherent to the modern mentality of obsessing over your child's safety that is likely counterproductive on average.

Children of school age DO NOT need babysitting. When I was a kid, everyone's mom worked and we kids just stayed at home or played together and were perfectly fine. There were zero kids who had a babysitter when they were 7 years old. Zero. Never heard of it. This was the late 80s / early 90s during the breakup of socialism. There was even a war going on for a few of those years.

I can't even imagine the level of ridicule a child would have endured if their friends had found out they had a babysitter.

Children don't just randomly burst into flames if they're left alone.

And I seriously doubt 30:1 is a significant part of the problem. Look at countries with successful school systems. Ours also used to be, but slowly got worse with time as we adopted western attitudes towards children and parenting. The schools themselves didn't change significantly, yet the outcomes became worse.

[Kluny]

True, but you were still in school for most of the day, right? You were probably alone for a couple hours in the evening and busy doing stuff with friends on the weekends, but don't you think it would have gone all Lord of the Flies if you were alone all the time? I remember staying home alone from age 10 or so and I was fine, but I also remember that bullying seemed to be a much more serious problem then than it is now.

[fpig]

Parents would be away for 4-5 hours at most while I was at home I guess, but we'd be without parents for more than that because we'd go out and do stuff with friends even when parents were home. Parents were kind of there to fulfill your basic needs, not your social needs. I think my parents would have probably loved to spend more time with me but kids prefer to be with other kids.

To be fair, it did go a bit lord of the flies on occasion, in the sense that we engaged in "wars" with kids from different streets and so on, sometimes someone would get a thrown rock to their head or get a beating, but nothing too serious. Also we were constantly getting injured while playing from falling, stepping on sharp shit, etc but kids are incredibly resilient, they recover from anything and quickly. The important thing is to teach the kid not to fuck around in traffic, that's where the real danger is. And if there is a war not to pick shit up that might be explosive.

[Strom]

I don't think the 30-to-1 ratio is the problem. From my own experience the main problem is grouping by age. Children should be grouped by skill instead. [1] I was always top of the class in math and held back by the slow pace dictated by the national education plan for my age. At the same time there were other topics like Russian language where I didn't learn as fast as was expected of my age. This meant that as the years went by I understood less and less of the new material that was being taught because my Russian fundamentals were weak. I imagine other children experienced something similar in math. I think we could do much better if children advance in classes based on how much they've learned, not based on when they were born. Also advancement in different topics need to be decoupled from eachother as much as possible [2], because I think it's completely expected that everyone will have their own personal strong topics and weak topics.

--

[1] I think schools teach much more than just what's on the national education plan. Making friends, making enemies, dealing with puberty etc are all valuable lessons that have less friction when the group of people you're around have similar amount of experience with those things. Thus being grouped with people with wildly different experience levels in these areas can be detrimental. While the primary grouping factor should be skill, there's probably a good case for secondary range limits by age, which is a decent estimative measurement of children's experience in these social areas.

[2] I understand that full isolation isn't possible, because physics requires math knowledge, which in turn requires writing & reading skills. Still, even with these dependencies we could do a lot more decoupling than what is being currently done.

[Cleisthenes]

Using public education for any form of job training is one of the gravest mistakes that has put us in the current position.

The reason for public education is to have an informed citizenry able to participate fully in society. Using it as job training is just corporate welfare, that is using tax money to pay for something businesses should do themselves.

There is often overlap in the skills needed in an informed citizenry and employees (e.g. reading, computer skills, etc.), but not always.

Trying to chase what business or the marketplace wants is a fools journey that create citizens poorly prepared to be fully empowered citizens with a solid understanding of the world.

I suspect entrepreneurial skills would be well covered by this approach as it should emphasis skills of leadership, self-reliance, consensus, and creative thinking.

[hackuser]

Thanks for saying that; it's essential to reframe the discussion. A few thoughts:

1) The Obama administration's college rankings (I don't know if they are still around) at one point were using the earnings of graduates as a basis.

