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by nonrandomstring 1537 days ago
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