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Comment by startuprules | Hacker News Reader

I am gonna propose something outrageous: currently there's no demand for better education in US.

- The high schools in US will get their funding as long as the students are barely good enough to pass standardized tests, which are jokes compared to the standardized tests in Asia/Europe.

- Colleges in US still enjoy the following advantages: global brands that they've cultivated for 100+ years, as well as the popular culture that extol fun/socializing over hard courses/hard work. (How often do you see smart people getting made fun of in American movies/tv...quite sad really).

- The current demand is dampened by the fact that there's also no real good way to compare college education quality now (I am sure many people have experienced professors that are world renowned for their research/knowledge, but are horrible lecturers/teachers)

Until people in US care about better education, there is no market

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Treating the entirety of an individual's education as a market doesn't really make sense. It's only a market in the last few years! There's a market for a college education, but there's no "demand" for a 5th grade education.

The whole education system is an investment in the future of our country - we wouldn't have a strong military or industry without it. So a pipeline was set up to funnel children from infancy to industry, because there's no other force that gets a kid to the point where she's employable. Your final step in this chute is jumping into the right college chute, which will land you in a job somewhere, for mysterious reasons. It wasn't always this way - my parents both had to consciously decide to attend college - it just wasn't a given. When you went to college, you had a clear end-goal in mind. "I want to go because it will let me do X."

What we need is not "demand", but a goal. If people actually attended school as if they were contributing to some greater good, the quality of our education might not increase, but the attitude of our students would be more focused on the end-goal.

Last time I check, Google got started in America.

It also doesn't matter if other countries made A to the fourth power, Google is still started in America.

What we need is kids that can think outside of the box, not get 3000 points on science tests.

Beside, markets doesn't exists when government basically provide education for "free". Kinda hard to have a market when the government basically take money from you. If you don't take your kids to public schools, you get less benefit if any. In basically every first world countries, education is provided for you. There's no markets in other countries too.

"What we need is kids that can think outside of the box, not get 3000 points on science tests."

What you're doing is comparing risk-taking to fundamentals. I would argue...why can't we have both? Isn't a better-educated population always better for the society?

"There's no markets in other countries too."

Except there is. In Belgium, government funds education -- at many different kinds of schools -- but if a school can't attract students, it goes out of business.

What you're doing is comparing risk-taking to fundamentals. I would argue...why can't we have both? Isn't a better-educated population always better for the society?

What kind of educated population you wanted? What is the fundamental?

You may want some basic mathematics and grammar, and maybe some courses in logics.

Science? That's a maybe to me.

You want to make an educated person in politics and governance too? Good luck with that. Government teaching civic education is like a criminal in jail teaching kids what's the law of the land is.

Beside, doesn't government plan the educational system? You gotcha do this and that or else we pull your educational money away.

Ah, Belgium. The exception to every rule. :)

> What we need is kids that can think outside of the box

Sometimes you need to know where the box is first ..

> fun/socializing/humanities over hard science/hard work

Insulting other scholars isn’t really necessary here, yah?

fair enough, I'll take humanities out :)

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