2) Often you hear people evaluating college based on their first job. Not only are employment skills not the goal, as you point out, but consider the absurdity of valuing education based on what is probably the least important, worst paying job you'll ever get, with a payoff of probably 1-2 years.

3) Looking at the shocking political and environmental problems in 'advanced' countries right now, perhaps more education in the non-vocational fields of liberal arts, including history, political science, and literary criticism, and in the sciences, providing an understanding of nature and scientific method, is more important than ever.

4) A useful way of looking at it: [0]

"The Yale Report of 1828" -- an influential document written by Jeremiah Day (who was at the time president of Yale), one of his trustees, and a committee of faculty -- distinguished between "the discipline" and "the furniture" of the mind. Mastering a specific body of knowledge -- acquiring "the furniture" -- is of little permanent value in a rapidly changing world. Students who aspire to be leaders in business. medicine, law, government, or academia need "the discipline" of mind -- the ability to adapt to constantly changing circumstances, confront new facts, and find creative ways to solve problems.

I'd add that it's not just leaders, but everyone who needs these skills.

----

[0] Richard C. Levin, President of Yale, in "Top of the Class: The Rise of Asia's Universities"

https://www.foreignaffairs.org/articles/china/2010-05-01/top...

[snomad]

At one point, we had more trade schools. Somehow they fell out of fashion as the 70s became the 90s. Perhaps we should bring back publicly funded trade schools (including IT!), and allow universities to morph back into pure education.

[tptacek]

There's been a YC RFS for Education for a long time; it's #7 on the list. YC has had some success in the space with companies like Clever, and for awhile had a sister-program dedicated solely to K-12 startups.

[adamnemecek]

While nice, neither of these strikes me as truly disruptive. The downside is that to achieve the best educational environment, you'd have to open a school which doesn't scale nicely unless you plug into existing "world APIs".

I guess you could start by opening a co-working space with a supervising adult (not teacher, this adult will be there to ensure that the kids aren't killing each other).

There would be teachers accessible via video calls but most of the time would be spent reading or doing work, not passively listening/watching. If you pool these teachers together, you will be able to teach even the most obscure subjects.

In this system, everyone is literally going at their pace.

I think that fundamentally the main objection to this system is that some people learn better in a classroom setting, to which I reply: 21st century education needs to make a transition to turn graduates into self-learners. This can only be achieved with a system that fosters self-learning from very early on.

It's not like you can create self-learners by making students go through a process that's fundamentally as anti-self-learning as possible.

This will also make switching schools extremely painless. You will transition to a new desk. It's like a gym membership, you can totally have two if that's convenient for you for whatever reason.

[anigbrowl]

For sure, but the point is that YC is welcoming to educational disruption even if the submissions so far haven't been very impactful.

I think that fundamentally the main objection to this system is that some people learn better in a classroom setting, to which I reply: 21st century education needs to make a transition to turn graduates into self-learners. This can only be achieved with a system that fosters self-learning from very early on.

I grew up in a very traditional system that would remind most Americans of the 1950s, and it hasn't impacted my self-learning ability at all. I'm fortunate in that my parents liked books and I was able to read by age 3 and as long as I can remember I had firm opinions about what I wanted to read. I'm not altogether convinced by your vision of students as intellectual tabulae rasa that can be variously configured as drones, autodidacts, or innovators.

A student's home and socioeconomic life can have as much or more impact on their intellectual development as the kind of school they attend, and the idea that perfecting education will automatically nullify other factors is a rock on which many would-be reformers have come to grief.

[stcredzero]

I grew up in a very traditional system that would remind most Americans of the 1950s, and it hasn't impacted my self-learning ability at all. I'm fortunate in that my parents liked books and I was able to read by age 3 and as long as I can remember I had firm opinions about what I wanted to read.

