Education
Some things I believe about the education system
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Parents say they care about learning, but credentials are really what they value.
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Education should feel more like a video game than a movie. The current system forces kids to sit back and listen. Better to gamify the experience and make it interactive.
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Poor pedagogy is a bigger problem than a lack of funding.
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If teaching kids was the real priority, schools would look a lot different from how they look today.
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To teach critical thinking, have students argue for perspectives they disagree with and expose their writing to criticism so they have to defend their core beliefs.
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A major blindspot in education is that the people running the system see the value in learning, so they assume students do too. And so, not enough energy goes into motivating students to learn in the first place.
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Homework should be the exception, not the rule. Kids are forced to do it every day because the time they spend in school is so unfocused and unproductive.
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The biggest problem with writing education is teaching kids that good writing comes from big words and long papers.
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Sorting kids by grade-level works on the playground, but not in the classroom, where kids should be sorted by skill-level. If the material is too easy, they won't learn anything. If it's too hard, they check out. Meet kids where they are (adaptive learning apps are the only way to do this at scale).
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Almost every kid is absolutely obsessed with something, and if you can frame their studies through the lens of whatever it is, they’ll learn much faster.
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If you’re trying to build something ambitious in education, get the parents of wealthy children to fund it by building an ultra-high-end product for them. If your product works, they’ll pay exorbitant amounts of money for their kids’ education, and you can use the high profit margin to build a solution for the masses. Elon Musk is doing this with Tesla. Schools can do the same.
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The modern education system is designed for girls, not boys. Just look at the trends in college graduation rates.
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The problem with school isn’t the system itself. Rather, the problem is that every school basically teaches people to learn in the same way. Kids around the country are stuck learning at the same speed, with the same tools, and in the same ways.
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One of the great tragedies of the education system is how many students graduate thinking that learning is boring.
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The best teachers are increasingly on the Internet, and they're already making millions of dollars per year.
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1-on-1 tutoring is the best way to learn. But until recently, it was too expensive and people-intensive to scale to the masses. AI and learning apps have changed that.
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We are wrong to throw so much shade at the Liberal Arts, but right to criticize the politicization of them. The stories, ideas, and art at the core of Western civilization are the seeds of tremendous wisdom. We should relish them.
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The idea that it's cool to get good grades without trying hard is a cultural weed that infects nearly every K-12 school in America.