I read this and was expecting /s but apparently not.
Please address something concrete! In the US, there are significant problems with the educational system. It's ok to write a theoretical piece thinking about ways to do things differently.
The author has some good ideas that do not deserve to be dismissed lightly. They can even be applied within an existing educational system. Examples that I think should resonate on HN:
- 1C: Produce Instead Of Consuming
- 1D: Do Real Things, Not Fake Things
So really, I'm left to assume that this is just a letter from the author to his past self. That's how this reads to me.
As for the concrete advice you list, this is exactly what I'm talking about. Saying something like "get a computer" or "make a thing" will play great here on HN. But this is not advice 14 year olds want or need. Kids are creating things all the time. You do not have to tell them to create things. In fact, telling a 14 year old that they need to get a computer to before they can produce shows a distinct lack of understanding of how 14 year old express themselves creatively. Most of the advice in that section is focused on how to find a cheap computer, not how to create anything.
If you actually listen to the problems kids have today, it's not that they have a lack of creative outlets. The problems they are facing revolve around managing mental health issues, and there's not a single word about that in all the 12,000+ written.
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The other thing going on is the generic HN discussion on education the blog post has catalyzed. The blog post doesn't really touch on the discussion happening here, so it's kind of separate, but still related. Here on HN, the discussion often revolves around the Big Important Feelings posters have about the education system. You're right, there are problems, but they are rarely identified here. The solutions offered therefore often aim to solve the wrong problems.
For example, a lot of HN posters have a problem with the number of administrators employed at universities, and they even like to cite a ratio of admin to students or admin to faculty. Then they say "They ratio is too high! Fire the administrators!"
This is a classic example of Chesterton's Fence. Firing the administrators and hiring more faculty seems like a great idea from the perspective of the student, who interacts with faculty and not administrators. But from my perspective as a member of the faculty, I would not want this at all and it would make my work and the work of my students harder (for many reasons I have articulated in previous comments if you're interested in those).
For the HN crowd, this is like saying "The computer is running too many processes. It looks like a lot of those are daemons and system processes, so let's get rid of the operating system to free up resources. That way we can run more programs, because after all, that's the point of the computer." The average HN poster will immediately see 100 reasons why that's a bad idea in a computer system, but then go to advocate for something very similar in principle when it comes to the education system.
If we measure computer resources we come a completely different conclusion. would you use an OS that uses up more ram and cpu resources than all the programs you run inside of it combined?. How about a restaurant with more managers than cooks and waiters?.
Schools with more administrators than teachers seems like the perfect example of the iron law of oligarchy to me.
So then let's cut administrators. We'll start with one of the most expensive departments on campus: IT. Let's just zero their budget, it will save a ton of money, and we will get to fire a ton of administrators.
Now I bet you and everyone else on HN will tell me 100 reasons why getting rid of the IT department on campus will be a massive detriment to campus life, and make it a terrible place for people to live and work in the 21st century.
But will the HN community be able to do the same for the DEI office? No, HN is very quick to say that DEI should be axed, the administrators do nothing, and they are just a drain on university resources.
Except that a lot of people on our campus find that the efforts of the DEI office actually do serve the goals of the larger community. Some of the brightest young leaders among our student body wouldn't be here but for the efforts and support of the administrators in the DEI office. But HN doesn't know these stories. I can't say we'd be better off without them.
Then you can go down the list of things to cut. Do we cut health services? Well, that would be nice, but the local community doesn't have the necessary health infrastructure to support the student population, and the USA doesn't have socialized medicine. Therefore, parents would rather send their darling precious to a school that does have a health center, so we can't cut that.
Do we cut the sports program? HN crowd sure likes to gripe about the athletics department, but the HN crowd also can be found in the Linux Lab at their respective schools, so of course they would be fine with this. But as it turns out that young people really like to exercise and play sports, so cutting the athletics department will seriously deter brilliant young people who are also physically active. So we can't cut that.
Do we cut the police department? I mean, why does a school need a police department anyway? Well as it turns out, parents prefer to send their precious darlings to a padded environment, where the blast radius of youthful indiscretions are contained, and don't leak into the unforgiving federal and state criminal justice systems.
These days, large universities like Stanford aren't just schools. They are actually small cities, and they provide services you'd expect of a city. It turns out faculty aren't the only people on campus who keep things running smoothly, or who serve to implement the educational goals of the university. There are plenty of administrators who work to do the same. We can't just axe them arbitrarily and expect things will automatically improve because they were administrators, and who needs administrators? I think you'll find a lot of pushback when you start suggesting cuts you think are obvious, and not just from the administrators themselves, but from the people they serve.
Always fascinating to see a forum with a population who see themselves as special outliers, but also think that they have some unique ability to speak authoritatively on what the other 99% should be doing.