Poor people's children self-teach. They definitely learn. They don't necessarily learn the culture and values that would allow them to function gracefully in the modern economy.

A student's home and socioeconomic life can have as much or more impact on their intellectual development as the kind of school they attend, and the idea that perfecting education will automatically nullify other factors is a rock on which many would-be reformers have come to grief.

People's subculture/tribe and actual community are a tremendous part of who people are and how well they can access resources and knowledge in the world. Religious and various civic organizations understand this. Often governments only understand this as a source of strength for their "opposition." Opposition movements and rebellions understand this.

Most significantly, school reform programs like Harlem Children's Zone understand this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harlem_Children's_Zone To fight poverty, you have to involve the whole community on your side. If your initiative is fighting the community, it cannot fight poverty.

[RangerScience]

"A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer", perhaps?

[gregpilling]

For those that have not read the book - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age

[davidivadavid]

It seems like that reference always pops up in discussions about education. Is anyone aware of any attempts at tackling the idea in reality?

[mej10]

I don't know whether either of these set out with the idea of creating the Primer, but they seem similar.

Osmo - https://www.playosmo.com/en/ - seems pretty cool. Uses the iPad camera and packets of materials for interactive learning experiences. It could evolve into something like the Primer.

"One Laptop per Child" has/had similar goals while not being nearly as advanced/cohesive as the Primer.

[jpereira]

I think you're exactly right in that the "world APIs" for education are the limiting factor. The major issue is that the assessment process is directly tied to the learning process within a single institution, leading to both being done incredibly inoptimally. It leads to the necessity of standardized tests and exams, and accredited institutions, which limits the potential learning opportunities available to the very few that are recognized on national or global scale.

If a "global assessment API" was decoupled from learning institutions it could capture educational experience as generated by any environment, from standard public schools to non-traditional schools, and we'd see a much more diverse set of educational experiences arise and be able to coexist fairly, meaning that individuals could better shape their individual academic paths without compromise and still be able to operate in the greater academic network.

A universal assessment system can exist in a very scalable way if its built upon social consensus. It would be absolutely impossible given our current models of assessment, especially the ones used on a national or international level. They are just simply far too expensive to begin to capture the breadth or depth of potential experience in academics in a meaningful way.

Today though we have the technology (i.e Ethereum and other decentralized technologies) to (relatively) easily design and deploy incentivized _secure_ systems for social consensus. It would enable systems like the one you're talking about to actually enable not just the teaching of the most obscure subject, but the _recognition_ of them too.

This is something I have been working on building for a while now. I truly believe its the answer to the flaws in our (global, not just American) education system and will be necessary for a truly effective, and universal, one.

[adamnemecek]

> The major issue is that the assessment process is directly tied to the learning process within a single institution, leading to both being done incredibly inoptimally.

Very good point. There are no feedback looks between the two subsystems which makes them both suck.

One point I'd like to raise though is that I'm not sure if it's really optimal have 'assessments'. I have some fundamental issues with assigning numerical values to things that are sometimes hard to judge numerically.

I think that a much better system would be that each student's work is stored in the cloud where it's accessible and everyone can judge for himself.

And I think that we should move away from test to projects that are largely designed by the student under the guidance of teachers.

[jpereira]

I don't think assessments are fundamentally numerical. Assessing is at its core simply about recognizing experience and I think systemized ways to do so would be incredibly valuable, as opposed to an ad-hoc system where everyone builds their own judgements. While that is more flexible its also far far less efficient. Companies hiring, other educational institutions, all need a way to efficiently parse experience without having do it themselves, and so a systemized assessment network I think will be necessary.

Experience could even just be a boolean value, has or doesn't have, instead of anything numerical. Or there could emerge separate numerical systems for each area of knowledge. The important part is that the system is based on social consensus of people who actually possess the experience, so that its the most relevant and applicable system possible.

[thowar2]

Good point.

