Thoughts on Education #

Education as a Certification #

One problem educational system have is that they force students to sit through classes that are boring because the students either already know the material or are not compatible with the pace of the class (too fast or too slow). If systems independently let students test out of courses, or offered testing separately from training, this problem might be solved to some extent. Of course, in this case the testing would have to be very good, and some things are unfortunately hard to test for. Project-based evaluation might be a good way around this.

See https://miguelrochefort.com/blog/cs-degree/ for a great story about what a test-driven education could look like for a motivated individual.

High School as Survey #

In my opinion, (at least my) high school education focused too much on fulfilling prerequisites and teaching fundamental topics and too little on surveying possible areas of study and career paths. I believe this is due to the assumption that prerequisites are necessary for students to be able to study higher level concepts (e.g. algebra before calculus before physics). While this is strictly speaking true, it ignores the power of motivating context. By this I mean that if you want to learn how a ball moves through space in physics, it is very obvious how calculus is helpful towards achieving your goal. However, if you are just learning calculus (or algebra!) without this context, it can feel like what you are learning is pointless (because it is to you at that moment).

Trying to learn complex topics without understanding why they are useful is extremely difficult and leads to less memory retention of the things you learned if you end up do learning them. IMO this is one of the primary reason many people struggle in school. Conversely, if you DO have a strong reason to learn something, it is much easier to do so, and you may be able to pack much more learning into a shorter period of time. Plus, the learning will be more useful, as it is already shown to have at least the one motivating use.

Not only can focus on hierarchical prerequisites stifle learning rate, it also does a disservice to students who are trying to figure out what to specialize in at college (if they attend) and in their careers. I personally knew a lot of abstract concepts in high school, and knew I was interested in STEM, but had pretty much no conception of the different types of STEM careers available to me and what kinds of day-to-day work they each would entail. If half the time spent in high school on academic classes was instead spent on career/field survey talks/activities/classes, I would have been much better prepared to set myself up for a fulfilling life after graduation, and I would have been more motivated to independently study those careers/fields.

As it stands, I feel like I got extremely lucky to land in the jobs I did. I very nearly joined a PhD program after college that in retrospect I’m quite certain I would have liked less than the companies I randomly was exposed to in my last years in college. It scares me that the only thing that saved me from this misstep was a random email on a mailing list I randomly joined, as opposed to something built into the educational system.

Extended Education Concept #

In high school and college I often felt extremely mentally busy. I was usually in 5+ hours a day of classes teaching radically different things. Synthesizing and remembering everything I was taught was difficult, and I fear that many of those hours were wasted simply because I didn’t have the mental bandwidth to get all the information to stick.

Post-college, I feel like I have much more mental bandwidth for learning. I’m well able to fill this with books, podcasts, and other online resources. Despite this, I sometimes wonder if generally speaking formal education could do a better job of utilizing mental bandwidth over time. By this I mean “hybridizing” college and other pursuits more than they already are.

For example, instead of being a full time vocation, college could instead involving taking 1 class per quarter/semester and spending the rest of one’s time working or doing whatever else you would otherwise do post-graduation. This would lead to college taking longer to provide the same level of education.

This could cause problems for people who want to start a skill-requiring job as soon as possible. I wonder if it’s possible to front-load practical prerequisites early in the education cycle for such jobs. In my experience in technical fields so far, there are only a few requirements I’ve truly needed from my education; otherwise most of my skills have been learned on the job.

Higher Education #

Interesting Article: https://annehelen.substack.com/p/is-everything-an-mlm?s=r

Letter to my past (middle/high school) self #

You are a person. As such you have the power to be creative and to change the world around you. Using this power is what you will spend the majority of your life doing.

You can use this power as an individual but most likely you’ll be working with other people in organizations to use your power together to achieve larger goals. Some examples of using your power individually include writing or creating any kind of content to be consumed by others on your own, or creating whole projects on your own perhaps tools for other people to use etc.

The world is full of big and small organizations of people trying to use their power together to make change. Some examples include companies, large and small, governments, research labs, universities, schools.

When joining an organization it’s important to understand who funds the organization and why and what you can stand to benefit from joining said organization, both in terms of the force multiplier on your power to change the world and how much you’ll be compensated for joining that organization specifically.

There should be a school course that explores each one of these types of organizations in turn and discusses key features of that organization type and why you might want to be a part of it - and how you could be a part of it; what it takes to join and then rank up in said organization.

For example I have no idea what it takes to become someone who works on government policy as a full-time job. Or what the concerns of people doing this job are for instance with respect to their compensation or job security.

Categories: Mind