[aabajian]

I think adult education needs reform. We prioritize childhood education, but kids don't choose their parents. Affluent kids have access to better education, and there's no later-in-life educational safety net for adults without those early childhood benefits. If you went to a crap high school because of where you lived, you have limited options after graduating, and even less if you dropped-out.

Your current options as an adult are to take a course online, take a course at a community college, or buy books and watch YouTube videos all on your own. The problem with these approaches is that all motivation must come from within. There's no requirement that you learn. As soon as you get bored, you can quit. A large majority of kids, even stellar students, study because they are required to do so, out of a fear of the consequences imposed by their parents, by their teachers and even by their peers.

Imagine if you had to learn a subject outside your comfort zone. How attentive would you be to an online classes? Even basic courses like algebra are very uncomfortable to adults with minimal mathematics knowledge. It's not enough to hope adults who enroll will 'do their best', you have to motivate them to stay and push them to excel.

Now...I don't know what such a system would look like or even if it's possible to implement on a large scale.

[nonrandomstring]

You're absolutely right that education is broken. It's been captured and commodified by a cult of testing, shallow training, exclusion, competition and normativity that cripples maturation, creative thought human development.

Can technology help with that?

Maybe. Look at what Wikipedia, Internet Archive, YouTube, Vimeo and other sites have done. We've never had access to more high quality learning materials in history. That is a form of profound freedom.

There are many very successful self-educated people in the world.

The internet did more for education in a decade than in the millenia between Aristotle and Thomas Mann.

On the other hand technologies like Turnitin, proctoring software, and the march of big-tech like Microsoft and Google into our educational institutions is a disaster for freedom, diversity and opportunity. It may be that the internet has been a spearhead that ushers in an era of thought control and "epistemological management" unseen in history.

The universities need an enema.

To fix education we need technologies that address the monopolies/centralisation of reputation, certificate issuance, commercial hiring practices, student debt, paying teachers, access to specialised research equipment and much more. I know people like Peter Theil have said the've given up on education reform, but I'm still optimistic the institutions can be rescued.

[thephyber]

I would argue that most of your complaints aren’t actually about education, but about the increasing specialization of the world. The more people there are, the more pressure there is for each individual to do something that can’t be commoditized. Universities seek students with high scores and unique motivation. Companies seek employees from great schools and with unique skills+training+motivation.

> There are many very successful self-educated people in the world.

How is this relevant? There always have been and always will be. The education system wasn’t designed for auto-didacts. They will thrive no matter the system. It is for the average worker bee to make sure they aren’t stuck with limited capability/mobility, which is bad for society. The question nowadays is related to whether the education system is too old to train the average worker for modern jobs as opposed to the old Prussian factory style education.

Education reform through technology hit a plateau early. MOOCs seem to have bad engagement metrics, so they suffer from the same problems that the worst in-person schools have. Few companies use online certificates as a stronger signal than branded, accredited 4-year university degrees.

I would argue that YouTube has been as much of a curse as a blessing. For those individuals with any non-trivial amount of gullibility, they can easily fall down a rabbit hole of false facts. Finding rigorously verified facts is more difficult, but still possible. I would have a really hard time hiring someone who believed the world was flat because they learned it dozens of videos on YouTube; that is a signal of high motivation but an inability to filter signal from the noise.

I agree that really reforming education will involve all of the tough things in your last paragraph. But you didn’t once mention parents in your comment, which is really interesting. I haven’t seen a movement of homeschooling which is much different from the anti-secular Christians have been pushing for decades.

Charter schools seem to be a mixed bag. Their biggest feature seems to be that they select their pupils/families (selective admissions, expulsion, etc). It will be interesting to see if any charter companies can grow to a national scale and keep high quality teaching results.

[nonrandomstring]

Many good points I agree with. Especially on the mixed blessing of YouTube etc.

> your complaints aren’t actually about education, but about the increasing specialization of the world.

I hadn't noticed. Can you maybe give an example of where my aim is off? To me, education is at the centre of my thought regardless the way the world is turning because it's about more than filling jobs.

> How is this relevant? (that there are many very successful self-educated people in the world.)

Sure, I meant to imply that actually autodidacts, and the plain-old 'talented' have less opportunity to thrive regardless as certified education becomes essentially mandatory. Sure, with the right social connections, supreme confidence and some money you can still freestyle through life. But requirements for credentials are closing in. The "Education Industry" is not just about teaching people, it's about erecting systems of trust and verification, metrics, models, passports and gatekeepers, serving industry as an outsourced filter and so on.

Perhaps I would say; there are many very successful self-educated people in the world today, who would not make it if they were born now and faced the gauntlet of the twenty first century judgement machine.

> Education reform through technology hit a plateau early. MOOCs seem

Yes I am aware of that functional saturation. I was involved early in research on what we called CBT (computer based training) and we saw limits as early as 1990. What I am more concerned about now is the non didactic encroachment of tech. Google and Microsoft are taking over the academy not in the classroom but at the infrastructural, communication and behavioural level. This is not a value neutral prospect, they very much are bringing SV values into places they don't belong, along with normalising permanent surveillance and extraction of psychometric data from students.

> But you didn’t once mention parents in your comment, which is really interesting.

Oh you got me. I am one, so it's just too confusing. There's a can of worms there next to a tin-opener and I am resisting the temptation as much as I can.

respects

[thephyber]

There is nothing in this post specific to adult education. The same exact issues interfere with exercise, diet, sleep, relationships, career advancement, etc.

In a world where adults are given freedom, the government doesn’t generally take part in motivating them to do anything outside of paying taxes, avoid breaking laws, participation in military conscription. Nearly everything else has always been up to the individual or their social circle to generate motivation.

[Cilvic]

At www.eidu.com we are working on education but starting with pre-schooler and the absolute basics (Foundational Literacy and Numeracy, FLN). The UN SDF 4 "education for all" points out the 600m learners who are "education poor". So it will be a long while before we touch adult education, but one can dream.

[emptysongglass]

I never got the all-American college experience despite hailing from the States. I want to go to university courses on lisp dialects then go to a frat kegger, maybe rediscover acid for the first time falling into polycules of love.