But I think its worth bringing up again as it is seemingly at the root of all the issues surfaced by the Trump presidency, which is the main driver of this new RFS

[shafyy]

As others said, education was already on an earlier RFS. But it's still important, maybe more than ever.

As you stated, I also believe that education it's the root of most problems. Today, almost everyone learns the same way as they did 100 years ago: A teacher going through a non-customized textbook that was written by a small number people. It's a linear learning path and highly ineffective. It's also inefficient, as teacher to student ratios are mostly around 1-to-20 (I am talking about K-12, not college or MOOCs).

I believe that we can overcome a lot of problems of education by applying technology. More concretely, we should be able to provide more customized, higher quality content for people at young and old age. This, while creating more genuine excitement for science and scientific thinking. This means, we have to rethink the current teacher/student paradigm. And I don't mean by merely providing tools to teachers or copy/pasting textbooks to online videos.

I mean by curating content that excites, using some ML to create an optimal and dynamic learning path per student and making it fit to the busy daily lives of people who don't have time to watch 1 hour lectures every week when they get home from work. This might seem like advertising, by I am working on exactly such a project and thought it would be ok to mention it here, because it is relevant for the discussion and other startups were mentioned in the comments, too. It's called Humbot (humbot.io) and I am happy to hear your comments and start a discussion on what the radical improvements in education must be over the next decade.

[basch]

Education and News are two sides of the same coin. At some point the majority of the adult population makes the decision to learn about the world from entertainment companies. We should reanalyze what news and continuing education mean, relative to each other.

https://theconversation.com/ and http://www.worldcrunch.com/ make good starts, as do aggregators like http://www.aldaily.com/ and https://redef.com/

As far as pure education companies, we need more software platforms for building curriculums collaboratively, some combination of wikia, github, wirecutter, and khanacademy.org. You may be thrown by my inclusion of wirecutter, but concensus based consumer reports type information, leading to populations making better decisions, helps cut through the paradox of choice. It also teaches people HOW to make decisions, and how to evaluate choices. It should be easy for anyone to fork, remix, contribute, or request corrections. Even collaborative documentary editing software, or the ability to sift through ALL the worlds lectures on a topic, and assessable the best bits. As long as teams of strangers can collaborate and fork, the world will have more shoulder standing giants, and less reinventing of the wheel.

[germinalphrase]

As a teacher, I would kill for a collaborative curriculum and assessment tool. A "backend" service for creating, managing, and personalizing curriculum materials would go a long way to mitigate the absolutely astounding amount of redundant labor that goes on in schools (you're really creating a comprehension quiz for To Kill a Mockingbird from scratch?).

Contrary to popular belief - even here on HN - teachers are chronically making known sub-optimal instructional tradeoffs because they lack the time to complete tasks as they should ideally be completed. Very little seems to be done to create tools to improve the instructional process (that doesn't involve removing the teacher from that very process - e.g. MOOCs, Khan Academy, Knewton, etc.). Those digital alternative absolutely have a place, but there's a lot of opportunity to fundamentally improve the instructional work being done by teachers in classrooms every day.

Your suggestions are a great place to start:

- network instructional materials and lessons so they can be accessed in their entirety by other teachers

- network assessment materials that are tied (on the question/answer level) to standards and common goals (e.g. comprehension quip above).

Email is in profile if anyone would like to continue this discussion in a more detailed manner outside the thread.

[andrewwhartion]

I think there's massive scope for improving the delivery of educational material, but most of my ideas have been related to later secondary education and university and to what I as a learner have wanted, not what the teacher/educator has wanted.

It's been an open question for me how to improve education in earlier years where there's probably less scope for self-learning, and more focus should be on how to improve the teachers' efficiency and effectiveness. Since my own kids are starting school now, these earlier years have taken on new significance, but since I don't have a background in education, I haven't known where to start. I'm more at the point of "How can I help?!", since I have very little visibility into the frustrations that teachers experience on a day-to-day basis, but I can build software, if software can be part of the solution.

Sent you an email, but I'm sure there are others who would love to be involved in the discussion...

[germinalphrase]

Thanks for the comment. I'll get back to you this evening.

[thowar2]

Hey check out Common Curriculum [1] they are part of the way there.

[1] http://www.commoncurriculum.com/

[basch]

how do teachers who have never met each other find each others work and collaborate?

this product looks like only people within the same team can work together. that means thousands of teachers all repeating the same steps.

[basch]

dont you think at some point the optimul remix of Roman History 101 University lecture clips, might exist, and then it becomes a process improvement task to make it a little better all the time, rather than constanly recreating a nearly similar lecture for each school.

I really believe forking is important. People might disagree with concensus and have a better way to do things that is looked down upon by the mass. One curriculum for all sounds like every egg in one basket.

(i decided i like optimul better than optimal)

[randomdata]

I have found the current education methods to amazingly effective. I can literally sit down and choose any subject of interest and become well versed in it with not much more than a time commitment. And since you can get up to speed on a whim, you can stay as current for job market purposes as necessary. In fact, my current educational interest of the past several months, which wasn't even career motivated, has already generated one completely unsolicited job offer.

I'm a bit jealous of the younger generations, as these methods were primitive/not available when I was younger. I could have learned so much when I had more time to learn it. The old school system I grew up with was quite ineffective, but thankfully we've improved the options well beyond those days.

[thowar2]

Access to knowledge is not at all the problem.

Lack of "soft skills" is the problem. We are taught or force fed knowledge, but not taught how to be well adjusted people.

You were lucky, for some reason you came to understand the value of personal development and self education. This is something that needs to be taught to everyone. In the world.

[adamsea]

Not everyone is proactive as you are, and having skilled professional teachers who can engage students to motivate them to learn something they may not on their own, is a collective good.

Uneducated people (and I am distinguishing education from intelligence; uneducated most emphatically does not mean unintelligent) are bad for society. Witness climate change denial, Trump and his ilk, etc.

[randomdata]

I'm not sure it needs to be mutually exclusive. While it is true that teachers are not strictly necessary to utilize our modern educational methods, there is no reason a professional cannot motivate a needing student in using the same tools to the same end.

[clarkmoody]

As long as education is controlled by government, directional decisions will be made politically. Try bringing up the idea of shrinking class sizes by eliminating the football program at your next town-hall and see what happens.

The only lasting solution will be to allow true market competition for education to replace the centralized top-down system we have. Yes, it's a libertarian pipe dream. No, I don't want to hear about how "poor people will not be educated" by such a system. You cannot know what a free market in education would look like, because we've never tried.

[tdaltonc]

I love the idea of a "free market in education" in theory but I do think that we have enough data to know that '"poor people will not be educated" by such a system.'

Every implementation of a freer market for education that I've read about has had a significant amount of scamming and kids left behind.

We have a free market for food, we subsidize food for poor people, and the market for food is much 'thicker' and 'fluid' than the market for education -- but we still have food deserts. If the free market + subsidies can't make healthy food available to everyone, what chance do we have with education.

[clarkmoody]

We also prop up US agriculture against foreign competition, so prices are not set on a free market.

Also, many of the poor don't get a good education with the current system.

Imagine if the current school system was completely free-market, and we were seeing the same performance as the public schools. There would be complete outrage and calls for nationalization. But somehow government gets the benefit of the doubt, and the only comeback is "but, but the poor."

Government schools do not respond to consumers, since the process is political. Thus, we have our current mess. There must be a better way. We've given the government over 100 years to get things right. Why don't we try something different?

[eli_gottlieb]

>You cannot know what a free market in education would look like, because we've never tried.

Why doesn't the time before public schools existed constitute a try? Seems to me humanity had centuries to millenia of a free market in education: anyone was free to offer or purchase as much education as they could afford.

It wasn't very nice.

[realusername]

We've never tried what? Private schools? I don't see how this would work since schools are always expensive to run by nature and the working class is getting poorer (for those still having a revenue), I don't see this working very well.

[clarkmoody]

Private schools are required to compete with "free" public schools.

> I don't see how this would work since schools are always expensive to run by nature and the working class is getting poorer (for those still having a revenue), I don't see this working very well.

That's why in my comment I said I don't want to hear this comeback. It's as predictable as sunset that every time someone mentions a free market in education, someone else can't imagine it working for educating the poor.

How well does the current system educate the poor?

[realusername]

So you don't want to hear about this argument but you have nothing else against it than "we never tried it"? It's does not seem to be very convincing.

It's already difficult for the working class with a free school so I can't imagine it would be better with a non-free one, the alternative to no public schools is simply no schooling at all for some people

> How well does the current system educate the poor?

You need to ask the US government for that, most public school systems are working well in western Europe so the US must be doing something wrong somewhere.

[kmicklas]

> Yes, it's a libertarian pipe dream.

Yes, yes it is.

> No, I don't want to hear about how "poor people will not be educated" by such a system.

Libertarianism summarized: have you ever tried hating poor people... on weeeeeed?

[EGreg]

I have a very specific vision for how to reform education. Would be happy to partner up with people who feel similarly:

http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=158

I have a platform that can be used to build it all but could use a good business partner and extra JS/Mobile developers can't hurt.

The business partner would help make pilots in schools and colleges. Just maybe a class here or there at first, then prove it out.

Please see http://qbix.com/blog for how we could partner together. If you are interested to talk, see my HN profile.

I agree with Bernie that college should be free but disagree that it should be free in its current state. It can b made much cheaper if you flip the classroom in the way I indicated above. That is what should be made free (ie paid for by the government).

In Primary School (everything up to High School) we need to reform the terrible top-down dynamics. I know about them secondhand because my mom is a teacher. School is a daycare center for parents who work. Kids are overdiagnosed with ADHD. Paul Graham wrote about school being a veritable prison back in 2003 (http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html) Things only got worse in the last 20 years.

[bduerst]

Agreed - we're in the middle of an education bubble, as the growth in student loan debt has fast outstripped the growth in income for graduates.

As technological automation continues, there is demand for a system that is capable of retraining displaced workers, and doesn't create modern indentured servants in the process.

[intended]

No! education should definitely not be on this list.

Education is a red herring, and the first thing people reach for.

But education is always misunderstood, and all research shows that there is vast amount of variability in things ranging from understanding to retention.

For example

1) Level of nutrition impacts grade outcomes

2) Level of food consumed on that particular day impacts retention/learning

3) Level of reading of parents impacts student scores

4) Level of grand parent nutrition impacts student health and nutrtion

5) Race and discrimination impacts educational outcomes

Leave aside things like bullying, student interest, intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation, learning style and so on.

And this may or MAY not impact job and future outcomes either.

Education is NOT an easy fix, and a tool which magically does fix this is a tool too powerful to create because if it were misused it would be an indoctrination tool beyond any other ever developed.

Education must be solved with other efforts

[bambax]

> The root of all these problems stem from a lack of effective education.

Does it? Many people with a college degree hold political beliefs one would consider unwieldy; Bannon went to Harvard.

It seems startups themselves are part of the problem, so one can doubt they will bring the solution. "Disruption" is another word for tearing society apart, ignoring legal norms designed to protect citizens from corporations.

The shift to online shopping -- actually, to online everything -- let people do most things from the comfort of their homes without ever meeting anyone.

"Fake news" were never a problem before Facebook and the bubble economy, where money is made by keeping people in a safe environment.

A better request would be: how to make people quit Facebook and stop using smartphones.

[thowar2]

I wouldn't consider college to be effective education. It's a credential factory, and the bar is low.

Bannon is the leader, not the follower. He takes advantage of those who are less informed and less likely to accurately judge fact from fiction.

If they were effectively educated, they would 1) be less susceptible to propaganda, 2) have better economic prospects and not be so pissed off.

[sebleon]

Agreed, education is probably the most high leverage investment out there for society. That being said, I'm highly skeptical that it will be fixed by a profit-driven, venture-backed business.

Much like healthcare, education's goals dont fit capitalisms mold.

[matt4077]

I believe the curriculum has always been based on the ideal of the "well-rounded citizen" aka a liberal arts education. That includes the sciences, math, philosophy, government, history, languages, art, and sports.

None of those subjects are particularly relevant for factory work. Even at the height of manufacturing, high schools were geared towards universities – because 10 is not the age where you want to make the decision that someone has or doesn't have the potential to be a judge/chemist/artist.

Calls to more closely align education with the perceived needs of the future economy seems misguided:

- You don't actually know what will be needed 15 to 20 years in advance (including the time it takes to develop a curriculum and teach teachers)

- It reduces citizens to their role in the economy

- It doesn't work. History is at least somewhat exciting. Teaching the filing of tax returns (a staple of such discussions) is completely removed from a 16-years reality. When it becomes relevant after college, it will be completely forgotten and possibly obsolete.

The current system is very much geared towards teaching modes of thinking, learning and similar meta-skills. History and philosophy, for example, are possibly the most important to understand current affair (but have often been decimated by a drive towards the sciences). Throw in a bit of statistics and you'll also have a good foundation for entrepreneurs.

[ThomPete]

Education which help creating people ready for the future is not education but to educate yourself dare I say in almost anything as long as you become really good at it.

The last thing we need is a bunch of people who have learned the same things, references the same books and inspirations. (yes there are obvious exceptions but even within those the landscape is normally so vast.

The first thing we need is people to start taking education on by themselves in todays world there is no excuse.

[Alex_Butters]

When I gave my first college lecture, I actually started wandering off half way through in my head wondering how this model of me talking, them listening ever worked or even lasted. By the end of the semester, I was "flipping"lectures and trying to engage my students more instead of just me talking.

The current model doesn't need to be destroyed and rebuilt, just remodeled as you said for a different future

[panic]

To fix education, our first priority should be to empower teachers. They're the ones who care the most about kids' learning and know the best how to make it happen. Teaching shouldn't be a low-paying, low-status profession. I'm not sure how you could change that with a YC startup.

[clarkmoody]

Why not empower the people who pay for the product? The consumer? (students / parents)

> They're the ones who care the most about kids' learning

Sad that some parents care less than their teachers, but that's probably the root of 75% of education problems.

[panic]

For the same reason patients aren't empowered to make their own medical diagnoses. Trained teachers can be much more effective than untrained parents.

[anigbrowl]

For sure, but it's not like all other projects are being auto-rejected, I think YC will always be interested in forward-looking educational proposals. One other thing to bear in mind that educational is a multi-generational undertaking; every little helps, but short-term thinking brings you cheap PCs in schools one year and iPads the next. Long-term thinking requires a vision going out 25 years into the future and a plan to respond to and either incorporate or resist outside criticism, depending on how well founded it is.

[AdamFernandez]

Education is a great long-term solution, but we need a PSA/Marketing solution for rational thought today. Similar to the TRUTH anti-tobacco campaign. Make it 'cool' to use logic and base your decisions on rational thought. I'm not advocating any particular policy issues, but a lot of problems can arise if people can't tell the difference between real and fake news, and don't bother to. They don't bother because thinking rationally is not something we encourage.

[Neliquat]

TRUTH make me, quit for 10 years now, want to light up. That kind of half-truth fearmongering to kids is the posterchild of ineffectiveness. Moreover is sows distrust of the very channels to use to provide valuable public info. Calling it 'truth' was just the hypocritical icing on the cake.

[adamnemecek]

I agree 100%. Let's talk about how to get there.

[geniium]

Yeah education is the root of our future. It's importance is often undervalued.